Ada Hoffmann

(You can also view this post on Buttondown.)

If I’m trying to post these review/recommendation posts at the solstices and equinoxes, then I’m a few days late – I’ve gotten pleasantly sloppy with my scheduling now that classes are no longer in session – but I did not forget! The period of April, May, June was busy with both difficult and excellent things, and many stories (in many forms) left an impression on me. Here are a few.

Flights of Fancy

Louise Glück, “Faithful and Virtuous Night” (poetry collection, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

I think Louise Glück is one of the best poets ever and this collection can be submitted as further evidence. I briefly considered putting it in the “Ones That Haunt Me” category – not because there is anything actually disturbing in here but simply because of the very slow, reflective reading that the poems demand of the reader, which feels like a kind of haunting. Slowness, here, should not be confused with difficulty. There is a surface clarity and a luminousness to the poems with something much deeper and more unsettled underneath, and sometimes I had to read just one poem and sit with it for a while, trying to feel rather than think my way through a meaning.

Marie Brennan, “The Final Voyage of the Ouranos” (short story, The Sunday Morning Transport, January 25, 2026)

This is just so yummy and delicious! The world is built in a way that implies more than it shows, but I sank right in to the science fantasy and the neologisms and the luxury and the ability to make and unmake anything – it made me want to see more and to play around in a world like this myself. Then of course, things go wrong, and in a delightfully eerie fashion.

Ursula Whitcher, “Secondary Filters” (poem, Strange Horizons, February 23, 2026)

Have I mentioned I am bad at reviewing poems? I’m bad at reviewing them. Yeah. This is very short and very 2026. I love the contrast in it – the simplistic knowledge embedded in a computer versus the fraught, contextual, grounded knowledge of the human in the loop, both of them looking at what is, ostensibly, the same image.

Emily Tesh, “The Incandescent” (novel, Tor, 2025)

Okay, so I was excited for this, partly because I loved the twists and turns of Some Desperate Glory, but also because I’ve been on a kick about the type of dark academia that actually critiques academia, particularly if it’s written from a faculty point of view, as opposed to just some students who uncover a murder or something. The Incandescent did not disappoint. It’s billed as a sort of anti-Harry-Potter, being about a teacher at a British magic school – and there are certainly a few places where you can see Tesh getting a few little digs in at Rowling. But on the whole, The Incandescent is refreshingly its own thing. I’m not even sure how to say all of what I loved about it without spoilers, but I love this book’s protagonist, who is messy and flawed and also terrifyingly competent and good at what she does – deeply human in both the good and less-good senses of that word. And I love Tesh’s take on the nature of demons, which are pointedly disconnected here from any religious connotations while still being very inhuman and very dangerous creatures which anyone in the proximity of magic will need to be wary of. I love the way that they start out formless but hungry to take on a “self” – and how that relates not only to their tendency to possess people/things, but also to the human characters’ own relationships with identity and meaning, and the way that the protagonist herself has been clinging a little too hard to a certain idea of who she is and what her life is for.

As a fun side note, I brought this book along with me to read while I was getting a tattoo, having no idea that a magical tattoo actually plays an important role in the plot. So that was a fun bit of synchronicity. My tattoo IRL doesn’t have a demon in it! Probably.

Disco Elysium (video game, Zaum, 2019)

Okay. This will be a longer review because I have so much to say. People have been raving about how good Disco Elysium is since 2019, but I’m late to the party as always. I finally tried it and love it so much for so many reasons, OMG.

Anyone who has read any of my books will know that I am a huge fan of interiority. If my editor doesn’t stop me then I will just keep going on for pages about what a character is thinking or feeling. So, guess what Disco Elysium is? It’s an interiority RPG.

If you’ve heard one thing about this game, it’s probably the distinctive writing style where different voices in the protagonist’s head are commenting on what’s going on. The first few times I saw examples, it sounded like a weird gimmick and not necessarily my thing – but I was astonished how well it worked for me once I experienced it in its proper context. In Disco Elysium you have a unique window on what Harry Du Bois is going through (it’s a lot, he’s a mess) and what’s occurring to him at every moment – and it’s your job to navigate between all these conflicting ideas and impulses and decide what he’ll actually do. I love this very much. There is also refreshingly little combat; instead, you solve problems using various skills. I feel like “I love games with lots of interiority and no combat*” is a pretentious thing to say – like, it’s what someone would say if they felt that they were The Most Intellectual Gamer and superior to all those other gamers – but also legitimately I love this shit. I want 100 more interiority RPGs now.

(*There is technically one very important combat, late in the game. Plus a few minor, optional, non-lethal ones that you can get into if you are really determined. But it’s all just handled with narrative, dialogue trees, and skill checks like everything else – there’s no separate “combat system.”)

Plot-wise, you’re solving not only a sordid murder but also an entire sociopolitical tinderbox which happens to have a murder at its heart. People seethe with hidden motives, alliances, and grudges that you can only untangle one effortful layer at a time. (They also seethe with racism and misogyny, which is an aspect of the game that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s clearly the type of writing where the writers aren’t endorsing those things but are instead very intentionally dropping you into the middle of them, in all their unvarnished and realistic ugliness, so you can decide how to respond.) The setting is a fictional city which appears at first glance to be from a gritty, run-down alternate twentieth century, but as you explore, it also gets delightfully weirder. Not all of the weirdness is real – the other thing that these characters visibly seethe with is superstition and pseudoscience – but some of the weirdness, transcendently, is.

