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Our Heads Are Better Than AI: Working Together on Challenges in Industry

Dear writer,

Right now, the SFF online conversation is potent and proactive (read: FIERY). The topic? AI scammers, the increasing complexity of their scams, and the challenges they pose as they infiltrate one publication, then use that credit to break into more.

To catch you up, I’ll share some resources at the end of this letter. Not everyone is as keyed in on the daily blow-by-blow of social media or reading at the speed of the Internet (I don’t know how you all are even writing creatively these days). For those of you who are online all the time, skim freely. 

We want to provide useful guidance for a discussion that airs out the challenges many publishers and writers face in this age of LLM tools. It is so easy to feel shame, frustration, and anger after any scam, but we can’t let that keep us from growing as a community. When we all know what’s going on, we can work toward the changes we want to see.

Thanks to the work of many thoughtful creators on the frontlines, our genre community is now engaging with big questions, like how do we keep our trust networks strong? How do we expand the genre and extend the platform to new and global writers when verification is much harder? And how do we do all of this with the small human teams who run so many of our great publications?

In recent days, the community has come together, through data and compassion, to help answer these questions and to let fellow editors and writers know that they are not alone. 

SFWA was hit, too, when Planetside: The Online Magazine of SFWA encountered scammers savvy enough to get past other major publications first. The old model of trusting in legitimate writing credits needs adjustment in our new era. But thanks to our responsive community, we were able to flag the work, take it down, and work on next steps.

Not Everyone Is Taking The Same Next Steps

Some teams, like Planetside, are changing processes for author verification and transforming editorial training. Others are using AI detection tools with final human oversight to reduce the load for their frontline volunteers. We all want our humans to keep working with humans. 

But how each team evaluates their own next steps is a complex decision, wrapped up in nuanced discussions of detection workload and data privacy. 

Sometimes I’m longwinded, so let me be clear: 

1. Blacklisting by geographical region degrades and diminishes our community; and 
2. AI cannot save us from AI. We want, and need, humans making these decisions.
   

We know that a stronger publishing industry is built on openness, diversity, and trust. Equitable practice has to create inclusive on-ramps while balancing the work of fraud detection and account moderation. The protection of contributors’ rights and work must be at the center of every community practice we adopt in response to the latest threat. 

New Battles in an Old Arena

This new era can seem daunting, but these are not all new challenges.

Victoria Strauss from Writer Beware® has written about online scams for us for years, while SFWA’s Advocacy Team, including our Legal and Contracts Committees, are always following key case law for opportunities to push back. 

SFWA’s mission is to serve writers coming from many backgrounds, and we do not approach creating any blanket policies or procedures lightly. Detangling the current crisis in publishing will require patience and cooperation. 

But we will not back down from our unwavering desire to see HUMANS typing on keyboards, writing in notebooks, and scrawling stats for RPG playtests. 

That’s where we need your help, writer. We need YOU in the conversation.

The main thing I’ve learned as SFWA President: we create our best solutions together. 

In that vein, this summer and fall, we are inviting you deeper into the conversation, with the ultimate goal of making sure we are all better prepared for the future ahead as we fight for the one we want: wildly human, creatively vibrant, and written by us. 

Join Us to Learn More, Get Engaged

Building on a groundswell of excellent member and community feedback last December, our Emerging Tech Committee has been crafting resources to help writers, readers, educators, and students. This weekend’s Emerging Tech conversation is the first in a series of opportunities to bypass the hype and make informed, pro-human decisions for ourselves and our writing tools.

If you can’t attend “Understanding AI: A Hype-Free Overview” this Saturday, July 18 at 1PM PDT, please submit questions and other feedback on our preliminary resource page. Your questions will be answered by panelists on Saturday, and that page will grow this summer to provide more tools to sharpen our understanding together of key terms and industry products. 

This event is open to the public, as part of our Givers Fund Fundraising Kickoff weekend. You can donate to the Givers Fund, which supports human creators growing the SFF community, when you RSVP for access to all our weekend’s kickoff events.

Also this summer, our Short Fiction Matrix Project will be launching Phase One of another community-driven resource page, which will support writers and publishers in a market where professionalism, transparency, and a commitment to writers’ rights are requirements to be part of the genre conversation. We are here for that! Help push for the changes you want to see by working with their team, just as you have done for years by sending sample contracts to our Contracts Committee. Your questions and contributions help us all.

If you are with a partner organization or magazine, or are an industry pro, touch base with me personally. We have resources behind the scenes to get you further connected and supported.

It’s going to be a good weekend. I can’t wait to continue the conversation with you. I’ll bring along questions of my own. We’ll work through them together.

Keep creating,

Kate Ristau
SFWA President

Resources for Further Reading

Apex Books & Zine. “Facebook Visual Post Rescinding Publication.” July 10, 2026.

Bona Books. The Machines Are Coming for Your Masthead: Small Press Publishing in the Age of AI. July 2026

Cast of Wonders. “Bluesky Post Thread Rescinding Publication.” July 7, 2026.

—. “The Many Faces of Charity Ogechi.” July 7, 2026.

Clarke, Neil. “AI and Short Fiction #1 – some recommendations for readers” and “AI and Short Fiction #2 – some recommendations for editors.” July 14-15, 2026.

DeLuca, Michael J., Reckoning Press. “AI: A Press Statement.” July 6, 2026.

Strauss, Victoria. “The First Clue to an Email Scam May Be the Address,” Writer Beware® , June 30, 2026.

The post Press Release – July 16, 2026 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Sam Macdonald

Read by Maggie Ayala

Speculative fiction has always borrowed from the sciences, but one discipline shows up more often—and in more unexpected ways—than readers might realize. Mathematics, usually seen as the realm of formulas and proofs, has a long history of being used as a versatile narrative tool for authors trying to make sense of political systems, technological anxiety, and the strangeness of modern life. Across more than a century of genre writing, math has worked quietly in the background as one of the most reliable sources of metaphor in speculative fiction.

Comedy and Critique Puffin’s 1946 edition. Cover art by John Tenniel. Via ISFDB.

Though mathematics has a reputation for being treated as dry, abstract, and apolitical, one of its oldest uses in fiction is satire. Mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson (more widely known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll) peppered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) with commentary on perceived dangers of the new directions mathematics was taking in the mid-19th century. Nonsense riddles and impossible implications serve as critiques of symbolic algebra, imaginary numbers, and the increasingly abstract turn of (then) contemporary mathematics. Interested readers are strongly encouraged to peruse Melanie Bayley’s wonderful article “Alice’s Adventures in Algebra: Wonderland Solved.”

Barnes and Noble 1963 edition. Via ISFDB.

Yet perhaps the quintessential early example of mathematics as metaphor appears in Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), the tale of a square (A. Square, to be precise) struggling to imagine dimensions beyond his own. The story captures something fundamental about both mathematics and speculative fiction: the pleasure of taking a simple set of assumptions and following them wherever they lead. In Flatland, those assumptions produce a society of line segments and polygons arranged in a rigid caste hierarchy, where imagining a third dimension is both a mathematical puzzle and social heresy. With its pointed satire of Victorian norms, including female characters that are literally one-dimensional, Abbott delivers a satirical gem that’s as weird as it is revealing.

