Ada Hoffmann

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!

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

I think it has become a tradition, since 2016, for everyone to start their year in review posts with a variation on “wow, this year sucked.” And like. It is a tradition because it is literally correct? Current events this year were YIKES. But I also assume that you, as a reader, already know all the ways they were YIKES, so I’m going to not dwell on them here.

Without 100% having intended it at the beginning of the year, 2025 was a bit of a fallow year for me in terms of publishing and newsletters. I’m not doing a “here’s what I published,” because I didn’t publish anything. I’m not doing a “here are my favorite stories/media” because I honestly needed a break from doing that; I’m going to try again in the new year.

In other ways, though, it was quite a busy year. Here’s how my 2025 went, in roughly but not entirely chronological order:

• Acquisition & big round of edits for IGNORE
• Trade war??? Elbows up??? Election???
• Strike at my day job (plus two other strikes that were threatened but didn’t happen, it was a mess)
• Big promotion at my day job WHILE on strike (don’t ask)
• PRIDE!
• Giant new course in critical AI literacy on two months notice (I actually wish we’d done this years ago…)
• Wait how do undergraduate committees work
• Murder mystery party!! (I write these myself, it’s a whole production, this year was the first time in a few years)
• Whole bunch of work on two different big, ambitious WIP books – one that’s still being drafted, and one that went through some major revisions.
• Whole bunch of therapy

 

It’s been a huge year for me personally. It’s been rough in some ways, but I feel I’ve been pushed to grow up and glow up in ways that were not as open to me before. It’s made me think a lot about individual and collective power. And I’m excited to share some of the fruits of those labors with you in the new year – certainly with IGNORE, and hopefully with more reviews, shorts, essays and other useful things.

Wishing you all a restful holiday season – because what we all need most right now is rest – and success at what matters most to you in the new year.

Best,

Ada

(You can also read this post – or subscribe – on Buttondown.)

Hi all,

I’m so excited to show you the finished cover for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS:

Tachyon Publications is sending it out on blast across all their social media accounts at the same time that I send this email – but I wanted to make sure you saw it right away!

Isn’t it cute? The art is by Elizabeth Story. I love the planet and the little robot peeking out from behind the letters. I love the Jolly Roger on the little spaceship. I love the way the handwriting-y font, on my name, softens the sci-fi aesthetic a little. We went back and forth with different versions for a while – one version had the title spelled out on a rainbow colored keyboard, which was also adorable, but we couldn’t quite get it to fit into book cover dimensions in a way that looked right.

IGNORE is also up already on Edelweiss and Netgalley – so if you’re on one of those websites and you’re dying to read and review the book before anyone else does, requests are now open! If you have reviewed my books before and you don’t end up getting a copy from one of those places, please feel free to get in touch with me directly, as I have some e-ARCs I can directly share.

And here’s the updated blurb from the press kit that my publicist at Tachyon put together:

A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.

Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.

Kelli has a rare and coveted job where her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Am, a girl.

Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?

Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Let’s get to the good part first: here’s my schedule for Can*Con in Ottawa, less than two weeks from now.

And here are the panel descriptions:

Slow Fiction

In our fast-paced world, and our avid desire to consume books, let us not lose sight of the importance of a slow burn. How does a narrative that wanders and ponders strike different chords within us? When does meandering fiction hit as powerfully as something action-packed? In the creation of art, taking your time can also be similarly significant. Where can a slow approach to fiction lead you as a creative, and why is that important?

Navigating Social Communication

Communication can be difficult, especially when trying to navigate potentially high-stakes conversations with editors, agents, publishers, and even fans. For neurodivergent, shy, and otherwise socially awkward people, this can be even more challenging. What are the potential pitfalls that exist for authors, and how can they be circumvented, avoided, or otherwise dealt with? How do we remain true to ourselves and our needs, and keep our batteries up and our spoons in good supply, while also finding ways to positively connect with others and get our meaning across?

