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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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by Janet Stilson and Sandeep Ravindran

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a series celebrating fellow literary nonprofits. We are honored at SFWA to be working alongside so many organizations serving writers and other creators, both within our target genres and in service to improved literary outcomes in general.

Journalists and authors who specialize in real-world science confront any number of issues. Press freedom? Check. Layoffs? You betcha. Generative AI? Absolutely. And that’s just for starters. At the center of that swirl is the National Association of Science Writers, whose many members lend each other support in an impressive variety of ways.

Leading the charge is NASW President Sandeep Ravindran, who engaged in the following Q&A interview with SFWA member Janet Stilson. In addition to discussing the organization’s full scope, Ravindran gives guidance on the ways fiction writers can tap into the deep resources that NASW provides—and the best ways to approach its members. He also explains why he became such a dedicated member of the organization and how he eventually rose to lead it.

How big is NASW’s team, and how big a community does it serve?

While we serve more than 2,000 members in the US and abroad, NASW is primarily a volunteer-run professional association. Many, many volunteers support the myriad projects, programs, and awards that NASW is known for, including the 15-person NASW Board and more than 100 committee members. NASW has one full-time staff member, our amazing Executive Director Tinsley Davis, as well as several excellent contractors and vendors.

Our community includes journalists, authors, editors, producers, institutional communicators, students, and people who write and produce material intended to inform the public about science, health, engineering, and technology. The organization serves 1,719 professional members, 108 affiliate members, and 172 student members.

How did you get involved in NASW, and what got you excited, or interested, in joining the fold? 

I’ve always been interested in both science and writing. I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and science nonfiction books and was an avid reader of the weekly science column in our local newspaper. But it was only towards the end of my PhD that I realized I could pursue science writing as a career. I went on to earn a graduate degree in science communication, and that was when I first came across NASW, including its book intended to introduce people to the field: A Field Guide for Science Writers. I remember attending my first Science Writers meeting and realizing I’d found my people.

NASW played a huge role in launching my science writing career, from finding out about jobs and freelance work to meeting editors at pitch slams. Most of all, it provided a community, which was particularly helpful once I started freelancing. I soon joined NASW’s freelance committee and started organizing pitch slams at the annual meeting and finding other ways to help the science writing community.

A few years later, I was elected to the NASW Board, and after stints as Secretary, Treasurer, and Vice President, I’ve been the President for the past year and a half. These leadership roles have been extremely fulfilling and have provided me with the opportunity to give back to this community that has meant so much to me, while also allowing me to exercise other skillsets besides just writing and reporting—from organizing events to managing people.

Our community tends to be enthusiastic about collaborations and love to offer their expertise.

Does the organization work more with individual authors or trade organizations that cater to the needs of authors?

NASW primarily serves individual authors. We have multiple resources for individual authors, from our “Advance Copy” column, which highlights NASW authors, to book and publishing-related events at our in-person and virtual conferences. In addition, we are grateful for our partnerships with other Authors Coalition of America members and have found it very rewarding to work with and co-organize events and webinars with our colleagues, including the Association of Health Care Journalists and SFWA.

Is there a stronger focus on science journalism, academic publishing, or popular science publishing? And are there differences in how you support writers in different spaces?

NASW is really a big-tent organization. We try to offer something for all those who produce material intended to inform the public about science, health, engineering, and technology—no matter what stage of their career they are in or what subjects they cover or whether they freelance or are staff or what medium they work in.

Our membership is varied enough that no matter what you’re focused on or want to learn, there’s someone out there with the same interest who can provide information and support. Organizationally, that support and programming often comes from various committees, including the freelance committee, institutional communicators committee, and journalism committee.

What NASW events, publications, and resources would you recommend to authors in the broader community, to learn more about your work and impact? 

Our annual conference is our flagship event and is an excellent way to get a sense of our work and community. The in-person component of the conference moves from region to region every year, all across the country and in both big cities and smaller towns. No matter where it’s held, about 30% of our attendees are first-timers, and we do our best to make sure any interested people can walk in and feel welcome.

This year’s in-person conference will be held in Corvallis, Oregon, from September 25-28, and the virtual-only component will be held on October 14-16. In addition to the Field Guide I mentioned earlier, NASW publishes a monthly email newsletter that highlights our latest news and events. Until 2023, we published a print magazine called ScienceWriters. We also work with a lot of local science writers’ groups, and that’s another way to learn more about our community. 

If a writer researching a fictional story thinks they could benefit from conversation with NASW’s members or its staff, what are the best ways to approach the organization (or specific people within it)?

An interested writer is welcome to check out our Find a Writer resource to look for members with specific expertise. They can also follow NASW on Bluesky and LinkedIn and engage in conversations with our organization and community there. The NASW annual meeting and virtual events are other good places to meet our members.

If fiction writers do reach out, what can they do to improve the experience? What are some healthy expectations that should be set in advance by anyone asking a science writer for help with their project?