Also – it’s awkward to talk about this, but talking about neurodiversity is my brand, so I’m going to be awkward and say it: Harry Du Bois’s interiority is an extremely neurodivergent interiority. It’s easy for “lol crazy character with voices in his head” to go very far wrong, which is frankly one of the reasons why I didn’t play this game earlier – and I have no idea what the writers’ perspective was as they came up with all this, whether they understood they were doing serious heavy-duty neurodivergent rep, or whether they mostly saw it as a bit they were doing. And I can’t speak for all neurodivergent people. But personally, I feel that if you took a very honest and accurate picture of what a certain type of OSDD looks like – and then filtered it through the same filter of cynicism that colors everything else in the game, while also hooking it into your RPG skill mechanic – then this is what you would get. It rings true to me in that way, you know? It checks out.

Anyway, I not only spent a couple of weeks autistically hyperfixated on this game, but I ended up hunting through the Wikipedia for a list of “spiritual successors” and adding them with big hopeful eyes to my Steam wishlist, while daydreaming about ways I could maybe one day write an interiority RPG myself. (I played all the way through Esoteric Ebb (Raw Fury, 2026), which is cute and engaging but didn’t slay me with its brilliance in the same way as Disco; I also bought a copy of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Zaum, 2026), but haven’t had the chance to really dive in yet.) Someone should have just printed a big label on Disco Elysium saying “THIS IS ADA HOFFMANN’S JAM.” It would have saved me a lot of time.

Comfort Reads

John Wiswell, “The Great Beyond Commands” (flash fiction; first published in Unidentified Funny Objects 9, 2022; but I read in Issue 10 of Small Wonders, April 2024.)

This is hilarious and adorable, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. A cranky magician is annoyed by a snooping vigilante, and tries to mind-control magic him into leaving him alone – but he is also perplexed to realize that he finds the vigilante attractive. From there, the story goes exactly where you imagine it will go, in the most cutely, grumpily sincere way it can. (If you see a consent issue inherent in the premise, don’t worry – that’s addressed, and deftly undone, before anybody gets hurt.)

The Ones That Haunt Me

qntm, “Valuable Humans in Transit” (short story collection, self-published, 2022)

Ok, so (spec fic hipster voice) I knew about qntm before he was cool. I happened on to his short stories on his website a few years ago, loved them, realized there was a collection, and immediately put the collection on my wish list. Due to the nature of my wish list which always has 10357 things, that meant I didn’t actually read the whole collection until just now. Qntm’s whole schtick is tech horror, the kind that you’d find in the better parts of the SCP Wiki, which he has contributed to. He’s got a very detached, matter-of-fact, cerebral voice which works really well for what he’s doing, because the words go down easy but then you’ve got an entire cosmic horror in your brain – usually the kind that stems from humans’ own technological & corporate overreach – which gets more skin-crawling the longer you think about it. A couple of the works in the collection read differently now, post-genAI, but that’s neither an entirely bad thing nor, really, the point. Of course qntm is better known nowadays for There Is No Antimimetics Division; I hear it’s good. I’m going to check that one out, too, eventually.

Sam J. Miller, “Boys, Beasts & Men” (short story collection, Tachyon Publications, 2022)

Boys, Beasts & Men is an absolute unit. I have always found Miller’s short stories moving and well-crafted, but put together in this way – with a lightly sketched framing story that ties them together – they mutually reinforce into something greater than the sum of its parts. I read it while I was in Toronto for my book launch and I couldn’t put it down. And this is maybe a very personal, idiosyncratic reaction, but what tips it over into the “Haunt Me” category is this pervasive sense I have that Miller knows something, with regards to the role of queer identity in an oppressive world, that I don’t and perhaps never will. Miller is consistently queer-as-in-fuck-you, very concerned with the humanity and the justified rage of the most vulnerable humans, in a way that puts my own milquetoast middle-class queer advocacy to shame. Miller is boots on the ground; he is the real deal. Go read this.

Sofia Samatar, “The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain” (novella, Tordotcom, 2024)

Speaking of putting me to shame? ASDFASGJLK;. This is exquisitely done. It was another stop on the “dark academia that actually critiques academia” tour, and that element is certainly there, but it reads even more as a story about something older, darker, realer and worse than the university, which the university is perpetually unwilling and unable to address. The writing itself, on a sentence level, is as luminous as the classic LeGuin that it’s been justifiably compared to.

Seth Wade, “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (poem, Strange Horizons, January 26, 2026)

What gets me about this one is the sense of shame. We like to imagine there are forces looking out for us in the world, but what if you were too much of a fuckup even for them? It’s brainweasel logic, but it’s drawn very well and true to life. The irony of the final lines is breathtaking.

Sarah Pauling, “Remember Me in the Meat” (Clarkesworld, February 2026)

As a cognitive scientist and AI literacy educator, I think more people should write about cognitive offloading. Which, as this story demonstrates, is not necessarily the same as writing about generative AI. In Pauling’s future, everyone has uploaded their episodic memories to the cloud, with all the security issues this implies – to such an extent that the intentional use of one’s own brain for memory is considered intimate and obscene. But on the level of physical response, memories – especially trauma memories – still accrue no matter what anyone does. Pauling’s protagonist is a traumatized assassin who’s determined to use all these facts of memory to her advantage, no matter who it hurts – herself included – and Pauling uses this premise to ask fascinating questions about the location of memory and thought. Extremely well done.

Lara Elena Donnelly, “Deathcap” (short story, Reactor, February 25, 2026)

Okay, so this one is pretty NSFW. It’s two exhausted space marines who’ve barricaded themselves in an infirmary after events which read as a deliberate homage to Alien, but with the sexual assault subtext of the original movie made even more blatantly text. If that doesn’t scare you off, then I will tell you what I liked about it: it’s the sense of doomed characters at the end of their rope, and the study of what queer desire looks like in that scenario. What people will do, not even for the sake of survival, but just for the sake of being able to go out their way.