He’s Babygirl: Reclaiming the Queercoded Villain

There is a long history of villains being queercoded, either as a way to signify their villainy, or as a way to include queer characters without tripping the sensors. In recent years, we have seen more openly queer villains (or at least, morally-grey characters): Lestat in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, Astarion in Baldur’s Gate III, even Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Jobu Tupaki. What does having “problematic” queer characters mean for the LGBTQIA+ community and for speculative fiction? How does the canonical queerness of these characters expand our understanding of these stories and the question of “good representation”?

Meanwhile!

You haven’t heard much from me lately. Looking back, I think I was even more tired of newsletters by the end of last year than I admitted to myself, and I needed the break.

But it’s been a fascinating busy year behind the scenes. People at my dayjob went on strike! (I walked off the job for a couple months in support of the grad students’ union, because there’s a sneaky clause in the faculty union contract that says we’re allowed to do that. No one had ever actually had to use that clause before.) I got a big promotion at work while I was on strike (lmao don’t ask.) I also got a pile of brand new service responsibilities, so now I’m getting a crash course, after having worked here for seven years, on things like what does an undergraduate committee even do. And I got tasked with creating and teaching a brand-new and extremely in-demand course on critical AI literacy. (I got to tell the students about chatbot psychosis yesterday. This sure is a time to be alive.)

There is a bit of a war going on in computer science departments right now over generative AI, which is completely different from the war going on in the arts except that it happens to be about the same technology. I’m not even going to go into that right now, but watch this space, because I’ve got something dark-academia-shaped on my mind lately and in a few years it might grow into a thing you can read.

But speaking of books you can read, I’ve been having meetings with the good folks at Tachyon Books about marketing and publicity for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, which I continue to be more excited about than I have been about any of my books in my life. (It’s a problem, actually. I’m like “what if I wrote 5 sequels!!!” and my agent is like “bro, slow down.”) I’m going to have more I can show you about it soon. In particular – I have seen the final cover, it’s totally adorable, and there may be a cover reveal coming to you sooner than you think.

(I’ve been drafting and revising some other, unrelated projects as well. Oh, and I’ve got a new official author photo. I crawled shamefacedly into the studio of a local queer photographer like “I have so much dysphoria I hate pictures but I need one for my new book, please help me” and she was great about it, 10/10 would recommend.)

More soon. I cannot wait to inundate you with promo material about this book.

[You can also read this post on Buttondown.]

Hi all,

I am SO excited to finally announce my next novel, IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, which is coming out with Tachyon Books in spring 2026.

Here’s the Publishers Marketplace announcement that just went live today:

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS is a book incredibly close to my heart, and also very timely in more than one way – and ever since I started work on the first draft, in mid-2023, I’ve been absolutely dying to tell you all about it.

You’ll get more details about what this book is and what it means to me closer to the release date. For now, here’s the blurb my agent wrote when we went it out on submission:

Once upon a time, people wrote stories, and they owned the stories they wrote. But all that changed when Inspiration created its AI language model. The language model was based on all of the language in the world, so it contained every idea anyone had ever written down. Inspiration couldn’t take those ideas back out, so they saved up money and bought them. Now they own all the stories.

Kelli Reynolds is a script supervisor for Inspiration — a professional who edits the output of the language model into intelligible stories. Kelli’s proudest contribution is the pirate Orlando — a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Then Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan shows up. Rowan’s the one Kelli based Orlando on, when they were teenagers. Back then, their relationship was a secret. Kelli thought at the time that Rowan, a trans man, was a girl. And Inspiration doesn’t allow any stories about girls that love girls, or girlfriends that turn out to actually be boyfriends.

Now Rowan’s tangled up in the black market, smuggling forbidden stories like the ones Kelli wished she’d had as a teen. He needs Kelli’s help with something — something illegal.

Kelli’s not sure she wants to be in this story, but she can’t let Rowan walk out of her life again. As she becomes entangled in Rowan’s scheme, it brings up the long-hidden truth of the disastrous choice that ended their relationship last time around. Kelli has to decide: will she risk the neat story of her life now for the world she wished for then, a world where every necessary story can be told? She asks herself: What would Orlando do?