In general, our community tends to be enthusiastic about collaborations and love to offer their expertise. Of course, like any freelance work, it’s important for people to be paid for their creative efforts and expertise and for activities such as editing or proofreading, so it’s best to be upfront about rates and expectations to avoid later misunderstandings. A great way to reach our members for any type of freelance gig is to post a job ad in the NASW newsletter/mailing list. Ads for single, one-time assignments are free. 

Our mission feels more critical now than ever as we see increasing challenges to the First Amendment and freedom of information.

Has the nature of NASW’s work changed over the years? If so, in what ways and why? And if not, has the challenge of fulfilling the organization’s mission changed instead?

NASW has been around since 1934, and as you can imagine the science writing environment has changed considerably during that time, although it feels like the field has been changing particularly rapidly over the last two decades. Among other things, we’ve seen a decline in staff science writing jobs and an increasing number of freelance members. In response, our organization has adjusted to better serve and represent freelancers. 

The internet also brought with it many opportunities beyond print, including podcasts, newsletters, and videos. And we have been doing our best to incorporate these different media, including having a series of workshops this summer to provide people with the tools and support to help incorporate multimedia in their work.

The past few years have also raised a lot of concerns in our field and among members of the Authors Coalition about AI, particularly the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI models. We released a statement about our use of generative AI and have organized webinars to help our members learn more about AI tools and issues. 

Science writing has also seen a lot of recent layoffs, with journalism publications closing and many university and federal science communication jobs affected by recent cuts in federal funding. We have tried to provide resources and support to help people affected by such layoffs, including sessions on career and mental health support.

What hasn’t changed throughout the years is NASW’s mission to fight for the free flow of science news, including promoting press freedom and improving access to information related to science and scientific research. Our mission feels more critical now than ever as we see increasing challenges to the First Amendment and freedom of information. Among other things, we have organized webinars, including a 2025 SciWriRoundtable, “Reporting in Challenging Free Speech Environments.”  We’ve published many statements both by ourselves and in partnership with other organizations on these issues, and it’s something that we will continue to track.

What does a typical year of NASW events look like, and what initiatives and opportunities should writers look for in the coming months?

NASW has activities throughout the year, including regular webinars and virtual networking socials organized by our committees or co-organized with partner organizations. The NASW Board also organizes virtual SciWriRoundtables each summer; this year’s offerings will be announced soon. 

Also this year, several of our Board members are organizing a series of workshops on multimedia, including vertical and explainer videos, podcasts, and newsletters, and these will be announced soon. We offer a mentoring program for students over the summer, as well as various awards, grants, and fellowship opportunities throughout the year. As I mentioned, our annual conference is always in the fall, with both an in-person and virtual component. We hope to see some of you there or online!

Explore more articles from SFWA Presents: Get to Know…

For over 90 years, the National Association of Science Writers has built upon the aspirations of science writers and educators, in large part with the help of fellow dreamers working toward a more scientifically curious and literate world. Does their work align with any of your projects? You can learn more about their Awards & Grants opportunities at nasw.org/awards.

Sandeep Ravindran is President of NASW and a freelance science journalist whose byline has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Science, Nature, WIRED, and other outlets. He is now serving his fourth term on the NASW Board, and previously served as vice president, treasurer and secretary during preceding terms. Additionally, in 2023 and 2024 Sandeep chaired the NASW Programs Committee, which curates the NASW professional development sessions and plenaries for the annual ScienceWriters national conference.

Interviewer Janet Stilson’s work as a sci-fi novelist has garnered IPPY and NYC Big Book awards. As a film writer, she was selected to be part of the Writers Lab for Women, sponsored by Meryl Streep. Her sci-fi novels, The Juice and Universe of Lost Messages, were inspired by her work as a journalist reporting on the crazy media industry. Janet’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Metastellar, and Pink Hydra.

The post SFWA Presents: Get to Know Our Industry Peer – National Association of Science Writers appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Emmalia Harrington

Read by Robert Greenberger

Photostories are a form of graphic storytelling using one or more photographs. The images may come with captions, comic-book-style word balloons, or forgo text altogether. The medium originated in early 20th-century American newspapers and 1960s Italian fumetti comics. Photostories, marketed as “fotonovels,” have also appeared in many beloved science fiction and fantasy franchises, such as Alien and Star Trek. For today’s SFF authors, photostories can serve as a form of marketing, combining prose with striking imagery. For authors with dysgraphia, making storytelling easier can be achieved by reducing the amount of text required to convey their ideas.

How the Format Evolved The cover of Novellino (1907), illustrated by Yambo, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some of the first known photostories were published in the New York Evening Graphic, a tabloid newspaper that ran from 1924 to 1932. During its brief run, it gained a reputation for recreating current events using composite photos with captions and pieces of dialogue beneath the images. From the 1940s onward, the medium gained popularity in Italy, producing stories from a diverse range of genres, including melodramas, romances, crime stories, and more. They became so popular that the Italian word for comics, “fumetti,” became an English term for photostories.

In the late 1970s, there was a boom of photostories in the SFF world. Franchises such as Doctor Who, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek found new lives for their movies and television episodes. Screen captures became comic book panels, and the panels combined to retell the films and shows in print format. These books had many names, including “photostory,” “photonovel,” “fotonovel,” and “movie novel.” The publications varied in size and scale, from a modest 300 screencaps for smaller books to over 1,000 for oversized deluxe editions.

