Industry News

The European Science Fiction Society (ESFS) announced the Hall of Fame Awards, Achievement Awards, and winners of the Chrysalis Awards for emerging talent.

The Hall of Fame Awards winners are:

Best Author

• WINNER: Luís Filipe Silva (Portugal)

• Marc Elsberg (Austria)
• Alessandro Forlani (Italy)
• Agnieszka Hałas (Poland)
• Christian Léourier (France)
• Ruth Frances Long (Ireland)
• Julija Lukovnjak (Slovenia)
• Michael Marrak (Germany)
• Emil Minchev (Bulgaria)
• Ondřej Neff (Czech Republic)
• Luís …Read More

  The post 2026 ESFS Awards Winners appeared first on Locus.

Winners of the Heinlein Society's annual undergraduate scholarships for the 2026-2027 academic year were announced on July 7, 2026, Robert A. Heinlein's 119th birthday.

This year's winners are Riya Gupta, Nora Kane, Leslie Manga-Abomo, William Mar, and Evan Sturdivant. The scholarship awards $4,000 to each recipient. Winners were selected from 310 applications, including 40 international submissions from 22 different countries.

Gupta receives the Society's new, unnamed scholarship and will attend …Read More

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Finalists for the 2026 Deutsche Science Fiction Preis, presented by Science Fiction Club Deutschland (SFCD), have been announced.

Best German-Language SF Novel

• We Burn the Sun, Anika Beer (Piper Verlag)
• Asimov's Kindergarten, Reda El Arbi (Lectorbooks)
• Der Himmel wird zur Seet, Sven Haupt (Eridanus Verlag)
• Ein Übermaß von Welt, Sven Haupt (Eridanus Verlag)
• Thanatopia, Tom Hillenbrand (Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
• Pandoras Flotte, Christian Märtesheimer (Atlantis Verlag)
• Denial of Service, Aiki …Read More

  The post 2026 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis Finalists appeared first on Locus.

by Randall Hayes, PhD

Read by Robert Greenberger

In these early days of artificial intelligence, when hallucinated facts and completely fabricated reference sources are disturbingly common, there is substantial value for fiction writers in being able to navigate structured databases of primary and secondary scientific research, usually in the form of articles in academic journals. For the uninitiated, primary articles are written by the people who performed the experiments and peer-reviewed by other objective scientists. Secondary review articles are written by scholars, who may or may not be experimentalists themselves, who compare, integrate, and evaluate results from multiple primary articles. Tertiary sources are journalistic articles written by non-specialists, such as this one. 

Some academic disciplines maintain their own idiosyncratic databases, such as ArXiv, but we’ll focus on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed, which now requires that any new article based on research funded by the federal government be uploaded to its servers as a free and publicly accessible full-text version, or at least linked to an equally available free version at the publisher’s website. This policy applies only to recent work; older articles may be immediately available only in abstract form. An abstract is a summary meant to give the reader some insight as to whether it’s worth the effort to track down the full paper.

Where to Start

For authors who may be specialists in their own fields but not others, or who may be self-taught generalists, starting higher up in the stack is advisable. Journalists will provide some interpretation and context based on their own previous research, and some will provide links to reference papers for further research. Even when they don’t, they will name their sources, and those names can be plugged into PubMed as an author search. For instance, either “Randall Hayes” or “Hayes Randall” will pull up a single Cerebral Cortex paper from 2006, based on my dissertation research with stroke patients. This is a primary journal article. It includes an introduction section intended to provide some context before presenting the results of my specific experiments, and a discussion that tries to interpret those new results. However, those sections are largely lists of references to other papers. Most career scientists read these things in light of their long experience, and much remains unsaid. 

For getting up to speed on what professionals think of a field or even a specific research question within a field—what the controversies are, where there are holes ripe to be speculated on in a story—the secondary reviews are the place for SF authors to focus. Reviews will provide more context, more cognitive scaffolding in the form of commentary and conceptual diagrams. Often, these will take the form of flow charts or causal models, which are wonderful for sparking thought experiments. Such as:

• What if this arrow were missing/broken, and what could plausibly break it in my story? 
• What if we could bypass this other element? How might we do that?

Sometimes these static diagrams can be animated for further insight, using simple tools like Nicky Case’s LOOPY.

How to Find a Review

The easiest way is simply to ask for one by typing in a search query. For instance, a query inspired by my paper above could be “visual deficits in temporal lobe stroke review.” The current version of PubMed will break down the search terms and map them to its standard controlled vocabulary of MeSH. This step is typically hidden unless you click the plus icon to the right of the “View Search Details” banner beneath the search bar. This query yields 13 results, which is manageable, but limiting it to reviews is as simple as clicking the “Reviews” box in the filter sidebar on the left-hand side of the page.

Evaluating the Search Results

The first article, “Disorders of facial expression and comprehension,” from 2021, could drive a narrative. It turns out that this particular paper is actually a chapter in a book called Handbook of Clinical Neurology. There is an abstract but no full-text on PubMed. The publisher adds some snippets and the references, but not the full paper. This might seem like a dead end, but depending on your purpose, it may not be. For example, if all you want is the general idea that people with right-hemisphere lesions have difficulty reading faces but not experiencing emotions themselves, that might be enough to generate a story on its own.

But let’s say you were struck by the phrase, “The participants with right- or left-hemispheric strokes attempted to determine if two different actors were displaying the same or different emotions,” from the abstract. That specific test could be the basis for a scene in your story. How was the experiment done? This is somewhat more difficult, as most of the references at the publisher’s website are older. Plugging them back into another PubMed search does not reveal full-text versions, whose “Methods” sections would describe in some detail the data-collection protocol. The author, Kenneth Heilman, would have had a personal lab webpage at the University of Florida, where he might have maintained web-accessible copies of his own papers, but Dr. Heilman died in 2024. Putting his name into Google Scholar reveals 50 of his papers publicly accessible, but not that one. This situation will likely require the assistance of a librarian. Best to move on for now.