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Last year I had the hubris to tell you all that the year had gone well for me, even if it didn’t for most people. This year, regardless of personal and career progress, I felt the larger stresses of the world more keenly. Transphobia, fascism, genocide, and vulture capitalist “consultants” chewing up my day job in particular, whee! Definitely not the best year.

But I’ve been resting and thinking a lot now that the holiday break is on us, and the solstice in particular, and I think I really want to end this year on a note of gratutide. To note what did go well, because there are always little things that did go well, and I think we don’t do ourselves any favors when we let those things get lost, even in the face of something big and bad.

In case you don’t want to read a lot of navel-gazing, I’ll first skip to the part where I list what I published this year:

• The Silent Sea (Baffling)
• Music, Not Words (The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters)

That’s it. Mostly, I worked on book-length fiction, and I got a lot done that I’m proud of, but just nothing I can publicly announce yet. Watch this space in 2025, because there will be something to announce then, even if I have to self-publish it. There’s stuff I’ve been super-excited about literally all year and just sitting on my hands about, because publishing, now more than ever, is really slow. But it will get to you, one way or another.

A couple other notable things happened:

Research.

In the spring this year, at my day job, I ran a survey about fiction writers’ experiences of, and attitudes to, generative AI. My co-authors and I have now published some preliminary results from this survey, which you can find here:

Precarity and Solidarity: Preliminary results on a study of queer and disabled fiction writers’ experiences with generative AI

This is a preprint; we’re in the process of getting a version of it submitted to a good conference. More later. This study has been emotionally draining in some ways, which is why I haven’t been the fastest working on it, but I feel it’s also very worthwhile, and I’m encouraged by the initial response by my colleagues. I honestly think there are lots of people in computer science who do care how technological change is affecting creative humans, and who would like to make it better. They’re just not the people who are getting billions of dollars in VC funding. Either way, more later.

Pride.

One of the biggest things I’ve been working on this year is connecting to community, especially queer community, face-to-face and on my own terms. This has been really helpful for me to work on, in even more ways than I thought it would. (I marched in the Pride parade this year with a group of queer folx from work, and now I’m on the organizing committee for that group, and it’s actually really cool? Like, these-are-the-people-who-get-me level cool?)

In the process – and in the process of one of my book-length fiction projects also, which was just an embarrassingly large number of words about a trans character and his cool backstory – I’ve realized how important gender really is to me.

Like, I already told you I’m genderfluid. I told you my pronouns are they/them. I’ve known this about myself for a while, but it’s been more theoretical. Like, I have this gender gauge in my head that goes back and forth but it’s largely an internal thing, you know? And 2024 was the year that I sat down with myself and said, no, wait, I don’t want this to be only an internal thing. I don’t want to be a person who looks like a cis woman, acts like a cis woman, and just has an asterisk saying technically they’re also other things. (No offense meant if that’s your gender – it’s a perfectly valid gender, it’s just not mine.) I am genderfluid and that means I am actually transmasculine, a significant portion of the time. So I want to do something about that. I haven’t figured out quite what, apart from messing around with different ways to do my clothes and hair. But this is a thing and it will keep on being one.

Why, yes, this is a scary thing to figure out about oneself in this particular year of world history, thanks for asking! But I’ve got folks I can talk to about it, locally, all I want, because a lot of us are in the same boat. And at least I got to do some cool writing about it. It used to be hard for me to write trans characters, apart from fanciful shapeshifting types like Akavi; I wasn’t quite ready to face those feelings head on. I think I am now, and when I look at what I wrote this year and last year compared to those early works, I can really see the difference.

Anyway.

See you in whatever the hell happens next year. I’ll still be here, and I hope you will, too.

Wellp.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been watching the news with great dismay. I’m Canadian, but I’m extremely upset on behalf of all my queer American friends and colleagues, among many other reasons. (We have our own little crop of Trump imitators up here, and you can be sure they are watching this play out and taking avid notes.)

It’s hard not to feel helpless right now, but I try to remember that the best defense against helplessness is to find one useful thing to do – even a very small one.

