It’s one thing to be anti-AI in the sense of believing that AI-generated slop, disinformation and deepfakes are bad; that AI companies that hope to con your boss into firing you and replacing you with AI that can’t do your job are bad; that betting the economy on AI is bad; that betting the human-habitable planet Earth on AI is bad; that running roughshod over local environmental rules and seizing …Read More
So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS – OTHER PEOPLE! –Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit
Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) …Read More
Norwescon 48 was held April 2–5, 2026 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Seattle Airport in SeaTac WA; the theme was Illuminating the Way. Guests of honor were Ursula Vernon (writer), Geneva Bowers (artist), Summer Ash (science), and Dutch Bihary (special guest of honor). Orbit was the spotlight publisher, represented by Bradley Englert. The weekend included hundreds of hours of programming with dozens of panels and readings, plus special …Read More
The 42nd annual L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers and Illustrators of the Future awards ceremony was held April 16, 2026 at the Taglyan Complex in Los Angeles, concluding a weeklong intensive of workshops, lectures, and classes for the winners. This year’s Golden Brush Award went to Bohuslav Argalas ”Bafu” from Slovakia for his illustration of ”Saffron and Marigolds” by Kathleen Powell, and the Golden Pen Award went to Michael Kuester …Read More
Making up imaginary new technologies is a fun game – so fun that we’ve built a whole genre around it. Even more fun is making up the social arrangements of those technologies – imagining who will use them and how. Think of Gardner Dozois’s quote: Most SF can predict the car, some SF can predict the drive-in theater, but SF that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as …Read More
The 49th Williamson Lectureship, held April 9-11, 2026 in Portales NM, celebrated Beneath the Bones in academic papers, student art pieces, and a student-led carnival.
Held to honor SF pioneer Jack Williamson at Eastern NM University, the 2026 Lectureship had Ursula Vernon AKA T. Kingfisher as guest of honor and Connie Willis as toastmistress.
San Jose criminalist Cordelia Willis started Thursday with a streamed presentation on Tracking Down the …Read More
The 47th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) was held March 18-21, 2026 at the Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel Lakeside, with the theme of (meta)cognition. Academics, writers, artists, playwrights, filmmakers, editors, and more participated in a weekend of panels and papers, keynotes and conversations on the topic. Guests of honorTed Chiang and Ann Leckie and guest scholar Sherryl Vint were all accessible and friendly. There were …Read More
In Guy Clark’s song ”Cold Dog Soup” he explains that, because poets never make any money anyway, they have total artistic freedom. (I’d quote the lyrics verbatim, but that would require paying for permission, and I’m a poet, too, so I don’t have any money.) It’s a true, if lamentable, point: Nobody gets into writing poetry in a serious way for the money. Writing short fiction is like owning …Read More
Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA), once described how the organization almost faltered early on. It wasn’t from lack of interest. Poets flocked to be part of the group! So many members signed up that it was hard to type, copy, and mail the monthly newsletter. Fortunately, volunteers jumped in to help, and the SFPA has survived since 1978 as a hub for …Read More
Science fiction poetry has been in the spotlight lately after SFWA added a Nebula award for Best Poem (to be awarded starting in 2026) and after the successful campaign to name the 2025–26 special Hugo Award category as Poetry. You won’t hear any complaints from me – as the poetry editor for both Asimov’s and Analog, I have a lot of love for the subgenre and hope that the …Read More
Poetry has always been a big part of my writing journey. I had early poems published long before I managed to sell any fiction, but it wasn’t until I tried sending poems to speculative magazines that I actually started getting paid for them. In the years since, magazines have come and gone, adjusted their pay rates and their open submission windows, or began charging submission fees in order to …Read More
Horror is one of the major forms of speculative poetry, but despite its storied history, it is often overlooked. Far older than science fiction, it sprouts from the fetid end of the same ancient pools of folklore and mythology as fantasy. At turns eerie, frightening, or subtly unsettling, horror connects humankind with its primordial fears, allowing us to process anxiety over subjects like death, extinction, dismemberment, abandonment, ego death, …Read More
We demand much of poetry. Most of us encounter poetry first in childhood. As we enter secondary and postsecondary school, our relationship with poetry might become combative. Instead of reading for pleasure or curiosity, our ”understanding” of poetry – how quickly we come to that understanding, and how correctly we express it – becomes evaluative. If we get the answer wrong, we are made to feel ashamed, unintelligent or …Read More
This roundtable was curated by Brandon O’Brien, who also was part of the driving force making this poetry feature happen in Locus. A set of optimistic convention conversations led to this series of features on poetry — so thanks, Brandon, for the time, energy, and encouragement!
What was the first poem you read that helped you understand what speculative poetry is?