The second search result, however, “Cerebral Embolism as a Result of Facial Filler Injections,” from the Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2022, has a full-text version in PubMed, with a list of individual cases and pictures! Perhaps the testing scene could be replaced with a surgery scene detailing what caused the stroke in the first place. Then the discovery narrative might be less about the detailed neurological consequences of the embolism and more about how to hold the surgeon accountable.

Combining thoughts from multiple papers into a sort of Venn diagram of narrative possibilities is the essence of how I work with scientific literature. I only drill down for details when I need them to enhance the reader’s experience. I also encourage serendipity, as in the workflow above.

Explore more articles from Writing from Science

Randall Hayes, “your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist,” has been publishing science fact articles online for about 10 years, starting at the Intergalactic Medicine Show and, since its closure, branching out to other venues such as Utopia Science Fiction and Trollbreath Magazine. A currently incomplete list of his work is at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. His personal newsletter, Doctor Eclectic, is at randallhayes.substack.com.

The post Searching the Medical Literature for Yourself appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The five-title shortlist for the 2026 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic was announced July 6, 2026:

• The Works of Vermin, Hiron Ennes (Tor) amazon / bookshop
• Horsefly, Mireille Gagné, tr. Pablo Strauss (Coach House) amazon / bookshop
• Wild Life, Amanda Leduc (Random House Canada) amazon
• The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death, Helen Marshall (Titan) amazon / bookshop
• Veal, Mackenzie Nolan …Read More

  The post 2026 Sunburst Award Shortlist appeared first on Locus.

Author and historian JAMES RAY COMER, who wrote as J. Comer, 59, died in late April or early May 2026.

Comer was born August 5, 1966. He wrote several pieces of short fiction, including Soldier's Coat (2015), Scratch (2016), The Wooing of Etroklos (2016), Star Thistle (2018), Beam That Is In (2019), Tilting the Wick (2020), Sky Machine (2021), Sometime Called Parchment (2021), Quicksilver (2023), and The Weather Maker (2024). …Read More

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Three debuts, Danielle J. Jensen's The Inadequate Heir (Del Rey), K.M. Moronova's Once Upon a Demon's Heart (Bloom), and Jaymin Eve's Night Witch (Mira), each debuts on both the USA Today and Publishers Weekly lists.

Title Debut / #wks on any list NYT
07.12 LAT
07.05 USAT
06.28 PW
07.06 Amz
(07.06) UK:
…Read More

The post Weekly Bestsellers, 6 July 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Author and editor TED WHITE, 88, died May 24, 2026. He was in palliative care.

Theodore Edwin White was born February 4, 1938. He contributed to SF fanzines at a young age and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1968. He was assistant editor at F&SF from 1963-1968 and editor for Amazing Stories and Fantastic from 1968-1978. As an author, he wrote Invasion from 2500 (1964) with …Read More

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Jean-Paul L. Garnier: One theme of The Iron Garden Sutra concerns failed generation ships and the existential troubles they face during their journeys. I have read several books recently with similar takes on generation ships. Do you feel that this kind of story reflects a growing tension between generations in the real world and youth feeling that they have been dealt a bad hand by previous generations?

A.D. Sui: Generation ships are a long-standing tradition in sci-fi. What’s not alluring about packing up ourselves into a tin can and running off into the universe in search of greener pastures? But in my opinion, it’s also a very naïve take. Space is hostile. Space is hard. But there is a romanticism in cutting and running. Staying is, arguably, far more difficult. 

I think every generation feels that pull of running away from their reality. Every generation can say that they have been dealt a bad hand. Millennials are economically disadvantaged because of policies enacted by Gen X and Boomers (and yes, have lived through three recessions now, but who’s counting?). Gen Xers felt they’ve been invisible all their lives. Boomers, I’m sure, felt disadvantaged in some way as well. Hard to imagine now, but one might. The generation before probably felt that they were unfairly thrust into a war that was only possible because of what the previous generation had done. And this is just the North American perspective. There are many more global conflicts, recessions, and other strains on each generation. We all want to run away, thinking that it will be better. To where? No one knows for sure, but somewhere that isn’t here. 

Part of The Iron Garden Sutra’s theme is deciding when to stand your ground and fight for the things we believe in. Even if we are one person. Even if the outcome doesn’t look hopeful. Millennials are of the age when our financial decisions and our voting have the most impact. Some of us are even in positions of influence. Some are making decisions on scales that will impact the next generation (hi, Gen Z, and sorry). We can continue to bemoan the hand we’ve been dealt, or we can also work towards leaving things better for those who are coming after us. I, personally, am a huge fan of complaining while doing the thing. 

It’s going to suck and it’s going to be a lot of work, sure, but we can leave a better world for those after us.

You’ve also created a religion in this novel, The Starlit. What did the process of creating a theology look like for you, and please tell us about the introduction of cosmology into the religion of peoples who have colonized the stars?

The Starlit is loosely based on Zen Buddhism. I have a very strong preference for non-monotheistic religions and like pondering where they can end up in thousands of years. What is the natural progression of something like Zen if it was supported into the future? What would its practitioners decide to keep and what would they discard? Because religion does change! Doctrine does change! It changes very slowly since religious institutions are massive and can’t afford to throw their entire weight around every other week, but it does change. 

I think the introduction of cosmology is the natural transition, given how we commonly incorporate elements from our immediate environments into religious texts. Parting the Red Sea, trudging through deserts, and all that. If people are traversing between stars frequently, then star-like language would begin bleeding into texts. 

The Iron Garden Sutra has multiple AI characters. Would you have written these characters differently had you written this book today?

I’ve been doing a lot of laughing/crying since the book has come out. You can guess why. 