Although Flatland helped launch a long tradition of “dimensional fiction”—stories that try to imagine fourth and higher dimensions—the heart of Abbott’s project goes deeper. As Alex Kasman notes in his comprehensive catalogue of mathematically themed fiction, Abbott’s narrative uses mathematics as a vehicle for examining the boundaries of knowledge itself. In doing so, Abbott connects mathematical metaphor to broader questions about culture, spirituality, and imagining realities outside human (or polygonal) experience.

From Humor to Horror First printing of The Call of Cthulhu in 1928. Cover art by C. C. Senf. Via ISFDB.

The idea of impossible geometries as stand-ins for the limits of human understanding took on a far darker tone in the early 20th century, most notably through the eldritch creations of H. P. Lovecraft. Confronted with the challenge of describing that which, by its very definition, exists beyond human comprehension, Lovecraft turned to the language of non-Euclidean geometry. In stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933), architecture twists into impossible angles, ordinary rooms open onto other dimensions, and straight lines warp in ways that defy intuition. Geometry, usually one of the most concrete and visual branches of mathematics, crumbles before our eyes as we glimpse the true structure of the universe. (This author makes no claim that such metaphors were poignant, successful, or even coherent—only that an attempt was made.)

E. P. Dutton 1959 English translation. Cover art by Seymour Chwast. Via ISFDB.

In addition to the unknowable, mathematics shows its versatility through its history as a metaphor for systems of control. One of the seminal examples is in We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a foundational dystopian novel that would shape later classic 1984. Set in a glass-walled city where privacy is deemed irrational, We depicts a society in which citizens are named through algebraic identifiers (such as our protagonist, D-503) and state doctrine is framed as a series of axioms and proofs, elevating mathematical “perfection” as the highest civic virtue. Frequent maxims of the populace include such timeless classics as “We are perfect because we are mathematical,” and “The ideal state is a perfectly balanced equation.” 

Alianza Editorial’s 1997 edition including “La lotería en Babilonia.” Cover art by Hieronymus Bosch. Via ISFDB.

Though Zamyatin uses mathematics to symbolize an excess of order, mathematical metaphor in dystopian fiction isn’t confined to rigid equations. Enter Jorge Luis Borges. In his short story “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941), a society governed by pure probability becomes authoritarian not through order but through randomness—a system so arbitrary and impersonal it feels omnipotent.

Satire and Sincerity Seabury Press 1974 edition. Cover art by Daniel Mróz. Translated by Michael Kandel. Via ISFDB.

As mathematical dystopias evolved, authors increasingly questioned not just authoritarian order or arbitrary chance, but the very premise that logic could govern society. Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad (1965) blends the threads of satire and autocracy into a series of exuberant mathematical fables: machines that follow flawless rules but cause chaos, proofs that function as weapons, entire societies run on algorithmic decree. It’s satire aimed squarely at technocratic fantasies of control, designed to dismantle pretensions of perfect rationality masquerading as political wisdom.

Not all mathematical metaphors are dystopian or absurd. Many authors employ mathematical ideas—especially higher dimensions, topology, and infinity—as symbols of liberation, spiritual insight, or imaginative possibility. A classic example is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962). Mrs. Whatsit’s demonstration of “folding” space offers both a physical explanation for hyperspace travel and an emotional metaphor: love, empathy, and moral courage allow one to bypass oppressive structures as easily as one might bypass distance in spacetime. Here, mathematics is transformed into the language of wonder.

Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy’s first edition (1962). Cover art by Ellen Raskin. Via ISFDB. Mathematics and Metaphor

Across these works, mathematics becomes more than a system of symbols or language of logic. It becomes a flexible metaphorical vocabulary capable of expressing fundamental aspects of the human experience—what speculative fiction is all about. Because mathematics is so deeply associated with truth, objectivity, and the structure of reality, bending or reinterpreting it in fiction allows authors to question what’s real at all. Whether it is Abbott opening doors to higher perception, Zamyatin warning about the dangers of perfect rationality, or L’Engle using geometry as a vehicle for hope, mathematics equips our fiction with a unique set of tools for exploring both the known and the unknowable. Mathematics is, after all, its own form of speculation.

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Sam Macdonald is a graduate student pursuing his PhD in mathematics in Lincoln, Nebraska. He has publications in speculative fiction magazines, mathematics journals, and humor websites, and hopes to one day write something strange enough to be publishable in all three. In his free time he enjoys rock climbing, strategic hammock placement, and the axiom of choice.

The post An Abridged History of Mathematical Metaphor in Speculative Fiction appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Now Hiring: SFWA Executive Director Organization Overview

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization for published writers and industry professionals in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. Founded in 1965, SFWA runs the annual Nebula Conference, the Nebula Awards, and has a number of programs to assist authors worldwide.

Compensation: $77,000 – 85,000/year with benefits.

Status: This is a full time, salaried position. Candidates must be US-based and eligible for legal employment.

Location: Hybrid remote/on-site (annual conference location)

Position Overview

The Executive Director is the key management leader for SFWA. The Executive Director will provide strategic direction and overall leadership for the organization, ensuring its mission to support science fiction and fantasy writers around the world. The Executive Director is responsible for overseeing the administration, programs, and strategic plan of the organization.

Other key duties include fundraising, marketing, and community outreach. The Executive Director will report directly to the Board of Directors and lead a fully remote team of employees, contractors, and volunteers.

Key Job Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership: Work with the board and volunteers to ensure good governance and strategic direction.

● Develop, implement, and maintain a strategic plan to guide SFWA’s growth, sustainability, and mission.
● Identify, evaluate, and pursue innovative opportunities to improve SFWA’s impact globally.
Financial Stewardship: Ensure the financial health of the organization while maintaining fiscally responsible spending.
● With the help of the Chief Financial Officer and Finance Team, oversee creation of the annual budget and monitor financial performance to ensure organizational stability.
● Develop and lead the execution of fundraising strategies, including grants and individual donations. Manage fundraising and development volunteer teams.
● Cultivate relationships with current donors, foundations, and partners.
● Ensure financial transparency in fundraising efforts.
Program Management: Actively manage SFWA volunteers, staff and programming.
● Oversee the design and implementation of programming designed to help science fiction and fantasy authors around the world, including industry oversight, legacy estates projects, educational publications, and grants.
● Cultivate and manage strategic partnerships with allied writers organizations.
● Oversee the administration of the annual Nebula Conference and the Nebula Awards.
● Directly manage and build volunteer teams supporting programming efforts.
Communications: Oversee internal and external communications and marketing.
● Oversee the Communications and Marketing Manager, who manages communication with 2500+ members and internal online communities through the support of social media and discord teams.
● Support SFWA marketing and public relations efforts.
● Actively engage with board, staff, and stakeholders to ensure open lines of communication.
Oversee Advocacy & Membership Efforts: Lead community outreach and advocacy efforts.
● Ensure that SFWA continues to improve its reach to underserved populations and communities around the world.
● Monitor and evaluate advocacy efforts and report on SFWA’s impact.
● Support membership recruitment and community outreach.
Skills and Qualifications
● Bachelor’s degree required. Advanced degree preferred in nonprofit management, education, or a field related to publishing.
● Minimum 5 years in senior management of a nonprofit organization or in a related field.
● Experience in fundraising and donor cultivation. Expectation of familiarity with Customer Relation Management systems.
● Strong financial management and budgeting background, including in-depth understanding of financial reporting.
● Strong management skills focused on creating and supporting a collaborative and cooperative team environment.
● Dedicated commitment to advocacy for the arts in general and science fiction and fantasy in particular.
● Proficiency leveraging technology for remote work and project management.
● Ability to work remotely with a worldwide team.
● The ability to travel to the annual Nebula Award Conference.

