Every month at The Ansible, we gather the articles that caught our eye, sparked our curiosity, or challenged our thinking about the worlds of fantasy and science fiction and book culture at large. September featured cozy reading recommendations, deep sea creatures, fantasy poetry, and considerations of translation in fiction. Consider this transmission your shortcut to the best conversations happening across the genres right now.
Who doesn’t love a good reading list? Grab a blanket, some warm tea, and cuddle up with one of these quality recommendations from The Fantasy Hive. I’ll throw my weight behind two recommendations: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.
The First Hugo for Poetry: An Interview with Marie Brennan
I’m young enough that the titan awards in SFF seem inevitable and unchanging, that beyond naming controversies their categories have long since been solidified. Last month we covered the Hugo winners. At the time I didn’t notice a new category addition: poetry. Thankfully, SFWA came to the rescue by publishing this insightful interview with the first-ever winner of the Hugo Award for Speculative Poetry, Marie Brennan.
Creatures of the Abyss: An Exercise in Science-Fictional Thinking
Author Judith Tarr (The Hound and the Falcon trilogy) asks us to consider the alien and “downright weird” environment and animals of the deep ocean.
What is steampunk and why does it exist?
A well-written article from Thoughts on Fantasy considering the origins of steampunk alongside a trip to Wuppertal, Germany.
On the Internet's General Inability to Properly Recommend Books
Shameless plug. Recommending books is hard. It requires a mixture of genre expertise, professional training, and a bit of art. Turning to search engines or forums often yields the same results over and over. This persistent problem is precisely why at Snowlock Books we created Personalized Reading Recommendations. This Reddit thread offers good analysis of the problem as well as funny stories of recommending gone wrong. Both contain useful information to improve the quality of your recommendation to friends.
Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Anthropic Settlement
U.S. District Judge William Aslup gave preliminary approval to a $1.5 billion settlement in the class action lawsuit between authors and the AI company Anthropic. According to the settlement, authors will receive $3,000 for each eligible work that was pirated by Anthropic to train their AI. Around 482,000 works are qualified to receive said payment. Fantasy and science fiction authors can refer to this helpful FAQ from SFWA that outlines the case and helps authors determine if they’re affected.
On Translation Fiction and the Comfort of Monolingualism
If Babel by R. F. Kuang piqued your interest in translation check out this essay from the LA Review of Books by Marie Lambert wherein she “analyzes recent works of fiction that feature translators as protagonists, and the questions they raise about cross-cultural communication in a heterogeneous world.”
Why don't you read indie/self-published fantasy books?
Just as some folks from outside the speculative genres look down on fantasy and science fiction, so too do some folks within our genre look down on self-published novels. I admit I share this is a stigma I share and actively try to work against. For those of you interested in how a sample of our community views traditional vs. self-published, check out this Reddit thread.
Why you should get (back) into RSS curation
Here’s a good reminder to return to RSS feed. Reclaim your time on the internet and get one step further from ads and from algorithms trying to pigeonhole you and force content you don’t care about upon you. RSS feeds allow you to build your own personalized aggregator. It’s what we use to keep up with all things fantasy and science fiction.
A long and well-documented article about the eviction of Josephine County libraries. Unfortunately the attitudes of those behind the eviction are all too common. Every year many libraries across the US have to spend substantial amounts of time simply fighting for funding, or in this case, their existence. It’s hard to be the best resource for your community when your livelihood and passion are consistently called into question.
In a win for free speech and a loss for those in favor of censorship a federal judge upheld precedent by ruling that parts of Florida HB 1069 are unconstitutional. Florida’s Department of Education argued that HB 1069 is protected under ‘government speech’. The judge dismissed this argument noting that: “slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints.”
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