A page from a photocomic made with Comic Life. Photo by Nelson Pavlosky, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This boom faded with the advent and growing popularity of the VCR and home video. SFF photostories still live on today, though they’re more likely to be independent work than part of a greater franchise. Alien Loves Predator, an independent parody, uses action figures to portray the characters living among humans. The Last Gay Man on Earth uses the medium to blend memoir with science fiction, magical realism, and meta-narrative.

Photostories as Creative Tools

In our age of social media, authors are expected to do a lot of our own self-promotion. Photostories are a useful tool for drawing attention to ourselves and our work. Using pictures with evocative imagery catches attention. They also quickly establish setting and character, allowing for condensed storytelling useful for social media. In this way, they serve as an elevator pitch, but with visual details.

Panel from Visiting Escapism. Photo and story by Emmalia Harrington. Published on Emmalia Writes.

One instance where photostories can help with promotions is by drawing attention to a new publication. I have done this, as has fellow author Beth Alvarez. A side story related to the new work can be a literal and metaphorical snapshot into your characters’ world, or of the themes you’re conveying. Photostories can be used on their own or incorporated into a greater campaign, along with blog tours, reviews, and the like. Pieces related to your older works can help draw attention to your back catalogue.

Panel from Hyperfocus Playtime: The Crisis. Photo and story by Emmalia Harrington. Published on Den of Angels.

On a personal note, photostories can also be useful for authors with dysgraphia. Dysgraphia is an umbrella term for various forms of neurodiversity that make writing challenging. Sometimes, the act of handwriting can be physically painful, resulting in illegible writing. Others may struggle with translating raw thoughts into understandable text. When they do write, they may end up with confusing grammar, omitted words, or inconsistent spelling. Or they may be like me, with all of the above.

Photostories are a compromise between the passion for storytelling and dysgraphic challenges. Images convey setting and reduce the need for descriptions. They also help with characterization as the model’s looks or poses showcase age, mannerisms, and other elements of character. As pictures say so much, dysgraphic authors can focus on writing about the heart of the story through dialogue or narration.

How to Get Started

To make your own photostory, first decide on the story you want to tell and how you want to express it. For example, if you want a minimalist look with a character-based focus, then you don’t need many backgrounds and props. If you want to use preexisting photos, then you don’t need to worry about creating a set.

Photo by Emmalia Harrington. Published on TCO_Anthology’s Instagram page.

Once you’ve finished planning, gather what you need. Some people, like the creator of Alien Loves Predator, tell their story through action figures or other objects. If you want to use models, scheduling is a must. Depending on the story, you may also want or need costumes, makeup, or other items to get the look you wish. Still more creators may want to take advantage of public domain photographs, like Victorian ghost photos or screencaps from films such as A Trip to the Moon. Another option is stock photography.

Panel from Spring Vacation: The Chess Battle. Photo and story by Emmalia Harrington. Published on Den of Angels.

Since photographs are not always perfect, you may want to edit your chosen pictures to your desired lighting, filters, and other effects. If you prefer text or word balloons on your pictures rather than separate captions, edit them in. If you’d like to add captions, do so below the corresponding image.

Congratulations! Your photostory is now complete.

Panel from The Power of Immersion. Photo and story by Emmalia Harrington. Published in Emmalia Writes #6.

Photostories are a fun way to stretch your creativity and explore alternative ways of telling stories. They have a long history in SFF, including retelling large studio productions such as films and TV shows. Today’s author doesn’t need the elaborate sets and equipment of film and TV to tell their own photostories, nor do they require printing. With a camera, a few models or props, and simple photo editing software, you can make your own photostories to promote your writing, work around dysgraphia, or whatever else you desire.

Explore more articles from Writing by Other Means

Emmalia Harrington is a disabled QBIPOC with a deep love of speculative fiction. This passion has led them to Codex and SFWA memberships, as well as the inaugural Voodoonauts program. Their short stories can be found at FIYAH, Abyss and Apex, Flame Tree Press, and other venues. Their first novel, Walk on Grey Ruins, is available at most bookstores. When they aren’t reading or writing, they are usually crafting or busy in the kitchen. Learn more at Emmalia Writes.

The post Photostories Past and Present appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced the winners of the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards (the Lammys ), celebrating the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender books. Winning titles and authors of genre interest, and their competing finalists of genre interest, include the following:

LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction

• WINNER: Beings, Ilana Masad (Bloomsbury)

• Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon (Tordotcom)
• Cry, Voidbringer, Elaine Ho (Bindery)
• Two Truths and …Read More

LAcon V has announced the Hugo Awards Base will be designed by Scott Lefton, and the Lodestar Award Base will be designed by H. Emiko Ogasawara.

Lefton specializes in multiple artistic forms, including metal, glass, wood, electronics, and digital design. He designed the 2004 Hugo Award base and the Hugo rocket displayed on the International Space Station. He is also an engineer. He says, I'm honored to have been …Read More