A very niche fury that I’m experiencing about GenAI is that it has taken a very well-established trope in sci-fi and made it into a real-life abomination. I’ve been hearing some discussions in the genre that we need a new name for this concept now because any time we even drop the term “AI,” readers begin to think that we support the existence of Grok. 

In The Iron Garden Sutra, I have tried to move from the term “AI” and sometimes use “synthetic consciousness” because that’s really what I’m describing here. This is a fully-fledged individual that can act (mostly) autonomously, who has agency and drive, but isn’t born from organics. This isn’t Claude writing an email. This is something that is as much of a person as other characters in the novel. 

If I were to write this book again, I’d change nothing. I think I would lean into the AI ethics component of the book even harder to hammer the point home that these characters are sentient and deserving of individual rights. The caveat is that if I were to rewrite it, it would take several years for the book to get published and by that point we’d all be fighting Boston Robotics dogs for access to fresh water, and no one would be reading anymore.

Two of the characters in this book share a body. What complications arose during writing characters that do not have complete bodily autonomy and must occupy the same internal space?

Two characters/one body is becoming a very popular trope in spec fiction! 

This was, arguably, my favorite dynamic to write and explore. What kind of relationship can you have when one of you cannot act on the physical world without the other’s permission? How does a relationship develop when you have complete access to someone’s deepest, darkest thoughts? 

There’s a balance of power between Iris and VIFAI (Iris’s AI companion/helper) and I think this allows them to have a true relationship and friendship, even if Iris doesn’t believe it at first. It’s the closest and most meaningful relationship Iris has had in his entire life, but it cannot stay pure from the fact that he *is* the container for VIFAI and the one supposedly “in charge”. Without spoiling anything, this does budge a bit throughout the book and Iris does come to a deeper understanding that VIFAI is not as helpless as Iris had believed it to be.

The name of the main spaceship in the story is the Counsel of Nicaea, which suggests a Christian theological bent, and is a great contrast to the Starlit and their worldview reminiscent of Buddhism and Hinduism. What were your aims in creating such a stark, yet subtle, contrast? 

The contrast does exist, but it was not intentional! 

The Buddhist worldview is the one I am most familiar with and preferred writing from that vantage point, and I must admit that the Christian theological bent was inspired by the generation ship in the ‘Expanse’ series, and the Nauvoo, which was commissioned by a group of Mormons who wanted to travel far past the Solar System. It made sense to me that a group of people united by intense faith would do well in long-term space travel. Although, as we see with the Nicaea, that might not always be the case. 

Without spoilers, the main character has revelatory experiences leading him to contemplate the meaning of the void and the space between the stars. Can you elaborate on how you used spiritual growth and crisis of faith in your character arcs?

Oh, poor Iris. 

I wanted him to be a reluctant monk. I wanted him to look right, wear the right clothing, say the right things, but I wanted him to think all the wrong ones. Well, what he believes to be wrong. I think there is a stereotype of monks being happy and peaceful at all times, but in reality, they are just people, experiencing the same existence we are, who also hold a specific job. Being a monk is a job, above all else, and people come to it for very different and personal reasons. 

And I wanted Iris to grapple with how he related to the doctrine and his role as a monk. I wanted to push him towards an understanding of what holding the role of a Vessel meant to him. There is a term in Buddhism called a koan. It’s kind of like a riddle used to impart a teaching of some sort and it’s often posed by a teacher to their pupil. The goal is for the pupil to have a revelation, to “get” the koan. There is no single answer to a koan, but rather a feeling that comes when one understands it. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re learning to ride a bike and after stumbling and falling, and trying over and over again, suddenly, you catch your balance. Hard to describe, but once you have it, you have it.  

The entire experience aboard the Nicaea is a koan for Iris, a question of his relationship with faith that only he can answer, and only towards the end. 

There’s a sequel coming, The Starlight Samsara.. Can you tell us about when and what we can expect from the continued adventure?

The sequel should be coming sometime near the summer of 2027! You can expect some new faces in the cast, but also some favorites returning. While The Iron Garden Sutra touched on the notion of AI ethics, The Starlight Samsara takes a deeper dive into the topic. And finally, things do get better for Iris, but not before they get significantly worse. 

A.D. SUI is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories. A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
You can find them on most social media platforms as @thesuiway and https://thesuiway.ca/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

Jean-Paul L. Garnier: One theme of The Iron Garden Sutra concerns failed generation ships and the existential troubles they face during their journeys. I have read several books recently with similar takes on generation ships. Do you feel that this kind of story reflects a growing tension between generations in the real world and youth feeling that they have been dealt a bad hand by previous generations?

A.D. Sui: Generation ships are a long-standing tradition in sci-fi. What’s not alluring about packing up ourselves into a tin can and running off into the universe in search of greener pastures? But in my opinion, it’s also a very naïve take. Space is hostile. Space is hard. But there is a romanticism in cutting and running. Staying is, arguably, far more difficult. 

I think every generation feels that pull of running away from their reality. Every generation can say that they have been dealt a bad hand. Millennials are economically disadvantaged because of policies enacted by Gen X and Boomers (and yes, have lived through three recessions now, but who’s counting?). Gen Xers felt they’ve been invisible all their lives. Boomers, I’m sure, felt disadvantaged in some way as well. Hard to imagine now, but one might. The generation before probably felt that they were unfairly thrust into a war that was only possible because of what the previous generation had done. And this is just the North American perspective. There are many more global conflicts, recessions, and other strains on each generation. We all want to run away, thinking that it will be better. To where? No one knows for sure, but somewhere that isn’t here. 

Part of The Iron Garden Sutra’s theme is deciding when to stand your ground and fight for the things we believe in. Even if we are one person. Even if the outcome doesn’t look hopeful. Millennials are of the age when our financial decisions and our voting have the most impact. Some of us are even in positions of influence. Some are making decisions on scales that will impact the next generation (hi, Gen Z, and sorry). We can continue to bemoan the hand we’ve been dealt, or we can also work towards leaving things better for those who are coming after us. I, personally, am a huge fan of complaining while doing the thing. 

