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Clara & the Devil, Olivie Blake and Little Chmura, 2026 graphic novel, originally on Webtoon, now from First Second/23rd St. This is not good - sort of vaguely Gaiman/McKean in the art and pacing, but, like, blander, the writing is full of little things that don't make sense (if nobody new ever comes to town, how does the library have someone whose entire job is memberships?), and the plot doesn't have much to offer. And it's suffering from what Rien Gray calls "if only eroticism" in this insightful essay - the cover, which is the best thing about it, shows the main character smirking while fingering a flower suggestively, but in the actual book we get page after page of her looking exhausted or sometimes stoned, talking about sex sort of wistfully but never getting anywhere near the actual eroticism of that cover image. And like, yes, I have read a comic before, of course characters are always posing sexy or badass on the cover in ways the book can't live up to (that first Saga cover probably remains the high point of the series), but the risk of a bait-and-switch is boring your reader, and they did.

Apparently announced at Worldcon, who knew! They announced the 2026 one in November 2025 so my inability to ever know when this is happening really may have something to do with its erratic scheduling.

Anyways: Nancy Kress! Kress was on my list of likelies and is one I'm very personally pleased to see win (her Beggars series is very big in my personal canon).

Looking back at my list from last time, Kress (born 1948) was in fact the oldest person on it, John Crowley and John Varley having sadly moved to the Infinity list. We now have left: Kim Stanley Robinson (1952), Greg Egan (1961), Martha Wells (1964), Ted Chiang (1967), John Scalzi (1969), Ursula Vernon (1977), Seanan McGuire (1978). Of whom I think they're less likely to give it to Egan or Scalzi but quite likely to give it to KSR sooner and Wells, Chiang, and Vernon eventually.

(Infinity list: Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, Joanna Russ, Philip K Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Iain M Banks, Vernor Vinge, CL Moore, Frank Herbert, James Tiptree, Zenna Henderson, Vonda McIntyre, plus John Crowley and John Varley, if we think it might go to people who died after they started giving it. I think they're somewhat unlikely to do that while there's still a big "backlist" to mine, but who knows.)

Steam, 2026 graphic novel, written by Shaenon K. Garrity and illustrated by Emily Holden. Cute, sweet, wacky romance between an escaped genetic experiment and a barista. I thought it was fun and should appeal to people who like Garrity's Willowweep Manor writing. (Also perhaps CB Lee's Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, or Flip or Song For You & I, but a little more screwball/a little less heft.) But I'm not sure I think it has the power to make it to the Hugo ballot, like I definitely read it and thought "oh yes we're all going to enjoy reading this", but are we going to think "everyone must read this"?

ETA: This book is set at Smithson but I can't remember the character designs from the Smithson comic well enough to tell whether there are any cameos in the background characters. I didn't spot any but if someone else has please tell me!

Daggerbound, T Kingfisher, 2026 fantasy novel. Swordheart is probably my favorite of all her books, so of course I'm thrilled that we're finally getting the other two books that one sets up. Daggerbound is not as wildly funny as Swordheart, but it's fun, and it's clever - if the best parts of Swordheart are an extended bit about one aspect of the central gimmick, then Daggerbound plays with a different aspect, and it's very satisfying.

But here's a question: is Vernon digging herself deeper into lady debt, and is this lady debt also lesbian debt? Here's what I mean. Swordheart, with a m/f romance, introduced two more future viewpoint characters, a man and a woman, the dude of whom was gay, and Daggerbound is his m/m romance as expected. The woman we know has once loved a man, but that doesn't necessarily mean she will again, and Vernon had thought her book would be second but changed her mind at some point and decided it had to be third. Meanwhile, over in Paladins, there were five dude paladins and two women, and so far we've had four of the dudes, three m/f couples and an m/m, leaving one man who's still in love with his wife who he's been letting think he was dead, which has always sounded like a hard book to pull off, and the two women. Which makes me wonder if Vernon feels the women are also harder to write, or harder to come up with romances for, and that's why she's been putting them off for the end? Of course all the m/f couples have women *in* them but I do feel like there's some kind of difference between the fixed and free ends of the pairings (not counting the first book of each series where she may have started with the woman or come up with the couple together). And are any of these women ever going to get an f/f romance?

All sorts of things are of course possible. Vernon may be into writing het and m/m but not f/f (one runs into this all the time in fandom), or f/f may not sell to romantasy readers who will happily buy m/f and m/m, or it could even be the "the second book is women" trilogy thing where the first book is m/m with better sales to establish the series and then in the second one the author gets to have f/f, only in this case even further along into the series. But she's running out of stalling room.

Rhinoceros at the ART. A deeply weird play by Eugène Ionesco about, I guess, the seductive power of animal transformation as a metaphor for fascism. Two hours of fast-paced shouting, notably John Turturro and Paul Giamatti shouting at each other and Tatiana Maslany not getting enough lines, Giamatti absolutely owning his rhinofication, Tatiana Maslany getting more lines but them not making a lot of sense, and John Turturro trying to find the emotional beat that will finally let him get off the stage. (No, I mean, he was great, the last act in particular just felt like a speedrun of maybe too many different things for them to all land.) I thought they did a better job making the rhinoceroses feel present in the theater than their Moby Dick did with Moby Dick, which I think was the last play I saw involving a threatening large animal just offstage.

Sublimation, Isabel J. Kim, 2026 sff novel. Excellent and recommended. Not to pit brilliant Asian-American short fiction writers who recently expanded a story into their first novel against each other, but this is how you get a whole novel out of a short story! (And I'll put everything else behind a spoiler cut, while avoiding specific spoilers.) ( Read more... )

Hugos! Between family travel and the start of school I'm a little behind the times but here are my thoughts (or see all the results and stats in the stats pdf here plus the admin report here). I did actually watch some of the ceremony live (on my phone, on silent, while at a family gathering) but have now also watched the whole thing here on YouTube.

Behind the cut, my thoughts. ( Read more... )

Moana 2, 2024 animated movie, on an airplane (note: JetBlue has a much more limited media selection than Alaska). Fine, unobjectionable, a little choppy as it jumped from bit to bit, a couple of fun songs (I liked "Get Lost" and "Chee Hoo"). Nothing near as catchy or moving as in the first one but did exactly the job I needed it to of entertaining me with pretty colors for awhile. Making the magical island that connects the world and brings people together recognizably the sandcastle version of the classic Disney castle logo (with the tunnel and the tallest tower on the right) was definitely a choice but I'd like to imagine someone had fun pitching that at a design meeting and is super on-brand for Disney so... sure.

Platform Decay, Martha Wells, 2026 science fiction novel in the Murderbot series. I continue to tear gleefully through all the library holds I had frozen for months. This was a very enjoyable installment of a very enjoyable series with lots of great moments and action sequences. My favorite not-too-spoilery detail was that, like in previous books, Murderbot again alters its appearance by lengthening its hair two centimeters and thickening its eyebrows. It must look like Groucho Marx by now and I can only hope this is a very slow-building gag that pays off someday :)

A Long and Speaking Silence, Nghi Vo, 2026 fantasy novella, seventh in the Singing Hills Cycle. This one is set earliest in time of all of them so far, which was sort of interesting, but I thought it was maybe the weakest story-wise. I might have hoped for a stronger installment being the one that puts it over the Series-eligible wordcount (which I think this one probably does?) but I suppose we can go again when the eighth (and last??) comes out next year.