Danika Ellis, “Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point” (blog post, Book Riot, May 29, 2026)

This post really made the rounds at the end of May, and let’s just say we discussed it in the group chat. It’s an example of a post that goes viral more or less because it accurately sums up what most of us already knew. For obvious reasons, the situation is worst right now in kidlit, and I don’t write kidlit. (Before you ask, IGNORE is not kidlit. It’s New Adult. The difference between YA and New Adult is a whole other post that I’m not interested in making.) And if I have one mild criticism of the post it’s the relative lack of distinction between queer kidlit, which is being very loudly and directly attacked to near-extinction right now, and queer books for adults which are of course next on the list, but are currently suffering in a somewhat different and more indirect way. But that criticism is small. However you slice up the genres, it’s bad right now for queer writers everywhere. We’re all feeling it, and because of the incredible US-centricness of publishing (not to mention rising transphobia in other countries), even queer authors from progressive countries are feeling it.

It is important not to prematurely despair, because a lot of folks on the far right are very interested in making us prematurely despair and give up. Clearly queer books for adults are still being published. I published one in May, and it seems to have gotten reasonable traction for the career stage that I’m at. But it’s hard not to look at the way the wind is blowing and feel afraid. I don’t know what to do about or what advice to give, except to make a note: yes, ok, this is where we are right now, and the fear is real.

 

The More You Know!

Chavisory, “The problem of ‘productivity'” (blog post, April 4, 2026)

Chavisory is unparallelled for her ability to look at neurodiversity discourse and point out – from a staunchly affirming, #ownvoices perspective – where it’s not quite right. Where one of the community’s simple truisms has gotten a little too simple to fully describe what’s going on. This one is about capitalism and the drive to Accomplish All The Things, and particularly about why the latter cannot, in fact, be reduced to the former. I found it painfully relatable – but I don’t think I could have said it in this way myself.

Autistic Book Shout-Out

Martha Wells, “Witch King” (novel, Tor, 2023)

I didn’t love this as much as I love the Murderbot books – maybe it’s just not possible for anything else to be as Murderbot as Murderbot – but I did love one of the secondary characters, Dahin, who reads as autistic to me. In a rich and well-realized fantasy world, Dahin is a sort of researcher; he goes off on his own investigating things and keeps to himself most of the time, but is open, curious, and forthcoming when the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes his lack of preconceptions about the world is a good thing – making him less susceptible, for example, to the fear and prejudice most people feel around our main character. Other times it makes him tactless and prickly. He reminds me a little bit of Daymar from Steven Brust’s Draegera books, with the same sort of guilelessness and openness – but imagine a version of Daymar who actually gets drawn with nuance, and whose friends actually care about him and enjoy his company instead of complaining about him all the time. Murderbot itself is a famously resonant character for neurodivergent readers, but it’s nice to see what Wells is able to do with an autistic-coded character who’s human for a change.

May really is Ada Hoffmann Month, because now after all the book launch excitement, I have a short story for you! “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” has been out for Lightspeed‘s paid subscribers since the beginning of the month, but starting today, it’s free for the whole Internet to read, so you can go and read it now.

“Ten Unsent Letters” has nothing to do with IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. Instead, it’s another look at one of my favorite silly tropes – the one where the villain’s faithful minion has a crush on them. Oh, and they also did a recorded version, so if you click “Listen” you can hear it narrated by Stefan Rudnicki.

There’s a fun story behind how this story came to be, but Phoebe Barton was kind enough to interview me about it for the issue, so instead of telling you the story here, I’ll just link you to the interview. Here’s a teaser: both Phoebe and the acquiring editor said that “Ten Unsent Letters” is very timely and relevant to this year’s news – but when I wrote it, I was thinking about something else entirely.

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In other news, it’s been great seeing mentions of IGNORE continue to pop up since the launch date – many of them from just ordinary social media users who happened to say something nice about the book and tag me. One especially nice mention comes from Book Riot, who listed IGNORE as one of the Best New Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2026. (How they can make a list like this when 2026 is less than half over, I don’t know, but I’ll take it.)

Also, Tachyon is doing a Memorial Day Sale from May 22-25, where all their books – including IGNORE – are 20% off. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, now (well, tomorrow and the next few days) is the perfect time.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

I’m gingerly getting back into my normal routines now after the IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS book launch. I’m really, really pleased by how this book has been received so far, and I want to say thank you to everyone – the people who showed up to the launch or the pre-launch or the signing, or who blurbed or reviewed, or who pre-ordered a copy, or even just reposted something on social media. All of these little things add up and build momentum, and I am grateful.

And here’s just a few more in my little whirlwind of launch week announcements.

• I’ve got a Big Idea post up about IGNORE on Scalzi.com.
• And there’s an interview with me up at paulsemel.com!
• If you like podcasts, I talk about IGNORE on episode 402A of the Turn The Page podcast.
• Another really lovely couple of reviews came out, from Trish Matson on the Skiffy and Fanty Show and from Vincent Halles at Phrasemaker.
• I’m seeing IGNORE crop up on some more lists, including BookBub’s list of May’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Avalon Free Public Library’s list of Best New Books for the week of May 12, and Autostraddle’s list of Most Anticipated Queer Books For May 2026.
• Jordan Kurella, who enthusiastically blurbed this book already, shouted out to it again in this Nerds of a Feather interview.

 

Whew!

More soon – I’ve still got “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” out this Thursday, which will be worth a whole newsletter post of its own. And you can expect at least one more little extra thing about IGNORE, maybe next week, while the dust settles.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

I’m at the point where I’m so nervous-excited I can barely talk, so this will be a concise one.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS is out this Tuesday! May the 12th! And I’m heading to Toronto to celebrate the launch in style:

And if you’re in Kingston, then the date to circle on your calendar is Saturday, May 16, from 11am-3pm: that’s when I’ll be at the Indigo at the Cataraqui Centre, signing as many copies as you can hand to me.