It’s going to suck and it’s going to be a lot of work, sure, but we can leave a better world for those after us.

You’ve also created a religion in this novel, The Starlit. What did the process of creating a theology look like for you, and please tell us about the introduction of cosmology into the religion of peoples who have colonized the stars?

The Starlit is loosely based on Zen Buddhism. I have a very strong preference for non-monotheistic religions and like pondering where they can end up in thousands of years. What is the natural progression of something like Zen if it was supported into the future? What would its practitioners decide to keep and what would they discard? Because religion does change! Doctrine does change! It changes very slowly since religious institutions are massive and can’t afford to throw their entire weight around every other week, but it does change. 

I think the introduction of cosmology is the natural transition, given how we commonly incorporate elements from our immediate environments into religious texts. Parting the Red Sea, trudging through deserts, and all that. If people are traversing between stars frequently, then star-like language would begin bleeding into texts. 

The Iron Garden Sutra has multiple AI characters. Would you have written these characters differently had you written this book today?

I’ve been doing a lot of laughing/crying since the book has come out. You can guess why. 

A very niche fury that I’m experiencing about GenAI is that it has taken a very well-established trope in sci-fi and made it into a real-life abomination. I’ve been hearing some discussions in the genre that we need a new name for this concept now because any time we even drop the term “AI,” readers begin to think that we support the existence of Grok. 

In The Iron Garden Sutra, I have tried to move from the term “AI” and sometimes use “synthetic consciousness” because that’s really what I’m describing here. This is a fully-fledged individual that can act (mostly) autonomously, who has agency and drive, but isn’t born from organics. This isn’t Claude writing an email. This is something that is as much of a person as other characters in the novel. 

If I were to write this book again, I’d change nothing. I think I would lean into the AI ethics component of the book even harder to hammer the point home that these characters are sentient and deserving of individual rights. The caveat is that if I were to rewrite it, it would take several years for the book to get published and by that point we’d all be fighting Boston Robotics dogs for access to fresh water, and no one would be reading anymore.

Two of the characters in this book share a body. What complications arose during writing characters that do not have complete bodily autonomy and must occupy the same internal space?

Two characters/one body is becoming a very popular trope in spec fiction! 

This was, arguably, my favorite dynamic to write and explore. What kind of relationship can you have when one of you cannot act on the physical world without the other’s permission? How does a relationship develop when you have complete access to someone’s deepest, darkest thoughts? 

There’s a balance of power between Iris and VIFAI (Iris’s AI companion/helper) and I think this allows them to have a true relationship and friendship, even if Iris doesn’t believe it at first. It’s the closest and most meaningful relationship Iris has had in his entire life, but it cannot stay pure from the fact that he *is* the container for VIFAI and the one supposedly “in charge”. Without spoiling anything, this does budge a bit throughout the book and Iris does come to a deeper understanding that VIFAI is not as helpless as Iris had believed it to be.

The name of the main spaceship in the story is the Counsel of Nicaea, which suggests a Christian theological bent, and is a great contrast to the Starlit and their worldview reminiscent of Buddhism and Hinduism. What were your aims in creating such a stark, yet subtle, contrast? 

The contrast does exist, but it was not intentional! 

The Buddhist worldview is the one I am most familiar with and preferred writing from that vantage point, and I must admit that the Christian theological bent was inspired by the generation ship in the ‘Expanse’ series, and the Nauvoo, which was commissioned by a group of Mormons who wanted to travel far past the Solar System. It made sense to me that a group of people united by intense faith would do well in long-term space travel. Although, as we see with the Nicaea, that might not always be the case. 

Without spoilers, the main character has revelatory experiences leading him to contemplate the meaning of the void and the space between the stars. Can you elaborate on how you used spiritual growth and crisis of faith in your character arcs?

Oh, poor Iris. 

I wanted him to be a reluctant monk. I wanted him to look right, wear the right clothing, say the right things, but I wanted him to think all the wrong ones. Well, what he believes to be wrong. I think there is a stereotype of monks being happy and peaceful at all times, but in reality, they are just people, experiencing the same existence we are, who also hold a specific job. Being a monk is a job, above all else, and people come to it for very different and personal reasons. 

And I wanted Iris to grapple with how he related to the doctrine and his role as a monk. I wanted to push him towards an understanding of what holding the role of a Vessel meant to him. There is a term in Buddhism called a koan. It’s kind of like a riddle used to impart a teaching of some sort and it’s often posed by a teacher to their pupil. The goal is for the pupil to have a revelation, to “get” the koan. There is no single answer to a koan, but rather a feeling that comes when one understands it. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re learning to ride a bike and after stumbling and falling, and trying over and over again, suddenly, you catch your balance. Hard to describe, but once you have it, you have it.  

The entire experience aboard the Nicaea is a koan for Iris, a question of his relationship with faith that only he can answer, and only towards the end. 

There’s a sequel coming, The Starlight Samsara.. Can you tell us about when and what we can expect from the continued adventure?

The sequel should be coming sometime near the summer of 2027! You can expect some new faces in the cast, but also some favorites returning. While The Iron Garden Sutra touched on the notion of AI ethics, The Starlight Samsara takes a deeper dive into the topic. And finally, things do get better for Iris, but not before they get significantly worse. 

A.D. SUI is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories. A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
You can find them on most social media platforms as @thesuiway and https://thesuiway.ca/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023/25 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Brain magazine. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction.  https://spacecowboybooks.com/  

The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation (NCSFF) has announced the finalists for the 2026 Manly Wade Wellman Award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors.