Deadline for Applications

Until filled.

How to Apply

SFWA is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender identity, religion, color, sexual orientation, sex, marital/family status, national origin, age, physical ability, or income. We strongly encourage applicants within traditionally underrepresented and marginalized communities.

Email a cover letter and resume in a single file (MS Word or PDF files only) to jobs@sfwa.org.

Please include ‘Executive Director’ in the subject line.

Please note all job applications will be reviewed by members of staff and the board at SFWA. No AI will be used in assessment of applicants. Additionally, the selected candidate will be required not to engage generative AI in the performance of their duties.

Thank you for your interest in working for SFWA!

The post Now Hiring: SFWA’s Next Executive Director appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

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.

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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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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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by Rosemary Jones

Read by the author

The first movie tie-in novels date to the rise of silent movies as mass entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. As with movie tie-in books today, these included both novelizations of screenplays and reissues of published novels illustrated with movie stills.

Newspapers Inspire Early Movie Tie-Ins

The novelization of The Adventures of Kathlyn is one of the earliest movie tie-in novels. This serial began on December 29, 1913, and was shown in movie theaters through 1914. One of the action heroines of silent movies, the film’s star, Kathlyn Williams, was famous for performing with big cats.  The movie took advantage of her talents and first name. Over the course of 13 episodes, the fictional Kathlyn rescues her explorer father and frees the enslaved population of a mythical kingdom. She traverses jungles, battles wild beasts, outwits the insidious Council of Three, and dodges a forced marriage to a foul prince. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to bring the audience back to enjoy the next installment until the story’s happy resolution.

(Bottom) Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) and (top) Perils of Pauline (1914). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Harold McGrath, who supplied the original story for the screenplay, wrote the novel published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The text was illustrated with black-and-white photos from the film. The frontispiece opposite the title page shows Kathlyn clutching the hunter Bruce, who aids her quest to rescue her father and provides a romantic interest.

Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times also featured stories illustrated with stills from The Adventures of Kathlyn. This was designed to boost sales of the newspapers, the serial, and the book, cashing in on every possible way to keep the public intrigued by Kathlyn’s trials and tribulations. It was all coordinated, with the Chicago Tribune helping to finance the movie production in hopes of boosting their circulation. The Motion Picture News noted film screenings ended with a reminder to read about Kathlyn in the Sunday newspaper, while the newspaper stories urged fans to go to the “picture theater” to watch the next episode.

Photoplays Become Bestsellers

The Adventures of Kathlyn launched the popular format of action serials with cliffhanger endings, most famously The Perils of Pauline (1914). Funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and written by playwright Charles Goddard, the serial put star Pearl White in dangerous situations, including being menaced by a gorilla (a costumed actor as opposed to the real big cats used in The Adventures of Kathlyn). Fifteen black-and-white photos of Pauline’s adventures accompanied Goddard’s novelization, which Hearst’s International Library Co. published. The title page proclaims it is “a motion picture novel.”

Perils of Pauline title page (1914). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

These early novels convinced other publishers that movies made great books. Novelizations of movies and books illustrated with film stills were quickly released. Hundreds of titles were in print by the 1920s.

In the United States, New York publishers A.L. Burt and Grosset & Dunlap were the most prolific publishers of movie tie-in novels. Both publishers specialized in issuing cheap hardcover reprints of popular fiction and classics. As silent movies adapted these stories to film, publishers found it easy to insert four to eight stills into their versions. Colorful dust jackets trumpeted that the book was the basis for the movie and named popular film stars as prominently as authors. Both publishers used the term photoplays to describe these books illustrated with movie stills. Grosset’s advertisements trumpeted that their books allowed the audience “the secret of enjoying the films over and over again in a comfortable armchair by your own fireside.”

Silent movies were a worldwide phenomenon, as were movie tie-in books. German scriptwriter Thea Von Harbou’s novel Metropolis appeared in multiple languages with illustrations from the 1927 silent movie directed by Fritz Lang. The Readers Library (UK) dust jacket art emphasizes the movie’s Art Deco design and robot. Von Harbou also wrote The Rocket to the Moon, which was the basis for Lang’s 1929 silent movie Frau in Mond (Woman in the Moon). The illustrated movie tie-in edition released by Readers Library used the title The Girl in the Moon.

Metropolis dust jacket, Readers Library edition, photo courtesy of Fantasy Illustrated ABAA. More Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Tie-Ins

Today, silent movie tie-in novels featuring science fiction, fantasy, and horror films attract the most interest from collectors. Some of these are still famous films, like Metropolis. Others are more obscure, like the 1916 version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Some films are lost, such as the 1922 edition of The Young Diana, inspired by Marie Corelli’s earlier novel. The movie tie-in version is the only way to see how Marion Davies portrayed its heroine, who is rejuvenated by a scientist. But all are testimony to the importance of science fiction and fantasy in the silent era.

A childhood favorite adapted to film early on was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Grosset published an oversized gift edition with photos from the 1915 silent movie. An account of how the picture was filmed before a live audience at the Savoy Theatre appears at the beginning of the book.

Alice in Wonderland colored frontispiece (1915). Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Douglas Fairbanks’s Thief of Baghdad (1924) was a stunt and special-effects fantasy extravaganza. The novelization was done by Achmed Abudallah, who listed himself as “the writer of many lands and many people.” As was common in the silent era, Abudallah’s biography sounded as romantic as his stories, claiming he was the son of a Persian princess and an exiled noble cousin of the last Russian czar. The A. L. Burt edition featured a wraparound dust jacket art by Willy Pogany with Fairbanks and his princess on the front and the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong in her breakout role as a villainess on the back.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with reproduction dust jacket. Photo by Rosemary Jones.

Lon Chaney’s groundbreaking, fantastic make-up in horror films is evident in the movie tie-in version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The book features four stills from the movie, two double-page color plates from earlier editions of the novel, and a wraparound dust jacket where the dead body on the grand staircase is cleverly centered on the spine. So, whether face-out or spine-only, this book was sure to attract fans of the Phantom.

Phantom of the Opera (1925) with reproduction dust jacket. Photo by Rosemary Jones. Enduring Connection to Silent Films

While the Jazz Singer and other sound experiments ended the silent movie era by 1930, the movie tie-in novel remained strong. Every decade has brought new movie tie-in novels, novelizations, and spin-offs in ever-increasing numbers.

But these silent movie tie-in books make charming reminders of early science fiction, fantasy, and horror films. Sometimes they are the easiest versions to find. Only fragments of The Adventures of Kathlyn remain in existence (which can be watched on YouTube courtesy of the Eye Filmmuseum), but McGrath’s novel is widely available in the used-book market.

Explore more articles from THE HISTORY FILES

Rosemary Jones collects illustrated fiction, including Photoplays. She has authored seven novels based on games, including two for Forgotten Realms/Wizards of the Coast and five for Arkham Horror/Aconyte. Her latest AH novels, The Nightmare Quest of April May and The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters, feature books from her collection tucked on the characters’ bookshelves. More about her writing can be found at rosemaryjones.com. Pictures of her book collection are available at @lost_loves_books on Instagram.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Introducing SFWA’s 61st Annual Nebula Award Winners

San Francisco, CA  – Saturday, June 6, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is proud to announce its latest Nebula Award winners for works published in 2025, as first presented during the Nebula Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 6, at the organization’s 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare Hotel and Conference Center in Chicago, Illinois.