Some other quick last minute notes:

• We’re giving away one print copy on Goodreads. US only because tariffs suck. Open until the 12th. As of this writing, over 2000 people are already in!
• And on Storygraph, one print copy (still US only) plus three e-copies. Over 1000 people have signed up in each category (but of course that means, with the e-copies, your odds are 3x as good). This one will stay open until the 19th.
• The full starred review of IGNORE is available now at Booklist.
• Literary Hub also recommends IGNORE as one of its Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of May, calling it “terrifyingly prescient” and “necessary.” You can read the whole list on their website.
• I have a short story, “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord,” out this month in Lightspeed Magazine. This is a fun/sad little bit of fantasy, totally unrelated to IGNORE, with a story behind it which you can read in the attached Author Spotlight. If you buy the PDF, then you can read the story and spotlight right now! If you’d rather wait and get it free, it will be free to read on Thursday the 21st. I’ll post again with more details at that point.
• And I’m one of the five #ownvoices autistic authors in this five-way interview about autistic representation on Bookstr.
• Meanwhile, if you have been holding out for the audiobook version of IGNORE, Recorded Books has put up a fan page where you can quickly find it at your preferred place where audiobooks are sold.
• And if you pre-ordered a print copy – at least in the UK, and possibly parts of the US – then Bluesky suggests that they are beginning to be delivered, even now.

You’ll hear from me again after the launch when I have stopped vibrating with excitement and can say things coherently. And, if you are in Toronto, see you soon!

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

17 days left until IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS hits the stores! And I’ve got some treats for you today, + some cool announcements. Scroll down to the part with the pictures if the announcements are all that you want.

By now, you’ve met IGNORE’s two lead characters, but I couldn’t resist introducing you to a few more of the characters as well.

Elaine Liyanage

Elaine is a precocious goth who loves sharks, villains, and everything evil – and who’s having a bad time at home. As a child, she fits right in with Rowan and Kelli’s games of pretend, diving gleefully into antagonist roles that make the stories more interesting and exciting. As a teenager, it’s more complicated. Elaine loves bad boys and looking sexy. When Rowan won’t join her in those kinds of games, she reacts first with bafflement, then with hostility – and hurts Rowan in the process much more deeply than she ever meant to – only to realize later, to her own chagrin, that maybe being a straight girl isn’t working for her after all. Rowan and Kelli struggle to work out who Elaine should be to them: a bully, a frenemy, a fellow queer, or maybe even something more. Either way, and more than they realize, she’s at the center of something that will change their lives forever.

Ting Jiang

A professonal thief who’s about Rowan’s age, and one of the few other trans people in the Brimstone Syndicate, Ting is one of Rowan’s best friends. They’re upbeat, friendly, and excited about their job. Ting is one of the first people to meet Kelli and show her around when she agrees to meet the syndicate to help Rowan. But even Ting doesn’t know just how badly the syndicate is planning to upend Kelli’s life. When everything with Kelli goes wrong, it leads Ting to question their loyalties – and maybe to become the unexpected ally that she and Rowan need most.

Zhaleh Attar

Zhaleh is coolheaded, glamorous, fond of the occult – and much more important in the Brimstone Syndicate than she seems. She’s also Rowan’s ex-girlfriend. Shortly before the mission with Kelli began, she betrayed his trust in a way he’s still reeling from. To Kelli, she’s beautiful and baffling; she seems to understand things about Kelli’s mind that Kelli is rarely able to explain to anyone. But Zhaleh has an agenda that even Rowan doesn’t fully understand. She might be about to save him and Kelli – or to make things much, much worse.

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And now, some news!

IGNORE got a great review from Library Journal earlier in April. It’s paywalled, but here’s a good pull quote:

Hoffmann (The Infinite) writes a thoughtful and hopeful story that features neurodiverse and queer characters dealing with censorship and creative freedom in outer space.

Booklist also gave it a starred review. The full thing won’t be up until May, but I’m allowed to give you a pull quote from this one too:

It’s sweeping, personal, and touches on many timely topics. Lovers of character-driven sf should make this a must-read.

That’s three positive reviews from the big professional trade reviewers, two of which are starred. (If you missed the other starred review, it came out from Publishers Weekly earlier.)

Another review I’ve seen in the wild is this one, from Shades of Orange. (I don’t go looking for my own reviews because that way lies madness, but sometimes my publicist forwards one to me.) Rachel loved the Outside books, so I’m delighted to hear her say she loves IGNORE, too.

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I had a great pre-launch event at the university last week before everyone ran off for the summer. People laughed at the jokes and bought the book! Here’s me, answering some fun and hard-hitting Q&A about generative AI from my conversation partner:

If you missed the event but are in Kingston, you should swing by the Campus Bookstore; I heard there are some leftover early copies of IGNORE for sale in there. You can’t get them anywhere else in the world until the launch day, so this is super-exclusive.

I also had a great time moderating the panel REVOLUTION IS NOT FOR THE SANE at Virtual Can*Con. I would have stayed longer if my spoons permitted! But the one panel was awesome and everyone was so smart. I love moderating, tbh – 90% of it is just coming up with some good questions and handing them to some people who are smarter than you on this topc, and then you get to just sit back and watch them go.

Now I’m gearing up for my trip to Toronto in a few weeks for the real launch:

If you are in Toronto, come to Bakka Phoenix and say hi! I’m planning to stay a few days, since I’m there, and take in some of the tourist sights.

In more minor but delightful news, here’s a bit of Bluesky microfiction by V Astor Solomon that was inspired by me.

And just one more thing: Jaymee Goh, who edited IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS and did a fabulous job, is up for the Hugo this year for Best Editor – Long Form. It is very well-deserved and I’m so excited for her!!

Take care. More soon. This book is really happening.

– Ada

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Rowan di Pietro was never quite like the other girls. Boisterous, charismatic, and assigned female at birth, he spent his childhood enthusiastically playing the role of a tomboy, leading a gang of girls who pursued their own imaginative games with absolutely no boys allowed. But at puberty, when his friends turned their interests to makeup, shopping, and heterosexual crushes, Rowan found to his own chagrin that he couldn’t follow them there – and that, maybe, “no boys allowed” had never been the whole story about him.