• The Unseen, Ania Ahlborn (Gallery)
• Last Chance Live!, Helena Haywoode Henry (Nancy Paulsen)
• Infinite Archive, Mur Lafferty (Ace)
• Transmentation: Transience, Darkly Lem (Blackstone)
• The Coming Dark, D.J. Molles (published by the author)
• Labyrinth, A.G. …Read More

  The post 2026 Wellman Award Finalists appeared first on Locus.

Simon & Schuster has announced that Atria Gallery Group will relaunch the Pocket Books imprint as a core romance imprint that will also publish additional genres including romantic thrillers, dark romance, and horror. Anh Schluep, who is joining Atria Gallery, will be vice president, editorial director, and deputy publisher of Pocket Books. Schluep said,

I'm excited to be bringing back Pocket Books. The imprint, which published its first list in …Read More

The post S&S Relaunches Pocket Books appeared first on Locus.

The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association (CSFFA) announced three inductees to the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame for 2026: author Kelley Armstrong, author James Alan Gardner, and past president of Fanzine Writers of America Mike Glicksohn.

This year's jury included David Clink (chair), JM Landels, Y.M. Pang, Clifford Samuels, and Edo van Belkom.

For more information, see the CSFFA website. …Read More

The post 2026 CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees appeared first on Locus.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

Dear writer, 

We’ve had an incredible year at SFWA. We charted new Constellations and visited a Quasar on our professional journey to the latest Nebulas. Together, we expanded our orbit, welcomed new travelers, and built momentum that will carry us toward our next horizon.

Yet, we can’t move forward without looking back. This year, we lost Past President Jane Yolen. A Grand Master, storyteller, and tireless advocate for writers, she inspired a generation of writers (like me!) to keep writing, creating, and, most importantly, imagining. Her legacy lives on, not just in the stories and poems she wrote, but in the community she helped shape. In the months and years ahead, we will continue to honor Jane by celebrating her work and carrying forward the spirit of generosity that defines her legacy. (or defined her life?)

Our community was joined this year by Executive Director Isis Asare. During her tenure, SFWA reached new audiences, launched ambitious initiatives, strengthened current programming, and became decidedly and emphatically more human. As Isis concludes her time at SFWA, we are deeply grateful for her collaborative leadership and supportive vision of what our community can and should be. We will miss her steady hand, but we also know that her next chapter will continue to shape the future of our genre. We will be cheering her on for years to come. You can follow along with Isis’ journey here.

As one chapter closes, another begins. At this year’s Nebulas, we welcomed N. K. Jemisin as SFWA’s newest Grand Master, celebrating her groundbreaking and world-shaking contributions to speculative fiction. In her acceptance speech (which literally lit the room on fire), she reminded us of the collective power and possibility of our community: “We should revel in our growth, fellow writers. And as we grow, we can make the world better, too.” That spirit has always been the gravity that holds SFWA’s constellation together. We are a community of creators who challenge the boundaries of what is possible, and build, build, build the future we want to see (revising all along the way). 

This August, at Worldcon, we’ll continue that tradition by honoring our next Grand Master, another writer whose work has expanded our universe and strengthened our community. I can’t wait to introduce you to the next star in our bright sky.

The future of our genre has never been built by one writer, one organizer, or one creator. It is shaped by the networks, community, uplift, and care that help us keep creating. After all, a constellation is only as bright as all of the stars reflecting light within it. With that in mind, this summer, SFWA is opening new opportunities and strengthening pathways for care and connection with the launch of our Writers in Crisis Grant on August 1 and the opening of our Givers Fund Grant on September 15. 

These programs are a promise to our community in a time of change: when you are struggling or facing moments of uncertainty, and when you are ready to build something bigger and better than what was there before, SFWA will be there for you with practical support, a helping hand, and a big reminder that none of us has to go it alone. As Jemisin reminded us, we can combine our powers, and as Grand Master Nicola Griffith told us in her 2025 speech, “No one does this alone.” Together, we can care for one another as we reach for the stars and build the future we want to see (with magic, science, sorcery, monsters and miracles). There is always more on the next horizon. 

Speaking of which, Singularity returns next Tuesday, with new Recommended Reading List features and new pro-human guidance from our Emerging Tech committee, along with updates from other great teams, SFWA members, and industry peers. If you are an active SFWA member, you can also join Emerging Tech for an introductory session this July 5 at 8 a.m. PDT (or review the panel on our new SFWA Events Theater at your leisure later).

The universe of SFWA is still expanding. As we continue this journey together (always), we want you to know this: wherever you are at in your writing, in the world, or with whatever challenges you are facing, SFWA is here for you because of you. 

So, keep creating,

Kate Ristau

SFWA Board President

The post Press Release – June 30, 2026 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Aashima Rawal

Read by Liz J. Bradley

A child stands before a Bright Door carved into the cracked walls of a city that always braces for impact. Police lines shimmer like heat across streets split by old debts. On one side, jinn watch with quiet, tired defiance. On the other, a clerk posts notices about vanished neighborhoods. Beyond the threshold, the architecture folds in on itself and reforms, as if memory is the only true map. In  Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, borders are drawn not with ink but with ghosts. The empire collapses again, but this time in the imagination of someone who refuses to accept the old version of the story.

Bright Door. Photo by Tekeshwar Singh on Unsplash.

Speculative fiction from former colonies often doesn’t prioritize spectacle. Its urgency lies elsewhere. These stories rebuild what history tried to erase. They confront the past without allowing it to dictate the ending. In the hands of a growing group of South Asian writers, the project becomes something quieter and far more ambitious: a way of restoring dignity to the record.

Decolonial speculative fiction has gained traction over the years, but it has recently become hard to ignore. Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall won the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for its ability to connect hope to the aftershocks of colonial violence. Writers like Premee Mohamed and Sami Shah consistently appear on the Nebula, Locus, and Le Guin Prize lists. Their work is recognized not for niche appeal but for expanding the emotional reach of the field. Many describe their stories as a form of repair—a conversation with parts of history that were rushed or redacted. Their rise also reveals familiar tensions like the so-called Tiffany Problem, where historically accurate names or customs in non-Western settings are deemed “incorrect” simply because they fall outside Eurocentric expectations. This serves as a reminder that imagination also has borders, and someone has to redraw them.