When my colleague Leigh Harlen told me they were starting a mini auction on behalf of Trans Lifeline, I knew this was my cue for a small useful thing. So I’m donating a signed copy of the whole Outside trilogy. Starting bid is a $35 donation to help trans people in crisis, and I’ll ship almost anywhere in the world. The auction starts this morning and will go until Monday the 18th.

If you already have a copy of the Outside trilogy, you can still browse the rest of the auction, which has books by other authors – including Nino Cipri and John Wiswell – adorable crafts, and even a friendly lady who will remotely coach you through tidying your house.

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Meanwhile, recs!

I’m seeing a lot of talk on Bluesky about how art will do this, art will do that. (I’m on Bluesky, by the way! It’s really been livening up and filling with people lately.) Art is where we will put our rage, or our joy, or our hope that a different world is still possible. Or whatever else our readers are going to need. I don’t know.

(I actually happen to be near the end of my current WIP anyway, in the “oh noes all is lost!!” section before it all resolves. So I feel like what I’m putting into my art, for the next few chapters at least, is despair.)

I think art is inherently political, in that it reflects the beliefs of its author; I think it is also political, in that engaging with art fosters empathy. (Inherently. Even if that’s not what the artist was thinking about.) It can sometimes be political in various other ways. I think good art can be consciously didactic and I enjoy some authors who write that way. But what I find – just for myself, just for my own creative process – is that if I try too hard to fit my art into a political program, even a program I deeply agree with, I freeze up and overthink and stop being able to make art.

I can’t promise that my art will channel any of the needs of the moment but mine. I can’t promise it will save any of you. Maybe a lot of art will save a lot of people, in the next few years, even in ways that its creators did not expect. That tends to happen, even in better times. But we’re going to need a lot of other tools as well.

Anyway, the one piece about the importance of art in these times that did resonate with me is DongWon Song’s.

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The remaining recommendations in this newsletter are for things I read before the election.

Alice Towey, “I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws” (Fantasy, Issue 87, January 2023)

I have such affection for parts of the self that are in shadow or otherwise exiled from normal consciousness, and I love the mix of revulsion and tenderness with which Towey’s narrator describes one of hers.

Grace Cahill, “flood fish/pumpkin moon” (The Deadlands, Issue 22, February 2023)

What I love about this one is the uncertainty, the way survivors try to make sense out of a disaster, not directly in the “why did this happen?” sense but in something more like a personifying of what the flood leaves behind. The sense that, of course, a rational survivor wouldn’t be seeing this or feeling this way – but they all do anyway.

Pooja Peravali, “The Changeling and the Child” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 9, 2023)

Normally when I read changeling stories, they’re about neurodivergence, or about being rejected by one’s parents in some way. Like, I hadn’t really thought about it, but that’s the norm for changeling stories these days. It’s not really a subversion anymore. Peravali takes a different tack, and dares to write a changeling story where the human mother of the story is the hero. What if all the business about fairies stealing babies and replacing them with fairy babies was literally true? In that case, what would it look like to address the situation, not with the abuse that we hear of in folklore but with kindness, love, and courage? Peravali has an answer to that question, and her answer is good.

Leah Bobet, “Notable Escapes” (June 19, 2023)

Harry says: when faced with straitjackets, / get bigger. I hate words like “inspiring”; but a poem like this feels – intentionally, I think – like a manual for resistance.

Stephen Granade, “The Sigilist’s Notes on the Fell Lord’s Staff” (PodCastle 807, October 3, 2023)

Look, “devoted minion who has a crush on the Dark Lord” is one of my bulletproof tropes, okay? I never get tired of it – not even after deconstructing it to death in The Fallen. Anyway this story delivers the goods, with a cute list-like format and in a refreshingly sweet way.

Francine Rubin, “Gravity” (Small Wonders, Issue 6, 2023)

Space is great! Also, it is physically and psychologically very difficult to be in space. I love the detail and care with which this poem compactly explores the claustrophobia and unrootedness of a space traveler, while also holding space for the longing that spurs them to make those travels regardless.