The Nebula Awards are voted on by SFWA Members in good standing, and they represent the views of professional SFF writers on the state of their industry and recent excellence within it.

Since 1965, SFWA has advocated for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. From that very first year, the Nebula Awards process has been one of SFWA’s foundational pathways to improving literary community for SFF writers.

This year, SFWA celebrated two inaugural awards: one for Poem, and one for Comic. Like the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing, these new awards celebrate writers at the heart of productions that also involve editors, artists, publishers, producers, and a wealth of other team members who make the magic happen. When voting opens later this year for work published in 2026, the second of these awards will be listed as Comics Writing.

The Nebula Awards Ceremony also celebrates excellence in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres through the issuance of special awards. This year, under the care and guiding words of Toastmaster Tananarive Due, the organization honored its 42nd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, N. K. Jemisin, the seasoned author of the Inheritance Trilogy, the Broken Earth Trilogy, and the Great Cities Duology, among others. SFWA also celebrated the excellent curatorial and community-building work of Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient David Langford, the tremendous genre commitment of Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Recipient Gay Haldeman, and the outstanding legacy of Infinity Award Recipient Roger Zelazny.

SFWA is delighted to announce that its next Nebula Awards Conference and Ceremony will be held in Seattle in June 2027. There is much to do to prepare for Nebula 62, but it all starts and ends with the power and purpose of good writing. Thank you to everyone who votes, writes, reads, and otherwise contributes to the betterment of this genre in all its brilliant forms.

The Nebula Award for Novel

When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory (Saga)
★ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK) ★ 
Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia)

The Nebula Award for Novella

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle, by Renan Bernardo (Dark Matter INK)
★  The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia) ★ 
The Death of Mountains, by Jordan Kurella (Lethe)
Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo (Tordotcom)
“Descent”, by Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld 5/25)

The Nebula Award for Novelette

“Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh”, by Marie Croke (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/9/25)
★ “Uncertain Sons”, by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Undertow Publications) ★
“We Begin Where Infinity Ends”, by Somto Ihezue (Clarkesworld 2/25)
The Name Ziya, by Wen-Yi Lee (Reactor; Tor Books)
“Never Eaten Vegetables”, by H.H. Pak (Clarkesworld 1/25)
“The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends”, by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 3-4/25)

The Nebula Award for Short Story

“Through the Machine”, by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed 5/25)
“Six People to Revise You”, by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny 1-2/25)
“In My Country”, by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 4/25)
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead”, by E.M. Linden (PodCastle 2/18/25)
“Because I Held His Name Like a Key”, by Aimee Ogden (Strange Horizons 6/16/25)
★ “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything”, by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25) ★

The Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

The Tower, by David Anaxagoras (Recorded Books)
Gemini Rising, by Jonathan Brazee (Semper Fi Press)
Wishing Well, Wishing Well, by Jubilee Cho (Atthis Arts)
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
★ Into the Wild Magic, by Michelle Knudsen (Candlewick) ★
Goblin Girl, by K.A. Mielke (self-published)

The Nebula Award for Game Writing

Spire, Surge, and Sea, by Stewart C. Baker (Choice of Games)
★ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by Guillaume Broche & Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (Kepler Interactive), Developer: Sandfall Interactive, Sandfall S.A.S. ★
Hollow Knight: Silksong, by Ari Gibson & William Pellen (Team Cherry)*
Dispatch, by Mayanna Berrin, Ashley Jeffalone, Suzee Matson, Chris Rebbert, Chad Rhiness, & Pierre Shorette (AdHoc Studio)
Hades II, by Greg Kasavin (Supergiant Games)
Blue Prince, by Tonda Ros (Raw Fury, Developer: Dogubomb)

The Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

KPop Demon Hunters, by Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang, & Hannah McMechan (Netflix)*
Sinners, by Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros Pictures)*
Severance: “Chikhai Bardo”, by Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman (Apple TV+)*
Pluribus: Season One, by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV+)*
Superman, by James Gunn (Warner Bros Pictures)*
★ Murderbot: Season One, by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz (Apple TV+) ★

The Nebula Award for Comic

Second Shift, by Kit Anderson (Avery Hill)
Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal, by Amy Chu (Berger)
Helen of Wyndhorn, by Bilquis Evely and Tom King (Dark Horse)
Fishflies, by Jeff Lemire (Image)
★ Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: The Killing Stone, by Jessica Maison (Wicked Tree) ★
Strange Bedfellows, by Ariel Slamet Ries (HarperAlley)
The Flip Side, by Jason Walz (Rocky Pond)
The Stoneshore Register, by G. Willow Wilson (Berger)

The Nebula Award for Poem

“Though You Always Are”, by Linda D. Addison & Jamal Hodge (Everything Endless, Raw Dog Screaming Press)
“They Said Robots Are”, by Casey Aimer (Penumbric 6/25)
★ “The World To Come”, by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons 12/22/25) ★
“The Mourning Robot”, by Angela Liu (Uncanny 9-10/25)
“Care for Lightning”, by Mari Ness (Uncanny 1-2/25)
“To Be the Change”, by Nico Martinez Nocito (Strange Horizons 3/10/25)

*No statement on LLM-use received from finalist during final ballot.

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by J.D. Henning

Read by the author

Look at your keyboard. If you’re on a phone, pull it up for a sec. You’re probably looking at a QWERTY layout. Even with the unlimited theoretical possibilities of a touchscreen, this is what the vast majority of English users see. 

But it’s crap. And we’ve known it’s crap for more than a century.

This all became painfully personal to me in the winter of 2021 when my hands went on strike. As a film editor and screenwriter, my life revolves around my computer. Samurai had their swords, and I have my keyboard. But my hands burned like fire, and my most trusted tool turned out to be the culprit. Repetitive stress injuries are no fun at all. And the horrible part is that a QWERTY keyboard is essentially made to encourage RSIs.

How We Got Here

At their advent in the 1870s, keyboards were ingeniously designed boxes of buttons and levers with actual physical bits of metal slamming against actual physical paper, imprinting ink every time a writer (for the sake of this example, you) hit a key. Problem was, if you really got on a roll—your Dracula/Moby-Dick mashup started to get really juicy—you might jam the typewriter. One lever would interrupt another, and Dracula could not look deeply into the White Whale’s eyes until your machine was serviced. 

Unacceptable.

The industrious designers at Remington & Sons—yes, the rootin’ tootin’ gunmakers—rearranged the keyboard to lessen the likelihood of a jam. This also slowed down your typing speed. So, they intentionally put letters in spots bad for you and good for the machine, because slowly sucking the blood of a whale is better than not sucking it at all. Mr. Remington’s keyboard layout quickly became the standard. And, because we, as humans, don’t like to learn new things, the QWERTY layout stayed in use even when all the mechanical reasons for the QWERTY format disappeared. Hence, your iPhone defaults to it even now, despite making no ergonomic sense at all. We have, by the way, known of its fatiguing nature since the 1910s.

I needed something else for my writing. Something that was made to give priority to the human doing the typing rather than the factory making the tool. Something that wouldn’t make my hands feel like burning charcoal briquettes. Enter stenography.