Suddenly the odd one out and no longer the leader of anything, Rowan found solace in his friendship with Kelli Reynolds, who wasn’t exactly a straight girl either. The two of them shared a secret queer world of pretend that eventually blossomed into a romance. But then tragedy struck. While Kelli’s fear and guilt drove her back into the closet, Rowan vowed never to abandon his identity – even if that meant he had to go it alone.

After dropping out of high school, Rowan found what he was looking for: a crime group called the Brimstone Syndicate who were happy to take him under their wing, treat him like a man, lease him a spaceship of his own, and even pay for his medical transition – as long as he did them some favors in return. Under the syndicate’s supervision, Rowan became a media smuggler, a job that he mostly enjoyed: sneaking data chips full of illegal, human-created media to the humans who needed it most, like the books that had helped him and Kelli make sense of their own feelings when they were younger. But the debt that he owes to the syndicate, and the secrets the syndicate knows about him, have kept piling up since then – and when the syndicate asks him to do things that go against his conscience, he knows he doesn’t have another choice.

It’s on one of these guilty, not-quite-voluntary missions that Rowan encounters Kelli again. She has a respectable job now, but the syndicate wants something from her – and they want Rowan to be the one to get it for them. That means not quite telling Kelli the whole story about why he’s here, or how badly he’s about to mess up her neat and tidy corporate life. But hey – at least he has this cool spaceship now, and all the sweet and enticing queer media that her younger self once longed for…

Rowan has dated many other girls, but he never really got over Kelli – or over the trauma that tore them apart. He doesn’t know if Kelli will ever accept the kind of life he has now. But if they’re going to escape the Brimstone Syndicate’s web, then they have to find some way of working together – and facing the truth of their past together, once and for all.

If you ever wished Han Solo was trans, you might be about to love Rowan.

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Meanwhile, here’s some other book news!

First, the launch is in May – just under one month from today – this week I’m doing a little flurry of pre-launch appearances. First, here’s one that I’m doing at my dayjob place of employment:

True story: I asked my manager at work very hesitantly if it would be ok for me to book a room for an event. She got so excited that, next thing I knew, my department’s entire Social Committee was on the job. We’re doing it in April instead of waiting for May so that we can get it in before everyone scatters for the summer – but this is going to be enormous fun. Anyone in the Kingston area who wants in is invited, even if you have no affiliation with Queen’s. And a little birdie tells me that, due to the extremely quick work of the campus bookstore, there might be some secret early print copies for sale…

I’ll also appear at Virtual Can*Con this weekend, moderating a panel called “Revolution is Not For the Sane.” More on that later this week, once the Queen’s event is done and dusted.

Also I made this cute summary image of all of my blurbs.

According to the royalty statement I just received, the audiobook edition of THE OUTSIDE has earned out its advance. I’m so grateful to all of my audio listeners and to Nancy Wu, my amazing narrator! If you like audiobooks and haven’t checked out THE OUTSIDE yet, why not give it a listen? Every new audio sale, from this point on, puts royalty money directly into my pocket.

And speaking of Nancy, if you like her narration, you’ll see her again soon…

I hope you all are having a beautiful April!

Today I am taking a break from book promo to give you a nice new batch of something I haven’t done in a while – reviews!

In 2025, I wrote no reviews, even the most casual recommendations post; I started the year vaguely intending to, but my brain rebelled against every attempt. I think I needed the time away – to shake off the last bits of old pressures I used to feel around reviewing that are not appropriate to the moment anymore. But by the end of the year, I was pretty solid on how I wanted to do it when I started again.

So here’s how we’re going to do this. I want to write a recommendation post four times a year – with today, the spring equinox, being #1. I’m going to mix up all types of media and all years of publication. All of them will be things I read, watched, or played in the past three months – since the winter solstice, in this case – but some are new and some are old and I literally do not care what is and isn’t eligible for the awards cycle.* I want to divide up the works, not by format or length, but by how they made me feel – because there are all sorts of different ways to like a work of art, and teasing out those different ways is what interests me as a reviewer right now.

(*I might or might not do a “caring about the awards cycle” post later in the year, at the traditional time. We’ll see.)

Right now I think there are four or five emotional categories, but they might not all show up in every single rec post, and I also reserve the right to come up with more categories on a whim.

Flights of Fancy

Here’s Category #1, and probably the one that will have the most things in it, most of the time! Flights of Fancy are the works that did a very good solid satisfying job of absorbing my imagination. The ones that skillfully drew me away to some other vivid time and place, tugged on my heartstrings, seduced my senses or made me cheer. This is the first and broadest category that I think of when I think of good storytelling, though as we will see, it’s not the only one.

Micaiah Johnson – “‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal” (short story, January 4, 2026, The Sunday Morning Transport)

Lately, stories about AGI and superintelligence have become a hard sell for me. I used to love them! But now my first thought is always “ugh, okay, is this going to prop up Silicon Valley’s most self-serving narratives or what?” Thankfully, Johnson’s story survived my initial skepticism and became a pleasant surprise. I like the small but crucial reversal of certain tropes: instead of humans being afraid of what the superintelligence might do to them, the superintelligence is frightened of humans – partly because of some of our own, present-day misuses of genAI. The AI narrator’s naively logical voice, disoriented and unused to viewing itself as a single self, reminded me of all the things I used to love about this type of story. (Autistic people still overidentify with robots, confirmed.) I also love that a poem, of all things, is what fatally shakes the superintelligence’s understanding of the world. I still wish it didn’t have “GPT” in the title since that is a very specific line of language models belonging to a specific company and those language models are not going to achieve sentience no matter what the company’s marketing department tells you, but, you know, whatever. It’s still a rare AI story that manages to rise above all that.