Marie Brennan: I like how you’ve phrased …Read More
Less Is More
by Linda D. Addison
Even though I write poetry and fiction, poetry is and has always been my first voice. My imagination always turned to speculative writing, especially poetry. There were dragons, demons, and magic dancing under the thin veneer of reality for me, and the music of poetry always sang in my mind. Poetry has a rhythm to it no matter what form …Read More
The Great Shapeshifter
by Bryan Thao Worra
Speculative poetry is one of the great shapeshifters in human history, going by many names, at times beloved, at others shooed off as a niche interest in the genre fields. At various points we called it science fiction poetry, science fiction and fantasy poetry, escapist poetry, or sometimes just poetry, and presently the catch-all of ”speculative poetry,” which allows any number …Read More
Norms change. That’s a foundation of stfnal thinking: all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. It’s not unusual for the bedrock ethos of your childhood to be overturned by your dotage.
As Douglas Adams put it:
Crises precipitate change. Before Russia’s despicable invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s transition to zero carbon energy lagged a decade behind schedule. Three years later, Europe has surged well over a decade ahead of schedule in their solar transition, and the process is only accelerating. It turns out that all the intractable obstacles to rapid, total technological transition just melt away when you’re shivering in the dark thanks to the aggression of …Read More
They say we have voices in our heads when we write. I have so many of these voices, from friends and beta readers, from my mentors from my MFA program. Listen, Rob Roberge said, if you work hard enough, and show up, and listen, your novel will make itself apparent to you. I have mentor Gayle Brandeis’s constant stronger without comments making me question extraneous sentences, working toward paring …Read More
Who are we to blame for enshittification? That is, who is at fault for the pandemic of platform decay, in which the platforms we depend on, where we congregate, trade, perform, sell, buy, connect, love, argue, and mobilize are all turning into piles of shit, all at once?
50 years of neoliberal canon says that we have to blame consumers. You, me, and everyone we know cast ballots in an …Read More
Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out …Read More
The 2025 SFWA Nebula Conference was held June 5-8 at the Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza in Kansas City MO and also held online for remote attendees.The conference organizers declined to state the number of attendees, but noted that there were roughly equal online and in person attendance…. 2024 had about 225 warm bodies and another 272 registered for online-only access, while 2023 had roughly 200 warm bodies …Read More
If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!
Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner …Read More
Science fiction, at its best, has always been about inclusiveness and acceptance of the other, a lens through which we can better understand the broadest and deepest reaches of our human condition. With the stated purpose of building relationships with an international gathering of writers from a broad range of interests and backgrounds, Hal-Con Japan continues to celebrate this view. This year’s Hal-Con took place at Kawasaki International Center …Read More
Norwescon 47 was held April 17–20, 2025 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Seattle Airport in SeaTac WA; the theme was ”Through the Cosmic Telescope.” Guests of honor were Catherynne M. Valente (writer), Wayne Barlowe (artist), Tracy Drain (science), and Isis Asare (special guest of honor). Paizo was the spotlight publisher, represented by Jenny Jarzabski and Mike Kimmel. The weekend included hundreds of hours of programming with dozens of …Read More
The 46th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) took place March 19-22, 2025 at the Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel Lakeside, with the theme of ”Night Terrors.”Academics, writers, publishers, editors, artists, students, independent scholars, and more participated in a weekend of conversation, papers, and events on the topic,with 363 guests attending (up from about 330 last year) and 160 people at the awards banquet. Silvia Moreno-Garcia was …Read More
If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.
Most …Read More
In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.
Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their classwork. Marty …Read More
During a recent trip to Singapore, I went book shopping. The science fiction and fantasy shelves of the Books Kinokuniya on Orchard Road predominantly featured familiar titles, but there were also a good number of locally published books by writers unknown to me. The specific publisher that caught my eye was Penguin Random House SEA, perhaps because in the UK almost all the SF titles with a penguin on the …Read More
It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Has it? Honestly, it feels like 2024 just began, and here we are at the end, staring down the uncertainty of the year to come. However, as always, my fiction reading – both for my review columns and for myself – has been a comfort and a highlight. I know I’ve missed out on many wonderful works. There are sadly only so many hours …Read More
Some years, it feels like there’s a central book in SF and fantasy, one around which the conversation orbits. A few obvious examples: Neuromancer in 1984, Ancillary Justice in 2013, This Is How You Lose the Time War in 2019. In my reading, 2024 was not such a year. There were plenty of good books – see below – but as a year it felt curiously decentered, as if the …Read More
In the summer of 2024, Briardene Books published Track Changes, a collection of my reviews. There’s nothing like putting a book like that together, combing your way through nearly 20 years of work, to make you think about the project of canon-building. What books still deserve to be talked about decades after you read them? What books represent shifts in the field, or in literature itself, that you were maybe …Read More