A specialized keyboard used by stenographers for shorthand. The stenotype keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Stenotype Fights Back

The stenotype machine came about not long after the typewriter, and was, itself, an evolution of shorthand. Heard of Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, or George Bernard Shaw? They all used shorthand. The invention of a machine further standardized the shorthand system, and the advent of electronic stenotype simplified the process even further. Hobbyists have since come along and created free programs to allow anyone to stenotype on their computers.

So, why doesn’t everyone use it?

Remember how I threw shade at the whole human race for not wanting to learn new things? Several paragraphs later, that’s still true. And it goes in spades for stenography.

How Stenography Works

Stenotype is fundamentally different from a typical keyboard. At its root, it’s phonetic. The 23 keys roughly correspond to the sounds in our English language. A word like ‘though’ only needs the phonetic sounds TH and the long O sound. Thus, “though” becomes “THOE.” Add in that these letters are all pressed at the same time and are ergonomically clustered together, and suddenly, my hands have stopped talking about unionizing.

Of course, the complexity of stenotype rises quickly, as there are plenty of homophones and other weird quirks of the English language. This is where another critical element of machine stenography comes in. It’s basically an enormous list of shortcuts, called outlines. The phonetic base exists for many words, but for all the many, many exceptions to these rules, you have outlines. 

Outlines work for phrases as well as words. If, for example, there is a phrase that comes up all the time in your current project, such as “Alucrad gazed at the white whale, trembling with delight,” you could add an outline for the whole thing. Maybe A*GD. If your hands are as finicky as mine, the ergonomic benefits pile up quite quickly: You’re hitting four rather than 56 keys, and the ones you are pressing don’t require your hands to contort to press them. It’s also much faster, both for this phrase and as a whole.

How fast? It varies based on experience, but to qualify as a stenotype court reporter, you need to get to 225 words per minute. And just think: Court reporters do this all day, every day. If ever there was a job serious about ergonomics, it would be this one.

A modern hobbyist level machine. Image courtesy of StenoKeyboards, maker of this and many other fine stenography machines. Is Stenography for You?

The process of learning steno is probably closest to learning to play a musical instrument. This is another way of saying that it is difficult, though how difficult will depend on the person. Is it worth it for the average writer? Probably not, especially if a good old QWERTY keyboard is working fine for you. Learning to stenotype would be like deciding to learn the guitar if you want to master music composition. Will it be helpful? Probably. Is it strictly necessary? No. 

It can, though, be a lifesaver for someone with RSI or other hand mobility issues.

The basics of learning stenography are the same as most skills: practice, persistence, and patience. I followed a free guide (available here) and worked my way through it over two years. That’s a long time, but my wife and I also had two children during that time. Unless you plan on popping out progeny at the same rate, your timeframe will likely differ from mine.

I can now steno quickly enough for day-to-day work (I’m stenotyping right now). For my next big writing project, I plan to mostly stenotype. I’m still slower at this than QWERTY, but I want to write for a lifetime. And an ergonomic, sustainable writing method is, like that great white whale, a goal certainly worth pursuing.

Editor’s note: To learn more about stenography, see How Steno Works At 200 WPM.

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J.D. Henning is a writer and filmmaker. Best known for writing and executive producing Portal Runner, a New York Times recommended sci-fi film, J.D. also recently took home the prize at the 2025 Worldcon film festival for his short film Superior Subject. J.D. can’t escape an incessant need to write in genre, whether it be spies, spaceships, or zombies. He’s the father of two young children. He, his wife, kids, and cat can be found cross-country skiing in his home state of Montana (well…maybe not the cat). You can learn more about his work at henningworks.com.

The post A 23-Button Stenography Keyboard: All Gain, Zero Pain appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Laurence Raphael Brothers

Read by Misha Grifka Wander

You’ve been writing for a while now. You’ve got a story folder, you’ve been submitting to magazines and anthologies, and then—Nice work! Congratulations on the publication! And commiserations, too, because there have undoubtedly been a lot of rejections along the way to that first sale.

This post is about the secretarial side of writing, and in particular, how to manage your stories over time. It’s a complicated subject, and everyone has different goals. Here are some points to consider.

Safeguard Your Work

Back everything up frequently. Cloud services are great, but it’s risky to rely on a single service provider. If all you have is a Microsoft account and Microsoft decides to suspend your account, what recourse do you have? It’s prudent to archive your work across multiple providers. Common choices include Google, Apple, and Dropbox, but there are many others to choose from. You can save your entire writing folder into a single zip or other archive file and then post the archive to your secondary providers. Losing a manuscript can be an excruciating experience, but losing access to your entire writing history would be far worse.

Track Submissions and Publications

I recommend using both spreadsheets and submission trackers to record submissions. Here’s an excerpt from one of my own spreadsheets:

Each row in this table is a submission. Tracking is a link to the market’s submission manager, if they have one. Ans Date is the date of their response. Pub Link is the published online link to the story. Strike it through or delete it if the publisher goes out of business or takes down the story. Rep Date is the date your contract says the story will be available for reprinting. You might also want to add a Fee column to track your income, a Rights column to indicate which rights were sold, and a Contact column for the market’s email.

I also use The Submission Grinder to manage my story portfolio. You could rely on them (or Duotrope, the Grinder’s for-pay competitor) exclusively, but I prefer to use my own spreadsheet, not only because something could happen to the site or my account, but because with my own spreadsheet, I can add custom columns and data.

Manage Your Contracts

You should retain all contracts associated with your publications. Contracts are the ultimate reference for exclusivity periods, rights sold, reversion terms, fees, and all the other minutiae associated with publication. Simply archiving your email is great, but if that’s your only reference, you might wind up wasting a lot of time looking for the email with a particular attached contract. One simple method is to drop all contracts into a single folder, with the contract files renamed using a standard convention that includes the story title. Another approach is to create a folder for every story, into which you can put manuscripts, revisions, edits, contracts, and anything else relevant to the publication.

Submit Reprints

Reprints can offer you fresh readers for your stories, restore a story that is no longer online to greater availability, and they can even make you money. Submitting a reprint is just like submitting a story for the first time, with a few important provisos.

1. Make sure the rights are available. Some publications demand a lengthy period of exclusivity before reprint rights. If you are submitting to a “best of” anthology, most editors will be happy to grant you a special exception to their exclusivity period if you ask, and many contracts have this exception already written into the terms.
2. Declare the story’s status. Always tell the new editor you’re submitting a reprint in the cover letter. Always name the original market and the date or issue of publication. It’s extremely unprofessional to conceal a past publication, and may be a civil offense, to boot.
3. Set your expectations. While there are some markets that pay the same fee for reprints as for first publication, for the most part, even markets that pay relatively well for original publications will only pay token rates for a reprint. That said, sometimes you can get lucky. My top-earning short story generated four payments of $500 apiece, one first publication, one award payment, and two reprint fees, all coincidentally the same number.
4. Best-of anthologies. I mentioned these anthologies above, and they’re easy to forget about because you can’t submit to them until the story sells, and then you have to do so during a one-year period. You can find some of them by searching The Submission Grinder for “best” in the name field. 

Translations and Foreign-Market Submissions

While many readers of this article are not native English speakers, it’s still the case that an English-language bias exists for SFF writing (though various Chinese markets are coming on strong). The sad fact is that the satisfaction of knowing your English-language submission was accepted for translation and published abroad may be your only payment. That said, there are occasional exceptions to the rule that pay well, and when your story’s exclusivity period ends, it’s worth considering markets worldwide for reprint submissions. One note of caution is that if there is a dispute over rights, payment, or other contract terms, you may have little recourse outside your own country.