Joemario Umana – “O ASHY WINGS STILL FLUTTERING” (poem, December 22, 2025, Strange Horizons)

I’m bad at reviewing poems, actually! When I like them, I just want to fling them at people incoherently and say “this!” But this is a very poignant description of something I recognize a version of in my own experience, and it’s done lyrically and with beauty.

P.C. Verrone – “The Husband” (short story, January 14, 2025, PodCastle)

A bisexual man is (consensually) taken as the latest bride of a vampire who already has three female wives. He has difficulty adjusting to his new life at first, and the other wives don’t know what to make of him, but eventually he rises to the challenge in creative ways. This was well-written enough (and hits the tropes solidly enough) to hold my interest throughout, but what really clinched it for me is the ending – both so unorthodox and so oddly sensible, as a solution to all of the characters’ problems, that now I wonder why more vampire stories haven’t ended this way before.

John Wiswell – “Phantom View” (novelette, October 2025, Reactor)

Wiswell has a way with sweet-but-creepy, sympathetic monsters; he always knocks them out of the park. I wasn’t sure about this one at first – stories about people’s parents are sort of complicated for me – but it really gets going once Wiswell’s protagonist and the mysterious blur in his house start to communicate. I love the complexity of what’s going on: the blur’s motives and feelings are only partly ever discernible; the narrator projects all sorts of things onto it and you can see where those projections are coming from, without quite always knowing how true they are or aren’t; it helps him and fails him and frustrates him and still ultimately guides him to something that he desperately needs.

Comfort Reads

There’s been so much discourse about “cozy fiction,” what it is and what it isn’t, what its merits are relative to other modes of storytelling. I do not intend to get into that discourse in this post, except to say that I don’t begrudge anybody any reading that makes them happy in any way – but that personally, when I read cozy fiction, it usually does not make me feel happy or cozy as advertised. I’m sorry, cozy fiction authors. It’s me, not you. (There are some exceptions, one of which is listed below!)

Nevertheless, I very much enjoy comfort reads/watches and go for them all the time. It’s just that my comfort reads are more likely to be other, weirder things, like thinky nonfiction about a topic I’m really curious about, or re-reads of my own books that I already wrote. Or else – less weird – it’s a cozy video game where nothing is too difficult and I can just putter around. Either way, when I encounter a piece of media for the first time and find that it soothes or comforts me really well, I want to put it here in this section.

The boundary between this category and “Flights of Fancy” is porous and vague. A work that comforts me often still contains some level of thrills, spills and drama – it’s just that the drama is kept within a certain type of safe bound. Your mileage may vary. I just like these.

Heather Fawcett – “Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies” (novel, January 2023, Del Rey)

Did I say cozy books don’t work for me? Here’s an exception. This one is weapons-grade adorable in my exact preferred way. The titular Emily is a Victorian-era professor who is among the world’s most brilliant minds at dealing with faeries, but who prefers to be left alone with her research all day, only grudgingly tolerating the presence of other humans, or anything else unrelated to her professonal special interest. (I 100% read Emily as autistic, although the term isn’t used.) Doing difficult field research in a remote and wintry village, she’s unexpectedly joined by her longtime rival, Wendell Bambleby – a charming and chaotic man whom Emily has long suspected may secretly be a faerie himself. Mysteries are investigated! Sparks fly! The faeries in this book are just eerie enough to be interesting – they often reminded me of a lighter version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – but never quite frightening enough to derail the burgeoning faerie/human romance that every reader can see coming long before Emily does. Her grouchy narrative voice is a delight, and now I have to get the second and third books just so that I can watch these two adorable losers finish figuring their relationship out. In the darkest parts of a pretty harsh IRL winter, this book was a balm.

The 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games

It’s always a comfort watch for me, but let’s be real, I think the competitors at this Olympics were feeling the geopolitical malaise just like the rest of us. It wasn’t Canada’s best Olympics ever. There were a startling number of upsets, crashes, and unexpected losses on all sides. The hockey games hurt to watch in ways that I suspect are nothing to do with hockey itself and everything to do with, sigh, geopolitics. There were also all sorts of bright, beautiful, thrilling, victorious moments, and brave, bittersweet moments where people picked themselves up and kept going, despite it all.

There’s just something that always resonates with me so deeply about this. To me, the Olympic spirit is about loving something so much that you devote your whole life to getting maximally good at it – not out of any capitalistic imperative, but out of sheer obsession. And then you get up in front of the whole world to show them what you can do, to invite them to share this thing you love with you. I am extremely not good at any sport ever, but I think that serious artists have a kinship with serious athletes. I think that we share the same intense, consuming, publicly visible love of the thing we are doing. And, you know, sometimes the moment when the whole world is watching is a moment where the thing doesn’t go your way. But that is not the point. The point is the love.

The Ones That Haunt Me

Meanwhile, this category is for stuff a little stronger than a Flight of Fancy. Sometimes a story messes you up and you thank it, you know? The works in this category punched me in the gut or burrowed into an uncomfortable part of my brain and it would be oversimplifying to say that I liked them, but it was really well done and I was glad it happened.

As with “Comfort Reads,” there is absolutely no scientific way to distinguish between a sad, creepy, or provocative story that goes into Flights of Fancy and one that goes here. It is entirely vibes and how I happened to feel in the moment. Nonetheless, at the moment, the distinction is important to me.

Phoenix Alexander – “Doppel Doppel Gang Gang” (flash fiction, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

A playful but disturbing bit of flash horror about a high school dance crew that encounters… something. The choice to tell this one entirely in dialogue and sound effects works really well, especially in the story’s second half as events ramp up; the work that my brain had to do, filling in whatever visual it could to account for what I was “hearing,” made it creepier than if the whole thing had been told in normal prose. It also makes the story clip along very, very quickly in a way that makes it difficult to look away. The ending gave me that classic feeling of “oh my God, what the fuck did I just read.”