Rewriting the empire on the page isn’t just a matter of rearranging events. It involves method. How do you acknowledge wounds without reopening them? How do you write about power clearly instead of imitating it? The stories in the anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories offer one approach. Jinn are not depicted as curiosities or exotic ornaments. They are figures carrying memory, burden, and rebellion. In Kamila Shamsie’s contribution, jinn move through domestic and communal spaces rather than distant myth, grounding the supernatural in the everyday aftermath of loss. Amal el-Mohtar’s story similarly resists spectacle, using lyric restraint and intimate perspective to explore longing and fracture instead of grand conflict. In both cases, folklore becomes a vehicle for emotional complexity rather than a simplified symbol.

Premee Mohamed has discussed drawing on scientific research, including climate science, in her speculative fiction, while still foregrounding community, character, and emotional stakes. Tasha Suri has said that the world of Empire of Sand was heavily inspired by the Mughal Empire and that she drew on the culture and politics of Mughal India before deliberately diverging from historical context to meet the needs of the plot. Critics describe the future Tel Aviv and Jaffa setting of Central Station as a liminal, layered border city and hub of cultural exchange, where multiple histories, faiths, and communities intersect in everyday life rather than through explicit political exposition. Taken together, these examples suggest a model of ethical alt-history rooted in attention and care rather than entitlement to historical material.

To rewrite an empire is to ask what might have happened if the world had been kinder, and then to sit with the knowledge that it wasn’t. It is both an act of mourning and imagination. Sami Shah’s “Reap” takes this to its limits. Partition, the 1947 division of British India into India and Pakistan, triggered mass displacement and violence that still shapes family memory across the region. In Shah’s story, the jinn bear witness to what people cannot bear to name, moving through the aftermath with a steadiness that feels like endurance. The story unsettles because it will not allow easy distance. Mohamed explores this same instinct in her essays: the inheritance of grief and the responsibility to transform it into something usable. This image recalls textile traditions like khadi and kantha, the way one carries the mark of the hand, while the other layers scraps of past lives into a single surface. Memory, in both cloth and story, rarely follows a straight line. It accumulates.

Kantha embroidery. Image by Nancy Kassim Farran from Pixabay.

For writers, this shift in speculative fiction is not a trend but a change in approach. It calls for slower reflection. It calls for empathy instead of spectacle. Recent Planetside craft columns state it clearly: use archives, not assumptions; write with history, not over it; let care shape the revision. The goal is not to tidy up the past but to listen to it. This might involve returning to primary documents, noting who is missing from official maps, or paying attention to rituals that continue to hold stories long after the paperwork has disappeared.

Each time a writer reimagines the empire, the world gains another map—one that accepts complexity, sorrow, and resilience. In Chandrasekera’s city of Bright Doors, no border is permanent. Streets erased by policy can be brought back into existence by memory alone. South Asian speculative fiction takes this possibility seriously. It offers a way to write with both accuracy and humanity, treating history not as a fixed monument but as something still capable of change.

Explore more articles from Writing from History

Aashima Rawal is a freelance writer with bylines in Art UK, Monograph, Hearth Magazine, Modest, and Business Insider. She writes about the intersections of storytelling, history, and culture, blending research with an accessible, reflective style. Her work often explores how memory, craft, and imagination shape the worlds we inherit and the ones we build.

The post Rewriting the Empire: Lessons from South Asian Speculative Fiction appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Starlog, the magazine devoted to visionary sci-fi and cutting-edge science, has announced its return to print for November 13, 2026. The magazine will be published annually; there will also be a weekly email newsletter, Lodestar.

Annalee Newitz will serve as editor-in-chief, with Meredith Borders as senior editor and Jason Kauzlarich as senior art director. In a podcast episode announcing the relaunch, Newitz described the goals of the print issue:

…Read More

The post Starlog Magazine to Relaunch with Podcast appeared first on Locus.

The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust has announced the shortlist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, awarding a $25,000 cash prize to the author of a book that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula's own work.

The nine shortlisted titles are:

• Audition, Pip Adam (Coffee House)
• Sunward, William Alexander (Saga)
• Call and Response,Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock)
• Midnight Timetable, Bora Chung, …Read More

  The post 2026 Le Guin Prize for Fiction Shortlist appeared first on Locus.

By Kemi Cole

Adita does not want to lead anything. She is seventy years old, she would rather pedal a solar tractor across an acre than borrow a battery from a neighbour, and she has spent her life arranging her existence so that other people leave her alone. However, the system she lives under has other ideas.

Yat Madit, the political system Dilman Dila imagines in his novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, distributes power so thoroughly that there is nowhere to hide from it. Dila has also written an essay tracing the precolonial Acholi governance structures that inspired this world, grounding the fiction in historical and political argument. This is the beating heart of the book, and also its best joke. Adita becomes the central figure of a narrative about a system explicitly built to have no central figures. The irony is precise and it does not soften.

What makes Adita remarkable is not that she changes. She does not. She remains uncomfortable in her own skin, hostile to touch, resistant to the idea that her interiority should be understood by anyone else. Dila never asks her to overcome this. The narrative does not cure her through the pressure of events or through a relationship. Instead, her introversion becomes the actual mechanism by which Yat Madit functions at scale. A leader who wants nothing consolidates nothing. A leader who retreats cannot become a tyrant. The political argument and the character are the same thing. That is what makes her work.