Short-Story Collections

Unfortunately, most agents and traditional publishers won’t consider short-story collections except from established authors. Not only is self-publishing an option, but some small presses accept submissions of story collections, either in book-length volumes or in chapbook form. If you’re interested in testing the self-publishing waters and you don’t have a novel in hand, publishing your own short story collection may provide an opportunity to learn the ropes. Such collections also provide some of the benefits of reprints sold to magazines.

Film and Video Options

For the most part, this is only available to writers with agents. However, on rare occasions, even unagented authors may receive solicitations from someone who read their story and wants to know if options are available. Unfortunately, there are many shady operators out there, so always look at such communications with a jaundiced eye. If the soliciting party seems legitimate, now would be a great time to get an agent, because agents will look favorably on a writer with an offer in hand.

Managing your portfolio isn’t all that much work, but it can pay many dividends as you continue to write and sell your stories.

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Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. He has published over 50 short stories in such magazines as Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, and The New Haven Review. He has worked in Internet and AI R&D for Bellcore, Verizon, and Google, written professionally for Toptal, and is currently employed as a US patent examiner. Check out his books and stories at http://laurencebrothers.com/bibliography. Pronouns: he/him.

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by Jason Collins

Read by Jeremy Zentner

“There is more profit made from [book] commerce than from all other merchandise,” in Timbuktu, as observed by Leo Africanus in 1526. This was not simply poetic exaggeration from the famous traveler. For centuries, the Malian city stood at the very heart of an expansive intellectual network across the Sahara where scholars traded in written knowledge. These manuscripts imported into Mali’s libraries can expand what speculative fiction imagines and how we build those worlds.

What Type of Text Is in the Timbuktu Manuscripts?

The manuscripts themselves cover an extraordinary range of subjects, including astronomical charts, medical treatises, legal commentaries, theological debates, and collections of poetry and proverbs. When viewed as a collective, they reveal a city where science, faith, and art were inseparable.

Page from the Timbuktu Manuscripts – Wikimedia Commons

We also know that at its height, Timbuktu’s scholars filled private libraries with manuscripts bound in goatskins and debated theology beneath the mud-brick walls of the Sankore Mosque complex, which functioned as an Islamic learning center. Over 27,000 of these handwritten works, some dating back to the 13th century, have survived the passage of time. Scholars safeguarded the manuscripts for centuries from theft and loss during colonial expansion. Recently, these manuscripts survived thanks to the efforts of families who risked their lives to hide them from extremist attacks.

What the Manuscripts Offer: A Different Intellectual Heritage

Today, writers in the science fiction and fantasy genre should thank all those who worked to preserve the great works of Timbuktu, as many of these West African manuscripts could be the blueprints for new imaginative tales.

These manuscripts reveal that African civilizations were theorizing law, cosmology, and ethics concurrently with European traditions. They also depict worlds where spirituality and science coexisted rather than collided and where libraries served as political and moral centers of society. 

Drawing from Timbuktu’s archives is to engage with an alternative intellectual lineage that redefines what “ancient knowledge” might look like in speculative fiction. The desert city was built on scholarship, where the true currency was knowledge and where literacy was a civic duty and a spiritual pursuit. With Timbuktu’s manuscripts, a talented speculative writer can build societies that think, argue, and evolve on their own terms, not according to what’s already well established in the genre.

Non-Eurocentric Inspirations for Worldbuilding

By leaning on Timbuktu’s knowledge, a writer could create an expansive society that bucks the norm, where might is not reliant on a sword, and a book of star maps is as prized as the business end of a blade. Where scholars wield influence through their mastery of astronomy and jurisprudence. Writers could go so far as to replace knights and castles with mathematicians and libraries who strive for a just cause, shifting the emotional center of a story from conquest to inquiry. 

The manuscripts themselves suggest near-endless narrative possibilities that reach beyond how a world could look. They feature astronomical treatises that map lunar cycles, medical texts with herbal remedies, and legal and ethical writings. This could guide a writer to imagine a world in which priests measure destiny through planetary alignments, healers blend faith and science with a touch of magic, or a civilization develops a justice system that is as complex as their speculative world. The opportunities are endless.

Contemporary Echoes in Afrofuturism and Fantasy

With Timbuktu manuscripts, writers have the tools they need to craft unique stories. But this is not to say that no one has ventured into the realm of Timbuktu lore for their inspiration. In fact, there are a few famous works that draw from this diverse tapestry of knowledge.

For example, The Black Pages, a novella by Nnedi Okorafor, is one of the best examples of an author using Timbuktu manuscripts and ethos in their modern stories. This gripping novella centers on a protagonist who is on an important mission to save an ancient library in Timbuktu, which is under attack by jihadists. This parallels the true events in which extremists threatened Mali, leading librarian Abdel Kader Haidara in 2013 to smuggle out thousands of manuscripts by donkey, cart, and canoe, under the cover of darkness.

Another excellent example of creatives drawing on the lore of Timbuktu is Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King. This comic adaptation, and its broader Afrofuturist worldbuilding, hints that Mali and Timbuktu are part of Wakanda’s heritage. A great alt-history for worldbuilding in comics.

An older example is the 1960s novels The Best Ye Breed and Blackman’s Burden, written by Mack Reynolds. These science fiction novels were set in North Africa and reference Timbuktu.

There are many other speculative worlds with African flair that imply lost scholarship and legendary libraries, even if they don’t name Timbuktu directly. 

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

It’s also important to know that when studying Timbuktu’s manuscripts, seeking inspiration from the knowledge gleaned teaches a subtler lesson about worldbuilding. It teaches coherence because every manuscript, even when theological, is grounded in a worldview in which the sacred and the rational intertwine.

Through this strategy, writers can design belief systems that make sense within their invented universes—and avoid the kind of flat cultural borrowing in which non-Western ideas are often used for visual flavor. That’s why, when writers draw on Timbuktu manuscripts, they must remember that these systems of knowledge are living ecologies. They feature histories of logic, lineage, and debate built into them, so a writer’s imaginary world must bear this in mind for the story to remain believable.

To avoid misrepresentation, it is important for a writer to be carefully curious and well learned by reading translations, listening to scholars, crediting influences, and acknowledging when they are an outsider. Science fiction and fantasy writers should go in with the mindset of treating Timbuktu’s manuscripts with reverence and intellectual partnership to guide the spirit of creation itself.

Timbuktu’s manuscripts endure as uncontested proof that civilizations are measured not only by what they build but by what they choose to remember. If we have learnt anything by looking into Timbuktu’s grand history, it’s that to create is to preserve, and to preserve is to imagine anew.

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Jason Collins is a Las Vegas–based freelance writer whose work explores how big ideas ripple through individual lives. His writing often moves between human experience and cultural imagination, tracing the ways people adapt, create, and dream within changing worlds. Whether covering real-world stories or cultural phenomena, Jason approaches each piece with a storyteller’s curiosity and a journalist’s precision.

