🚨 36 Days to the Midterms 🚨

Ahoy! Sept. 19th! It's that day again! How did Talk Like a Pirate Day begin? Find out HERE . For all who celebrate, here are a few pirate-themed novels and othe

That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of…

I've read all five finalists for the 2026 World Fantasy Award: Best Novel. For me, there's no contest. If I ran the zoo (but I don't!), I'd pick M. R. Carey's O

The Inflectionist Review is a small press publishing stark and distinctive contemporary poetry that fosters dialog between the reader and writer, between words and their meanings, between ambiguity an...

Most of us in the U.S. are with you

Find out more HERE . This strange, interesting book is hard to categorize. It could be called "cozy fantasy," where the stakes are pretty low and the attitude o

Hint: It’s not jobs

Reading Giovanni de Feo's novel is like entering a fever-dream. In fact, the main character does exactly that. In a fantasy 18th-century Italian town, eight-yea

LACon hosted the ceremony for the 2026 Hugo Awards last night, and the Hugo Awards voters have spoken. Alix Harrow's revisionist Arthurian story is the winner.

The senator’s parents died when she was a kid. That’s tragic. But it’s also tragic that she’s against the kind of care that could help untold numbers of people avoid that fate today.

Department of Homeland Security agents infiltrated a gathering of activists in Minneapolis, and upon learning the group planned to protest using peaceful methods, suggested they could hook them up wit...

The Trump administration’s approach to food safety was already controversial. Now, it’s worse.

Stand up for Science

Amazon can steer market-wide prices without ever colluding—exposing a gap in antitrust law that the FTC is now fighting to close.

If what you want from fantasy is world-building and a fascinating magic system, Martin Cahill's Audition for the Fox is your kind of book. Main character Nesi i

Outgoing Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, voted to confirm anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy as health secretary before speaking out

Dammit, Donut! Dungeon Crawler Carl did not win this award. E. J. Swift's When There Are Wolves Again is the winner. To be fair, Swift's novel looks marvelous.

Exclusive: Companies that kept policies did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as those that didn’t

Harrow's novel is a clever take on the Arthurian legend. Its dual narrators, the chronicler Mallory (a nod to Sir Thomas Malory who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur , th

There's no "middle" between neofascist corporatism and democracy

It has been quite the wait! At last the finalists are announced. Here are the short-listed candidates for Best Novel : The winners in this and all the other cat

Three writers jump in a Google doc to discuss the fallout from this most recent literary scandal and debate the future of the industry in the shadow of AI

On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.

You know that eerie feeling when reality catches up with science fiction? I had it in 1984. And no, Orwell's predictions in 1984 , that dystopian classic, did n

The move was a rare pullback for the administration, which has used inquiries as leverage. Few schools resisted as Penn did after it was pressed for antisemitism complaints and a list of campus groups...

I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people.

NEW: The people of Maine are still occupying the streets after ICE killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in cold blood. Their demands are simple: abolish DHS and remove Susan Collins from ...

Navigate the interactive map of Odysseus' voyage across the Mediterranean. Discover every stop in Homer's Odyssey.

Twelve state AGs are challenging it

I am honored to join the wonderful writers of this issue! Find it online HERE, as well as directions for ordering a paper copy.

So hard to choose! So many of these entries were superb. But these two are my favorites: Tesh's The Incandescent is bursting with color and fascinating characte

Here’s my last post reviewing the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The award will be presented on Aug. 30 2026 at LaCon, Anaheim, California. The list of finalists: A Drop of Corr…

Here’s my fourth post documenting my quest to read and review all six finalists for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Novel, to be announced on August 30, 2026, in Anaheim, California, at LAcon: T…

Thanks to Amy from Pixabay for this image. License: royalty-free, free for commercial use The longest-running major awards in speculative fiction are the Hugos. The World Science Fiction Society pr…

We were the dream of convenience, the permanent press. / We were the yogurt cup you spooned empty at dawn,

The winner for Best Novel! Great choice for the Best Novel award, Nebula voters! See my review HERE. (I keep calling these awards the 2026 Nebula Awards, when they’re actually the 2025 awards…

But I'm going to tell you anyway

And what must be done to stop it

Trump has shown us why we need a good and decent government