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Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) has been named the recipient of the fourth Infinity Award.

The award was created by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) to posthumously highlight the life and work of creators who achieved a distinct and tremendous legacy in science fiction and fantasy. Although they are no longer with us to celebrate this honor, these writers helped to lay the foundation for today's science fiction, fantasy, …Read More

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Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider. 

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose.  From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties. 

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying! 

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read. 

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel. 

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans,  there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book. 

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider. 

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose.  From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties. 

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying! 

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read. 

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel. 

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans,  there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book. 

TheBaltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) has announced that The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso (Atria) [amazon / bookshop] is the 44th winner of the Compton Crook Award.

The other finalists were:

• A Song of Legends Lost, M.H. Ayinde (Saga) amazon / bookshop
• Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy) amazon / bookshop
• All the Water in the World, Eiren Caffall (St. Martin's) amazon …Read More

  The post Gelfuso Wins Compton Crook Award appeared first on Locus Online.

MILESTONES

SARA HASHEM is now represented by Chloe Seager at Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency. Hashem's Merciful Carnage, first in a dark fantasy romance duology, and another book went to Alyea Canada at Orbit via Jennifer Azantian of Azantian Literary Agency. UK rights sold to Jenni Hill at Orbit UK.

HANNAH WASTYK is now represented by Arley Sorg at kt literary.

OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI has been hospitalized for a spinal fracture …Read More

The post People & Publishing Roundup, April 2026 appeared first on Locus Online.

Finalists for the 17th-annual Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction were announced by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association on March 31, 2026. Titles have been translated by Hu Shaoyan, except where English titles were provided by the authors or publishers.

Best Novel

• Ocean Break, Chen Qiufan (Flower City)
• The Tale of a Loong's Metamorphosis, Hai Ya, Fengxing Chengzi (New Star)
• The Gun that Ends Beginnings, Liang Qingsan (People's …Read More

  The post 2026 Xingyun Awards Finalists appeared first on Locus Online.

Congratulations to all of the Locus Awards top ten finalists! These results are from the February 1 to April 1 voting by readers on an open public ballot.

The Locus Awards winners will be announced May 30, 2026, during the in-person Locus Awards Ceremony, held in the historic Hotel Shattuckin downtown Berkeley, California. Join MCs Sarah Gailey and Maggie Tokuda-Hall, plus guests of honor Tananarive Due,Stephen Graham Jones,andNnedi Okorafor, …Read More

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Katrina Kat Templeton has won the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) to travel from Europe to North America to attend MetropolCon, the 2026 Eurocon, defeating Lisa Hertel.

There were 76 votes, 3 of which were submitted with no preference. The fund is currently administered by Sarah Gulde in North America and Mikołaj Kowalewski in Europe. Eurocon 2026 will be held July 2-5, 2026 in Berlin, Germany.

For more information, see the …Read More

The post 2026 TAFF Winner appeared first on Locus Online.

Fantasy illustrator MICHAEL HAGUE, 77, died March 10, 2026 in Colorado Springs CO.

Michael Riley Hague was born September 8, 1948 in Los Angeles CA. He attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He illustrated for numerous books, many of them classics, including L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1982), C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1983), J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1984), J.M. …Read More

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Fantasy author John Flanagan, 81, died February 7 of complications from non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

John Flanagan was born May 22, 1944 in Sydney, Australia. He worked in advertising and wrote TV sitcoms before publishing The Ruins of Gorlan, first in The Ranger's Apprentice series, in 2004. He then wrote The Burning Bridge (2005), The Icebound Land (2005), Oakleaf Bearers (2006), The Sorcerer in the North (2006), The Siege of Macindaw (2007), …Read More

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Joyelle McSweeney, author of the poetry collection Death Styles (Nightboat) [amazon / bookshop], is among the recipients announced for the 2026 Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, recognized in the Poetry category.

The Windham-Campbell Prize was established in 2013 to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. The prize is administered by Yale University, with …Read More

Anathema: Spec from the Margins, a speculative fiction magazine by and for queer people of color, has announced that it is relaunching after a four-year hiatus.

We're committed to supporting marginalized writers by paying them a professional rate for their work. To feature up to 4 stories, 4 poems, and 1 nonfiction piece per issue, we plan to pay:

• $0.08/word for fiction up to 6,000 words
• $0.05/word …Read More

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the recipients of its 2025 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Jonathan Maberry and Lisa Morton. The awards will be presented on June 6, 2026, during the Bram Stoker Awards at StokerCon®2026 in Pittsburgh PA.

The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented periodically to an individual whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre. While this award is often presented to a writer, it may also …Read More

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).

There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.

These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.

“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?

References

Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179

Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x

Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.

By Christine Aicardi

Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).

But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.

Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.

From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).

What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).

There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.

These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.

“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?

References

Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179

Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.

Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x

Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.

SF writer and television producer ROB GRANT, 70, died February 25, 2026.

Robert Grant was born September 25, 1955 in Lancashire, England. He attended Liverpool University and wrote for BBC radio. He co-wrote with Doug Naylor the TV series Red Dwarf and several tie-in works of fiction, including Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989), Better Than Life (1990), and script collection Primordial Soup (1993), under the name Grant Naylor. He wrote …Read More

The winners of the 2025 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards have been announced.

BestNovel

• WINNER: When There Are Wolves Again, E.J. Swift (Arcadia) amazon / bookshop

• A Granite Silence, Nina Allan (Riverrun) amazon
• Project Hanuman, Stewart Hotston (Angry Robot) amazon / bookshop
• Edge of Oblivion, Kirk Weddell (Troubador)
• The Salt Oracle, Lorraine Wilson (Solaris)

Best Shorter Fiction (for novelettes and novellas)

• WINNER: …Read More

Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey (Orbit UK; Orbit US) [amazon / bookshop] was announced as the winner of the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award on April 3, 2026 at Norwescon 48. In addition, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow) [amazon / bookshop] received a special citation. Other nominees for the award included:

• Sunward, William Alexander (Saga) amazon / bookshop
• Casual, Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous) amazon / …Read More

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the winners for the 2025 NBCC awards for books published in English (including translations) in the United States. Titles and authors of genre interest among the winners include We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. Paige Aniyah Morris & e. yaewon (Hogarth).

Committee chair Heather Scott Partington said the novel presents

a work of blinding melancholy, bleak weather, and murmuring syntax. …Read More

The shortlist for the 2026 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, honoring the best SF/F work published in France in 2025, has been announced.

French Novel

• Festin de larmes, Morgane Caussarieu & Vincent Tassy (ActuSF)
• Aatea, Anouck Faure (Argyll)
• Tovaangar, Céline Minard (Rivages)
• Sintonia, Audrey Pleynet (Le Bélial')
• Une vie de saint, Christophie Siébert (Au Diable Vauvert)

Foreign Novel

• Le Chant des noms [The Naming Song], Jedediah Berry, tr. …Read More