Cailín Frankland – “Death is a Drag Queen” (partly-prose poem, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

I was a little bit mad at myself for how many Feelings I Felt with this one. I was like “oh come on, this is so conceptually simple, this is a thing I have already heard queer poets say 1000 times.” Apparently I still really needed to hear it once more, and in the romantic, vivid, but spare way that Frankland says it. This is a piece that could be read aloud for Trans Day of Remembrance, which is probably all the content warning that you need.

Premee Mohamed – “The Butcher of the Forest” (novella, February 2024, Tordotcom)

If Heather Fawcett’s faeries are just eerie enough to stay interesting, Mohamed’s are a genuine nightmare – and the everyday necessities that drive her protagonist into the forest to meet them aren’t much better. I loved the menace and dread of this short book but even more the deeply human, despairing, determined heart that beats underneath.

The More You Know!

Sometimes it’s less about how you feel and more about what you learn. In an environment of information overload, this category is for works – mostly, but not necessarily, nonfiction – that explained something useful to me that I hadn’t known before, and was glad to.

Jane Alison – “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative” (nonfiction book, April 2019, Catapult Books)

When a book is trending among writers and I don’t read it, I feel self-conscious and out of the loop. When a book is trending and I do read it, I feel self-conscious in a different way – like, sure, I jumped on the bandwagon. Is it newsworthy to say that I’m on the bandwagon? I don’t know. Regardless, “Meander, Spiral, Explode” is the craft book that everyone has been talking about lately. It’s focused on litfic (although there is an interesting shout-out to Cloud Atlas) but it does what it says on the tin: identifies patterns, in writing and in nature, that can serve as alternatives to the traditional rising-action-climax-falling-action triangle, and analyzes examples from existing literary works to show how those patterns can be used.

Personally, I spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to do the traditional plot triangle better. It was necessary to do that thinking because of the places where I was getting stuck in my craft. But Alison isn’t trying to destroy the plot triangle so much as put it in its proper place, not as the be-all and end-all of structure but as one potential structure among many. The whole thing is playful and thoughtful and interesting and it made me really want to try out some of these alternate structures for myself. It filled my head with thoughts in a good way.

Isis Asare et al – “Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon”

I read this via the transcript that was posted in Strange Horizons on January 12, 2026, although the panel itself was held at Seattle Worldcon in August 2025! Either way, this panel was very welcoming and gave a lot of interesting food for thought. If you’ve been reading intersectional feminist speculative fiction discourse for a while then the ideas won’t be wholly new to you, but I still found it helpful to have them all concentrated in one place. I came out of it with a lot of thoughts about things that my fiction only partly and sometimes does, and perhaps could be doing a lot more of.

(Although: sometimes, for purely selfish reasons, I gotta use my fiction as a scream pillow. So the dystopias are not going away. You’ve been warned 😀 )

Angus Hervey – “The Telemetry” (newsletter post, December 2025, Fix The News)

Someone linked me to this and I wish I remembered who. It was probably Ada Palmer, who links to this sort of thing on Bluesky regularly. (Yes, it’s a Substack. Sigh. Sorry.) I read it on New Year’s Eve and found it a welcome antidote to the general ambient doom that has been floating around everywhere these days. Some things are indeed very bad right now, and Hervey’s writing doesn’t pretend those things aren’t real, but it points past them to a surprising number of other things in the world that are continuing, despite everything, to get unglamorously, usefully, incrementally better. They are by no means all small or all localized things. Some of them really surprised me. I have subscribed to their newsletter 🙂

(Oh, but if you are prone to eye squick, maybe skip the first section, because the first section is about how we developed a cure for a really gross eye virus. 😛 )

Bonus Section: Autistic Book Shout-Out

I’m not sorry that I stopped the Autistic Book Party series when I did; I don’t miss feeling the self-imposed responsibility to somehow read and have deep thoughts on every single autistic book that comes out (which, of course, I never managed to do.) But I still love autistic books! And every once in a while I will shout out to a few of them here.

Isaac Fellman – “The Two Doctors Górski” (novella, November 2022, Tordotcom)

I like everything I’ve read from Isaac Fellman, and this short, brooding, lyrical bit of dark academia was as good as I expected, but nobody told me the main character is autistic? Maybe people did say it, and I’ve been so out of the loop that I missed it, or forgot? Well, whatever! Annae’s identity as an abuse survivor is much more important to this story than her autism; the fact that she’s autistic is plainly stated but also goes by a bit fast and isn’t hammered on in the way that some authors hammer repeatedly on autistic traits to make sure that you’ve noticed them. If you know what you’re looking for, though, the abuse survival narrative and the autism go perfectly hand-in-hand. The trajectory of Annae’s life – brainy and irritating as a child, then painstakingly teaching herself to be charming, then being targeted and taken advantage of because of that charm, combined with the autistic naivete she hasn’t shaken off, and trying clumsily to rebuild her life in the aftermath – is painfully realistic and recognizable.

Also! Not going to write a full paragraph of review because I technically read it before the 2025 winter solstice, but how about Antonia Hodgson’s “The Raven Scholar”? Another buzzy, well-written recent book that I didn’t realize had an autistic protagonist (an adorable one, by the way) until I was already partway through.

(You can also view this post on Buttondown.)

One thing I’ve always wanted to do for IGNORE is write character introductions, and now that the launch date is drawing closer, I’ve got one for you!

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Kelli Reynolds is an autistic woman who has lived on Callisto all her life. She has always been fascinated by stories. As a child, she liked to sit alone and tell stories to her medically-prescribed companion robot – until her soon-to-be-best friend, Rowan di Pietro, swept her up into the world of communal pretend play. By telling stories that the rest of Rowan’s friend group could add to and act out, Kelli briefly became a social fixture – much to the consternation of her robot, which would have rathered that she make friends in a more typical way.