The world Dila builds around her is grounded and specific. Kampala is Kampala. Villages have names. Solar panels are made from a paste of leaves and algae. Governance runs on consensus down to the smallest communal decision. Dila embeds Acholi concepts into the narrative without translation. He is writing as if Uganda is the centre of the world, not a location that requires outsider comprehension. That act of centering is political. What is unusual is not the centering itself, which is a defining feature of Africanfuturism, but the depth and specificity of the political system he builds from precolonial Acholi structures, and his refusal to simplify it. 

When war arrives, Adita must navigate the central paradox of Yat Madit: how do you mount a defence in a system explicitly built to reject centralised command? A federation of hundreds of villages cannot coordinate quickly enough through pure consensus. The problem emerges early. As someone says in frustration: “Really? An idea to defeat the mighty army of USA? You?” The question is not cruel. It is structural. Dila is naming what his system cannot do. In response, they create a War Council of twelve people to speed up decision-making, but that very act risks betraying the founding principle that power should not concentrate. The danger, as Dila makes clear, is that such small numbers could lead to centralism, to a few people making decisions that affect everyone. They have created the thing they feared most in order to survive.

In face of this massive threat of war, solutions seem to arrive faster than the reader can absorb them. A spaceship appears. Technology embedded with living jok code, a form of sentient programming rooted in Acholi spiritual tradition rather than Western computing logic, is deployed. A satellite is accessed. Because so much depends on mechanisms the narrative never fully clarifies, the resolution feels contingent in ways that might be intentional but are also difficult to settle into.

Lokang, who should be the most complex figure in the novella, sits at the centre of this problem. En, the pronoun used for Lokang, is not a god. En is not quite human. En designed much of Yat Madit and then withdrew from public life, quietly innovating for decades. The novella never gives the reader enough to know what en actually is beyond those outlines. This means Lokang cannot quite carry the weight the final movement of the story needs from en. Dila seems aware of this and does not try to solve it by making Lokang less opaque. It is a choice, but it costs something in the narrative and might leave a reader wanting more.

What is not in question is the seriousness of what Dila is attempting. He is not interested in the aesthetics of Africanfuturism. He is interested in whether a society built on consensus can survive the demand for speed that crisis requires, whether precolonial political structures powered by contemporary technology could actually function, whether you can write about power without making power the story. These are genuine questions and the kind that speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to ask, using narrative to stress-test political ideas that policy cannot yet imagine.

In the aftermath, the federation does not solidify into a new order. Power begins to reconcentrate around those who used it well during the crisis. The system’s founding commitments are already being tested. Adita is alone. The tree, in Acholi tradition the meeting place where the village gathers, remains. The conversation never ends. That is not a triumphant ending. It is an honest one. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to argue with the book, which is exactly what Dila has built it to do.

The Blossoming of the Big Tree is a genuinely absorbing read, funny and serious in equal measure, and Adita is one of the most quietly original protagonists I have encountered in the genre in some time. 

By Kemi Cole

Adita does not want to lead anything. She is seventy years old, she would rather pedal a solar tractor across an acre than borrow a battery from a neighbour, and she has spent her life arranging her existence so that other people leave her alone. However, the system she lives under has other ideas.

Yat Madit, the political system Dilman Dila imagines in his novella The Blossoming of the Big Tree, distributes power so thoroughly that there is nowhere to hide from it. Dila has also written an essay tracing the precolonial Acholi governance structures that inspired this world, grounding the fiction in historical and political argument. This is the beating heart of the book, and also its best joke. Adita becomes the central figure of a narrative about a system explicitly built to have no central figures. The irony is precise and it does not soften.

What makes Adita remarkable is not that she changes. She does not. She remains uncomfortable in her own skin, hostile to touch, resistant to the idea that her interiority should be understood by anyone else. Dila never asks her to overcome this. The narrative does not cure her through the pressure of events or through a relationship. Instead, her introversion becomes the actual mechanism by which Yat Madit functions at scale. A leader who wants nothing consolidates nothing. A leader who retreats cannot become a tyrant. The political argument and the character are the same thing. That is what makes her work.

The world Dila builds around her is grounded and specific. Kampala is Kampala. Villages have names. Solar panels are made from a paste of leaves and algae. Governance runs on consensus down to the smallest communal decision. Dila embeds Acholi concepts into the narrative without translation. He is writing as if Uganda is the centre of the world, not a location that requires outsider comprehension. That act of centering is political. What is unusual is not the centering itself, which is a defining feature of Africanfuturism, but the depth and specificity of the political system he builds from precolonial Acholi structures, and his refusal to simplify it. 

When war arrives, Adita must navigate the central paradox of Yat Madit: how do you mount a defence in a system explicitly built to reject centralised command? A federation of hundreds of villages cannot coordinate quickly enough through pure consensus. The problem emerges early. As someone says in frustration: “Really? An idea to defeat the mighty army of USA? You?” The question is not cruel. It is structural. Dila is naming what his system cannot do. In response, they create a War Council of twelve people to speed up decision-making, but that very act risks betraying the founding principle that power should not concentrate. The danger, as Dila makes clear, is that such small numbers could lead to centralism, to a few people making decisions that affect everyone. They have created the thing they feared most in order to survive.

In face of this massive threat of war, solutions seem to arrive faster than the reader can absorb them. A spaceship appears. Technology embedded with living jok code, a form of sentient programming rooted in Acholi spiritual tradition rather than Western computing logic, is deployed. A satellite is accessed. Because so much depends on mechanisms the narrative never fully clarifies, the resolution feels contingent in ways that might be intentional but are also difficult to settle into.

Lokang, who should be the most complex figure in the novella, sits at the centre of this problem. En, the pronoun used for Lokang, is not a god. En is not quite human. En designed much of Yat Madit and then withdrew from public life, quietly innovating for decades. The novella never gives the reader enough to know what en actually is beyond those outlines. This means Lokang cannot quite carry the weight the final movement of the story needs from en. Dila seems aware of this and does not try to solve it by making Lokang less opaque. It is a choice, but it costs something in the narrative and might leave a reader wanting more.