The post Unearthing Timbuktu’s Legacy: Using West African Manuscripts in SFF Worldbuilding appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

by Corrine Kumar

Read by Liz J. Bradley

Until this summer, I thought I had my writing process down to a science—my perfect desk setup, music playlist, iced coffee, phone away and on Do Not Disturb. However, when I sat down to work on a novel I’d taken a break from, I found myself stuck, hit by writer’s block. When none of my usual tools and strategies worked, I decided to ditch my perfectly curated setup and try something new. I hopped on my treadmill and started dictating my novel into my phone instead. And, remarkably, this was just what I needed. At the time, I thought of this as a last-ditch strategy to overcome writer’s block. Now, however, writing while walking has become a core part of my writing practice and has had a tremendous impact on my writing craft and process.

Increased Creativity

When I’m in the brainstorming phase of a project, I get my best ideas while walking. If I get stuck on a scene, chapter, or section of my manuscript, everything always seems clearer when I get back to my desk after a run. While I’ve observed this anecdotally, a 2014 Stanford University study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition has shown similar findings in the lab. In their study, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” researchers Opezzo and Schwartz found that participants who walked on treadmills, walked outdoors, or were pushed in wheelchairs scored higher on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (which assesses creative and divergent thinking) afterwards. These results—though not found in relation to writing specifically—suggest that writing while walking might help us come up with creative solutions to narrative problems and figure out what comes next.

Increased Immersion

While I initially thought adding the extra component of walking to my process would break my immersion in the story, I have found the opposite. Walking actually helps me visualize my settings, improve my dialogue, and get into my characters’ heads. Since I’m not staring at the words on my screen, I can better picture the settings my characters are in and see them in my mind with greater detail. Because I’m saying my characters’ thoughts and dialogue out loud, I get a better feel for their personalities, word choice, sentence structure, and emotions.

Turning Off Your Internal Editor

The “internal editor” is something that plagues many of us throughout our writing careers. It keeps us staring at the blank page, deleting sentences as we write them, and tweaking the same paragraph for an hour. However, when I’m dictating and walking on my treadmill, I find this voice is strangely quiet. This is, in part, because I don’t look at the words while I’m dictating, and thus, my internal editor can’t analyze and pick my sentences apart. The combination of walking, generating ideas, and dictating keeps my brain occupied enough that it can’t find a way to edit as I go.

Increasing Physical Activity

Physical activity has so many benefits for our physical and mental health. Numerous studies have shown that exercise leads to enhanced cardiovascular health, sleep, bone strength, creativity, self-esteem, balance, memory, cognitive flexibility, attention, problem-solving, and overall sense of well-being. Improvement in all these areas not only results in better overall health, but it can have a positive impact on our writing as well. However, in our busy schedules, trying to fit in both writing and physical activity amongst everything else can be challenging. By dictating while walking, we can combine these two activities and better integrate them into our daily lives.

Feeling the Flow

Reaching a creative flow state is something I crave as a writer. Those writing sessions where hours pass without me realizing it, words flood the page, and it feels as though the story is writing itself. I’ve tried many tricks over the years to reach this flow state—the right writing setup, great music, a unique writing ritual—but none of these methods have worked as well for me as writing in motion. While I don’t get to the flow state every time I use the treadmill, I find I reach it more frequently.

Decreased Distractions

Though having your phone in your hand to dictate might sound like the perfect recipe for distraction, I’ve found the opposite in practice. Because I’m so focused on generating ideas, walking, and dictating, my mind is too busy to wander. Too busy to watch another cute koala reel on Instagram, see what friends are up to on Facebook, or refresh my e-mail. Because my mind is occupied and I can only have one program open on my screen at a time, I’m less likely to fall down a research rabbit hole mid-writing session. When I get to a point in the scene where I need more information, I’m forced to dictate a placeholder rather than spend an hour researching how a character might repair an internal combustion engine.

Increased Inspiration

While most of my writing is done on a treadmill, I do also take my craft outdoors. When I write outside, whether I’m in an exciting, new location or in my neighborhood, I find infinite ideas for my settings. For example, seeing the variety of colors in the fall leaves on my usual route sparked an idea for a world where the magic system changes with the seasons. Outdoors, I’m also naturally forced to experience the world with more of my senses—to pay attention to more than just what I see. Hearing hawks calling to each other, feeling the oppressive heat of the humid 90-plus-degree summer, and smelling the blooming wildflowers remind me to use a variety of sensory details in my scenes.

Getting Started

As with all new strategies, writing while walking does have a learning curve. Speaking the words aloud can feel strange and awkward, getting used to your software’s quirks can be frustrating, and editing mis-dictated words afterwards takes time. However, with practice and patience (and a little time devoted to setting up), this method increases my enjoyment of writing, improves my productivity, and feels just as natural as typing at my desk. As you’re getting started, walking at slow speeds, using all safety features of your treadmill such as handrails and safety keys, setting your phone on the treadmill’s console, and walking in outdoor areas you are familiar with can all be ways to ease into this new method. 

Whether you use this strategy as a core part of your process, as a weekend treat, or as a way to just mix things up to get over writer’s block, writing while walking can be an incredible addition to your creative practice.

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Corrine Kumar is a science fiction and fantasy writer with a love of martial arts, cooking, and learning languages. Her greatest writing influences are Brandon Sanderson, Fonda Lee, Pierce Brown, and Christopher Ruocchio. She is an alumnus of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop, and her articles “Active Reading to Step Up Your Writing,” “It’s All About Momentum: Writing Effectively and Productively Amidst a Busy Life,” and “Characterization and Worldbuilding Through Fight Scenes” were previously published by The SFWA Blog. Corrine can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.

The post Walking and Dictating: A New Strategy to Mix Up Your Writing Routine appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Rosemary Edghill (June 1956–07 April 2026), also writing as, eluki bes shahar and James Mallory, was a prolific novelist, short story writer, comic writer, and essayist. She is known for her genre-spanning work, writing both alone and collaboratively. Mad Maudlin, her third Bedlam’s Bard collaboration, was a 2002 Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA) selection as one of the best Horror and Fantasy novels of the year.

Starting as a comic book and then a regency romance writer, Edghill debuted in science fiction and fantasy writer with the space opera Hellflower series, and continued to write across genres and media, collaborating with several of the bestselling women authors of the day. Dozens of her short stories were published, and dozens of collaborations of varying length, along with her own novels, including the Bast series, and the Twelve Treasures. Edghill continued writing and collaborating through the mid 2010s.

Edghill loved collaborative writing as a way to explore both another writer’s mind and the multitude of interpretations different people find in the same phrasing of language. She enjoyed her experiences at conventions, meeting and talking with other writers, and especially loved her English Toy Spaniels.

Rosemary Edghill lived 69 years.

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Ian Watson (20 April 1943–13 April 2026) was an innovative and highly prolific novelist, poet, and short story writer. Watson’s 1973 novel The Embedding won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was also a Nebula Award Finalist, along with the 1985 novelette “Slow Birds.” Watson was also a Hugo Award Finalist for “Slow Birds” and “The Very Slow Time Machine.” Watson’s 1975 novel The Jonah Kit won the BSFA Award, and in 2024, Watson was named European Science Fiction Grandmaster by the European Science Fiction Society.

Watson served as the SFWA Overseas Regional Director in the early 2000s, and he was the long-time European Editor for the SFWA Bulletin, where he also handled the regional shipping of copies. Born in England and settling in Spain, Watson was often a featured guest at European book and science-fiction conventions and events.