As Rowan and Kelli got older and social interaction got more complicated, Kelli withdrew again. After a bullying incident, she became fascinated by the idea of lesbians – a forbidden topic for minors on Callisto – and eventually, after covert research, realized that she might be one herself. She and Rowan retreated into a private, romantic world where they told queer stories just for themselves – until tragedy struck and estranged them from each other, leaving Kelli guilt-ridden and alone in the world.

Determined to mend her ways and play by the rules, Kelli went back into the closet and studied hard until she landed a coveted job supervising television scripts for the AI media corporation that runs Callisto. The job meant compromises: on Callisto, the only legal media is generated by the company AI, and it definitely can’t include queer characters or anything else controversial. But supervising the AI scripts is the only legal way for Kelli to pursue her love of stories, and she’s achieved success by sneaking elements of herfavorite childhood games into her show: a family-friendly pirate adventure story called Ship of Fools. Kelli lives an orderly life and tells herself that she’s happy, or happy enough. But she knows something’s missing.

Which is when Rowan unexpectedly pops back into her life, claiming to need her help with something questionably legal. It might be the end of Kelli’s career if she says yes. Or it might be the beginning of a thrilling, queer pirate adventure story in real life.

If you love Abed Nadir, but you also love repressed sapphics who are hiding a dark secret, you might love Kelli.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS is available for pre-order from all major retailers.

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Here’s a few other book promo tidbits if you’ve read this far:

• Here’s the officialy IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS playlist on Spotify.
• And a Pinterest board that I made while I was writing the first draft, showing the contrasting aesthetics for each moon of Jupiter that we visit in the book.
• Plus an excerpt is up at the Civilian Reader

Take care,

Ada

Hi all,

The good vibes are continuing to roll in for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. My publicist told me that we’d already gotten our last blurb, but then one more rolled in anyway and it’s amazing. Check out this rave review from none other than John Joseph Adams:

“Ignore All Previous Instructions is a revelation. It hooked me from page one and never loosened its hold on me, building and building toward an emotional catharsis that will simultaneously destroy you and give you life. I can’t remember the last time I was so sad to see a book end, while also feeling it would have been criminal if it hadn’t ended exactly where and how it did. I almost never give anything a 10 out of 10, but I could give Ignore All Previous Instructions no other rating—but the last two lines tempted me break my scale so I could give it an 11.”

—John Joseph Adams, series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy

The most amazing thing is that we didn’t even send JJA a review copy. He found an advance review copy himself and then loved it so much that he independently decided to send in a blurb.

Not only that, but he’s also going to publish an excerpt from IGNORE in the May issue of Lightspeed, along with my short story, “Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord” – totally unrelated to the novel – which Lightspeed bought in early 2025.

May is going to be a big month!!

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While we’re on this topic, check out this starred review from Publishers Weekly:

“Kelli Reynolds, the autistic heroine of this thrilling, prescient, and emotionally rich sci-fi adventure from Hoffmann (The Outside), is one of the few humans on Jupiter “talented enough to get a steady wage for the kind of work a machine couldn’t do.” She works as a script supervisor for a popular pirate-themed television show produced by Inspiration, the AI megacorporation that bought up the rights to all existing stories and is now the only approved source of information and entertainment. Kelli’s surprised to hear from Rowan, an ex from her school days who has since undergone illegal gender transition, who reaches out for help clearing his debts. Only after agreeing does Kelli learn that Rowan is a smuggler of illegal media working for a crime syndicate, and soon she finds herself embroiled in a dangerous heist. This high-stakes plot is complemented by flashbacks to the leads’ school days, when Rowan, then known as Am, used prompt engineering to thwart the robot assigned to help Kelli mask her autism (by, for example, enforcing eye contact) and the pair spent their days making up stories while slowly realizing that their desires fell outside of allowed options. Both timelines gracefully build toward crisis as Kelli navigates situations she struggles to fully comprehend. It’s an exceptional balancing of action, interior turmoil, and chilling dystopia. Readers worried about the future of storytelling in the age of AI will gobble this up.”

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A few other tidbits of novel news:

• IGNORE was included in Netgalley’s Cover Love feature for February and displayed right on Negtalley’s front page. This is nothing to do with me and everything to do with the wonderful work of the cover artist, Elizabeth Story.
• I’ve posted a sneaky deleted scene in a secret place on my website as a reward for newsletter subscribers only. If you’re a subscriber, then you’ve already got the link (check your email archives for February 4 – or the date that you subscribed, whichever’s later.) If you’re not a subscriber and are reading this on a web page, you too can access the secret deleted scene by subscribing any time before July 1!

Here’s the newsletter page where you can subscribe.

One other thing: my publicist and I, behind the scenes, have been starting to put together an itty-bitty book tour. We’re stopping at Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto for a launch day event, and then back to my hometown of Kingston, Ontario for a signing that weekend at Indigo Kingston. (That’s right, Senpai Big-Box Bookstore noticed me! This portends great things. I am agog.)

At least one or two other stops are being worked on, but not finalized yet; I’ll continue to update as more details emerge. Meanwhile – if you live anywhere within an easy train ride of Kingston, and you know of a venue that’d be interested, and you want me to come to your town in May – now is the time to reach out! There’s still a lot of room to add you.

(Although: Canadian locations only, please! American fans, I love you too, but for reasons you are all well aware of, it isn’t safe to cross the border right now.)

I’m SO excited by how this is shaping up. More soon!

Take care.

-Ada

Lots has been happening as early buzz builds for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, but I think I’ve been posting in my Buttondown newsletter and forgetting to copy to the website / Dreamwidth. In case you missed it, here are the two news posts from the first month and a half of this year:

“Precisely the book we need right now.”

Most Anticipated Sci-Fi Books of 2026

More soon and sorry for the confusion!