What is not in question is the seriousness of what Dila is attempting. He is not interested in the aesthetics of Africanfuturism. He is interested in whether a society built on consensus can survive the demand for speed that crisis requires, whether precolonial political structures powered by contemporary technology could actually function, whether you can write about power without making power the story. These are genuine questions and the kind that speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to ask, using narrative to stress-test political ideas that policy cannot yet imagine.

In the aftermath, the federation does not solidify into a new order. Power begins to reconcentrate around those who used it well during the crisis. The system’s founding commitments are already being tested. Adita is alone. The tree, in Acholi tradition the meeting place where the village gathers, remains. The conversation never ends. That is not a triumphant ending. It is an honest one. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to argue with the book, which is exactly what Dila has built it to do.

The Blossoming of the Big Tree is a genuinely absorbing read, funny and serious in equal measure, and Adita is one of the most quietly original protagonists I have encountered in the genre in some time. 

by C. L. Kagmi

Read by Tobias Lokasson

The goal of science fiction is to expand our horizons. The genre asks not only what is, but what might be. What might life be like in a time or place we haven’t seen yet? How might alien minds be different from our own?

These investigations start, like all literature, with studying our own experiences. Then, some of us ask: What if our senses, our social structures, our emotions were different? 

Neuroscience can help answer that question. By revealing the building blocks of our own perception in the concrete forms of genes, proteins, and neurons, it gives us authors new toys to play with. 

Sensory Perception

Did your aliens grow up in a place with a different spectrum of light? Is their sun a different type of star, or did they evolve in the black depths of an alien sea? Maybe their eyes need different photoreceptors from our own. They’ll see different colors or perhaps substitute vision with some completely different sense. 

Which sensory perceptions mean home, safety, and love to them? Which mean danger, fear, and rejection? Are they warm-blooded social creatures for whom warmth, softness, and touch are the language of intimacy? Or does their biology fear heat and embrace solitude as the surest form of safety? Do they read some form of long-distance communication as the language of love and solidarity instead?

Many of us learned in school that we have five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Science has revealed that we actually perceive much more than that: temperature, balance, pain,  chemical communication, proprioception, magnetoreception, and intuitions from a whole-body neural network that processes information outside of the brain. We now know that chemical communication and magnetoreception are major parts of the sensory world of some species on Earth, and that “gut feelings” in humans are not just a figure of speech. How many frontiers does that open?

Worldbuilding Questions

When crafting an alien viewpoint character, there are two major questions to ask:

• How might their physical sense organs be different from ours? If their sun is of a different star type, does it make sense for them to have evolved different photoreceptors? Will there be colors, types of electromagnetic radiation, they can see that we can’t? How might temperatures, energies, and pigments that are invisible to one species but not another become a plot point? How might it affect their daily relationships to know they literally do not see the world in the same way?
• How do they feel about these sensations? Our emotional and sensory associations with colors are shaped by Earth. The calming blues of clear skies and still water, the soothing greens of plant life in daylight, the warm yellow of the sun, the excitement and danger of red blood. How might another species whose sun, sky, blood, or plant life are different colors feel about our world? On the other hand, how might we feel about theirs?

Consider life around a Class K star. These are more common than our own sun’s type, and scientists believe they may host life. This means many aliens may grow up around them. These stars are cooler, producing more light we would think of as red and less of the light we would perceive as blue or green.

Would it make sense for their children to see into the infrared range or to lack receptors for the color blue? Would they have finer distinction in the red part of the spectrum, perceiving multiple primary colors in shades that look nearly identical to us? Would they pity us for our inability to appreciate the finer points of their art, while a Monet canvas might appear black and white to them?

How would such a species feel about the colors they do see? Do they have red iron blood, like most Earth animals, or blue copper or green blood like a few? Would they associate the color of their hemoglobin with excitement and danger, or would it be the absence of red light found in hemocyanin or biliverdin that speaks of spilled blood?

An Example

Let’s try something a little more alien. What if a sense that is minor in our experience is conscious and major for our aliens? What would a technological species that relies on chemical communication look like? This species could communicate in ways others can’t, using messages carried in air or water currents. But how do they feel about telecommunications that can’t transmit pheromones?

I play with this question in the design of my own aquatic species, discussed in my short story “Hostess.”

“The taste of Draco cannot be described,” she says, suddenly. Her eyes finally leave my face and stray to the sea. “It is—was—like any underwater ecosystem, swimming with pheromones and gametes and waste products, but much more intense. Much more varied—the flavors of a given reef much more subtle. 

“Our people coded messages in carbon chains, memories and mating calls, interesting observations, art pieces designed to elicit emotion, requests for and offers of help. I’m sure you’ve read about it, how our entire ocean, our entire world, was effectively a massive brain. Our ocean thought, knew, experienced, expected. Our World-Minds speculated about life around other stars before you came, you know.”

Learn to Stretch Your Horizons

At first glance, breaking experience down into its mechanical parts, its genes and proteins and neurons, might sound clinical. But human experience arises from our proteins. When seeking to stretch our horizons beyond what we know, looking at what we do know and then breaking it can be very instructive.

We often forget how much we share with all life on Earth: common ancestors, a common genetic code, a shared environment for billions of years. We can’t be sure what alien life is like with a sample size of one world. But we can study the hardware that creates our own experiences and ask, “Would this be the same if it evolved somewhere else?”

The experiences, emotions, meanings, and relationships these mechanisms create, that is the domain of science fiction.

Explore more articles from Writing from Science

C. L. Kagmi earned her B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2011. She worked in clinical research at Mott Children’s Hospital for five years before leaving to start her writing business. Her writings have appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Writers of the Future Vol. 33, and Compelling Science Fiction: The First Collection.

The post How Neuroscience Reveals the Alien Mind appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.