Focused on thought, perception, and transcendence, with a detailed eye to control of information in pursuit of power, Watson wrote, explored, and taught over the course of six decades. Watson wrote over 200 short stories, including 11 short story collections, alongside dozens of novels. While best known for his science fiction, Watson enjoyed innovation across genres, including satire, erotica, thriller, and horror. His works were translated into a large variety of European languages, and the translation of The Embedding, L’Enchâssement, won the Prix Apollo in 1975.

Watson, along with Michael Bishop, achieved the first noted transatlantic science-fiction novel collaboration, Under Heaven’s Bridge, via mailed, typewritten manuscripts. In 1990, Watson was the first novelist for the Warhammer 40,000 wargame setting, and he is a credited writer, in a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, for the Steven Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Ian Watson lived 82 years.

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Joseph Lee Green (14 January 1931–20 February 2026) was a prolific science-fiction writer. A charter member of SFWA in 1965, he was the Nebula Conference Toastmaster in 1970, and served as co-Director of the South/Central Region from 1976 to 1978.

A missile base construction worker and later communications writer for the US Space Program, Green also wrote prolific fiction on topics of extraterrestrial life and technology, including genetic modification. Green also wrote for non-fiction articles for Analog Science Fiction and Fact between 1967 and 1972. Around 80 of his short stories were published over the course of nearly 60 years, along with eight novels. His earlier novels include 1971’s Gold the Man (published in the US as The Mind Behind the Eye), and he returned to novels in the late 2010s, including with a supernatural murder series. Green’s novelette “The Decision Makers” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1965.

Author Robert Silverberg remembers:

“I met Joe Green at the 1961 Worldcon in Seattle. My career was well established by then, but Joe was just starting to think about doing some writing, and asked me a lot of questions about the commercial aspects of writing for a living.  I helped him as much as I could, and was pleased to see his name turning up on the contents pages of the s-f magazines not long afterward. A good many stories and some novels followed over the years, an impressive body of skillfully done work. Wisely, though, he looked upon writing as a sideline – very few of us have been able to make a go of it as a full-time proposition — and as his primary activity he put in 37 years as an engineer with NASA, serving to turn science-fiction into reality. When such writers as Robert A, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gordon Dickson came to the Kennedy Space Center to see the launch of moon rockets, Joe, who lived nearby, was their genial host.  I enjoyed a friendship with him of more than sixty years and his passing leaves yet another big absence for me.”

Joseph Green lived 95 years. 

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Lee Martindale (1949–10 March 2026) was a multi-genre fantasy writer, editor, anthologist, essayist, advocate, Named Bard, ordained minister, and friend to many.

Martindale served for two three-year terms on the SFWA Board of Directors, where she authored and was a fierce advocate for SFWA’s Accessibility Guidelines. She served on the Grievance Committee as a liaison to membership, and also as the SFWA Ombudsman. She received the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award in 2019.

Martindale was a passionate writer her whole life, yet it wasn’t until her forties when she first sold a published short story, “YearBride,” the first of around three dozen short stories published over the next quarter of a century. Martindale’s writing danced through speculative realms, centered in fantastical sword and sorcery—and never stayed its hand from exploring love, marriage, and sex. Determined to defy harmful standards for women in sword and sorcery, she was proud of stories such as 1998’s “Neighborhood Watch,” which introduced a “fat, feisty, and toothsome heroine into SF&F.” Martindale also wrote essays on her experiences and advocacy work, in her own Rump Parliament Magazine, her The Bard’s Fire blog, and in the 2012 article “The Good Guest Primer” for the SFWA Bulletin, edited by Jean Rabe.

Martindale’s anthologies and collections were of particular and groundbreaking importance to women in genre. Her 2000 anthology, Such A Pretty Face: Tales of Power and Abundance, centered fat protagonists, enabling a new welcome to many women to see themselves in the stories they loved. And her 2011 anthology, The Ladies of Trade Town, featured sex workers as protagonists in speculative stories. The continued notability of these collections speaks to Martindale’s insight and impact. She published a collection of her essays in 2008, and one of her short stories in 2014, under her own imprint, HarpHaven Publishing.

Lee was a member of the “SFWA Musketeers,” a self-proclaimed troupe of SFF women authors, all members of SFWA, almost all of whom were skilled fencers. Rumor speaks of some men as auxiliaries. Lee fenced from her “battle chariot” (motorized wheelchair), delighting doubters and the familiar alike with her victories (and losses) during convention demos.

Former SFWA President Cat Rambo says, “Lee was sharp and funny and unafraid. She spoke her mind and I am so sad never to be able to talk with her again in this life.”

Writer and Musketeer Elizabeth Moon recalls, “I knew Lee Martindale for years both in SFWA, and outside it; as a personal friend who, with her husband George, enlivened many a Thanksgiving feast and birthday party at our place. Lee enjoyed visiting with my horses and they enjoyed her, until Rags was a Bad Bad Pony and bit her once. She was a lively, interesting, fun guest to have around the big table. And as most of you know, a fierce advocate for many causes. I’m sure whatever post-life location her soul ended up is enjoying her now. I certainly did.”

Writer and Musketeer Melanie Fletcher notes, “If you looked up ‘force of nature’ in the dictionary, you’d see Lee’s picture. She was a brilliant writer and editor, a fierce champion and activist, and the most loyal friend anyone could ask for. She was also my treasured sword sister as one of the SFWA Musketeers. One of the most ‘Lee’ moments I can remember was when she received an angry letter from someone she’d turned down for an anthology threatening physical violence. Her reply: ‘I have two things to say to you: ‘Smith & Wesson’ and ‘Come ahead, sucker.’’ The next letter she received from the individual (yes, he wrote back) was exquisitely polite.”

Writer and Queen of the Musketeers (not a fencer, as it was not considered wise to hand her sharp, pointy things) Esther Friesner remembers, “I don’t know when we first met but I’m so glad that we did. She was talented, no-nonsense, gifted and able to speak frankly without using ‘honesty’ as a shield for speaking cruelly. She knew how to choose her battles and was never one to retreat from what needed to be done or what needed to be said. She was always fun to hang out with. As the Musketeer’s Queen I took to calling her ‘ma barde,’ and bard she was. It’s very hard accepting that ma barde has gone ahead. It is a comfort to know that even so, her music and her voice remain.”

Lee Martindale lived 76 years.

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Jeffrey A. Carver (25 August 1949–06 February 2026) was a prolific and beloved novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher, and creator of science fiction worlds, such as The Chaos Chronicles and the Star Rigger Universe. Carver wrote over a dozen novels and two short fiction collections. His novel Eternity’s End was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2001. Carver received the Helicon Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.

In service to SFWA, Carver first took on the role of Nebula Awards Committee Chair and then as SFWA Awards Rules Committee Chair for more than 25 years, starting in July 1998.

Carver directly and unabashedly loved science fiction. His childhood wonder at the expanse of space led him to find that same inspiration in writing, in literature as exploration. Carver wrote of possibilities, hoping readers would take that insight and question the world around them, of what possibilities it could hold. Carver took his passion also to teaching, with the educational series Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Author Robert J. Sawyer reflects:

“Jeff Carver was an absolute gentleman. Although at that point, we’d only ever met online, when he heard I was coming to his home state to do a signing, he invited my wife and me to stay overnight at his home. He was also one of the few authors willing to share hard numbers with others; he believed the more we all collectively knew, the better off everyone would be. We were friends for thirty years, and I will miss him for the rest of my life.”

Jeffrey A. Carver lived 76 years.

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