Very much looking forward to this tonight! Priest's writing was absolutely iconic. Well worth your time if you're in the area and at a loose end.

We're thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 Baifang Schell Book Prize, our awards for nonfiction and literature from or on China and the Sinophone world published in 2025.

See the winners and honorable mentions: chinabooksreview.com/2026/04/23/2...

Hardback copy of The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, against a garden backdrop

Happy book birthday to Nina Allan 💙 The Illuminated Man, co-written with Chris Priest, is out today: www.ninaallan.co.uk?p=7300

A Celebration of Christopher Priest | Events at Waterstones Bookshops | Waterstones Events at Waterstones get you closer to the books and authors you admire most. Find information and tickets about A Celebration of Christopher Priest today.

Coming up on Thursday at @waterstonesargyle.bsky.social - if you're in the Glasgow area, check it out www.waterstones.com/events/a-cel...

Congratulations to Paul Kincaid! Colourfields is a Hugo Award finalist

LAcon V Announces 2026 Hugo Awards Finalists LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, announced the finalists for the 2026 Hugo Awards, the most prestigious honors for excellence in science fiction and fantasy, on April 21. First p…

LAcon V Announces 2026 Hugo Awards Finalists
file770.com/lacon-v-anno...

A cartoon. John, Alison and Liz are wearing Octothorpe T-shirts and matching purple baseball caps while standing behind a market stall clad in a very slightly different purple and with various delicacies upon it. The sign above the stall reads “Octothorpe 158 Hugo HOT takes”, with “HOT” in a little tiny fire. The sign below the stall reads “Always half-baked! Fresh off the griddle! Three-pack special!”

We’re releasing early today, with a Hugo Awards finalists special! We discuss what ended up on the ballot and give some off-the-cuff remarks about it all. We’re also thrilled to be finalists again: a huge thanks to all who nominated us.

Listen here! octothorpe.podbean.com/e/158-i-am-t...

I mean, I have obviously lost faith with this book a bit by this point. Other opinions should be consulted. But yes, for me there are unexamined assumptions and contradictions lurking. (The remainder of the book looks to be more personal essays and I expect to enjoy it more.)

The answer is, by writing an essay about Hollywood (not even Western) vs Japanese cinema, thus setting up the starkest possible contrast, leading to the conclusion, without any hint of irony, that "narrative variety broadens thinking."

City Like Water by Dorothy Tse: Review by Niall Harrison locusmag.com/review/...

A Magical Girl Rehired In this charmingly chaotic follow-up to A Magical Girl Retires, our favorite millennial-turned-magical girl begrudgingly returns to the workforce to fight c...

And another one coming in December...! www.harpercollins.com/products/a-m...

I didn't realise Not Yet Gods had been pushed back - gives me an opportunity to review, although I doubt I'll have time to do the full catch-up

I have an ARC of The White Desert, don't have Formosa Exchange yet but hoping to see it. The Perfect Circle is the one on your current list that I have gone and snapped up ... also v curious about the Ojeda.

All the #SFinTranslation out in 2026 that I know of so far:

www.sfintranslation.com?page_id=15892

China + 100 | Comma Press £11.99 (Paperback / Anthology) - Lu Hang, Zhou Dedong, Ling Chen , Dan Shi , He Zun and others

China+100 ed. Xueting C Ni commapress.co.uk/books/china-...

The Formosa Exchange Buy The Formosa Exchange by Huang Chong-Kai, Jeremy Tiang from Amazon's Fiction Books Store. Everyday low prices on a huge range of new releases and classic fiction.

The Formosa Exchange by Huang Chong-Kai (I don't think all of Honford Star's books have got listings yet, they have three or four out over the year) www.amazon.co.uk/Formosa-Exch...

The White Desert Life on earth is fading to a whisper. Faced with a stalled future of economic...

The White Desert by Luis Lopez Carrasco granta.com/products/the...

Not sure - I don't think they would go so far as to say non-imprint SF does not do that, I think they would say imprint SF has the tools and techniques to do it best.

Yes, sure, but they have clearly tried to make it into something of a coherent project - where essays have been revised and expanded it is partly to incorporate the imprint SF/reader contract arguments for instance.

I wish it was positioning itself as historical, but I don't think it is; very much reads as a keeping-the-true-flame-burning book to me.

There is also an essay specifically on Japan and anime/manga, and it seems to me one of the better essays (caveat: it's not something I know much about myself), and they are able to talk about an exchange between Japan and US sf that makes sense to me. But I'm not sure that works as a general model.

Yeah, in addition to being "we like" I think it also works better as a historical perspective: this is the story of the stuff we like and it holds true up to, ehhh, maybe the mid 2000s?

Screenshot of an exchange between Richard Morgan ("The reason I've waded into this thread is that I see a very real danger of a portion of SF/F - what we might call the literary end - becoming so enamoured of its own purity that it fractions itself off and treats the remainder with exactly the same contempt that the mainstream literati now treat all SF") and M John Harrison ("I don't want that, Richard. I don't want what you want. I resent it. I've had it stuffed down my throat for nearly forty years. It's the boring old received wisdom of the genre") from the New Weird discussions in the early 2000s

Takes me back to New Weird days ... are you saying they are Richard Morgan in this context? urchin.earth.li/~twic/cgi-bi...

There is actually an essay on non-Anglophone sf in the book - next up for me - I can't wait to see how they square that up with the implication of literally every other essay.

At one point there is a hilarious reference to Priest not being "savvy" enough in the 1970s to write books that would fit into US publishing categories

Yep, 100%.

and for most writers I would accept the "we like" part as implicit, but they almost go out of their way to say no, we are talking about the proper meaningful real stuff here.

I think the book makes a lot more sense when you approach it as "this is an attempt to explain how the SF we like works and why it is good" rather than what it presents itself as, which is "this is an attempt to explain how SF works and why it is good".

Well, quite. At least when the first two were emerging you could argue them as outliers, though. Don't think that's the case today.

My observation is that you can't cleanly divide them in the US either. You can no longer be confident that an SF novel from a literary imprint is written by someone who is not aware of and has not published in genre venues previously.