(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Summer is a weird time, both in publishing and in academia. Structure dissolves. Everyone’s off traveling, either for personal reasons or for urgent work ones. A university town like mine starts to feel hot and empty – but not restfully empty, or at least that’s not what it was this time. Too much course prep, faculty union business, and other largely-invisible work to keep doing. Not to mention the continuous background world-is-on-fire of it all.

Then of course September starts and you’re suddenly back in the whirlwind.

I’m writing this on the tail end of having caught a stupid flu bug that’s been going around on campus, which is why it’s a little later than the real equinox. I was, frankly, feeling a little overwhelmed even before the flu. Nevertheless, I’ve been reading (and watching, and playing) things. And some of them have been exceptionally good.

Meanwhile: remember when I said I reserved the right to change my category system whenever I wanted to? It’s only the third one of these quarterly review posts and I am changing it already. Most of the media I loved over the summer was at least mildy dark and hard-hitting – but most of it was also full of sensawunda and adventure, a combo that made the distinction between “Flights of Fancy” and “The Ones that Haunt Me” feel arbitrary, picky, and meaningless. So I’m not making the distinction this time! All the fiction is going in one big pile! Enjoy.

Perilous Adventures

N.K. Jemisin, “The Fifth Season” (novel, Orbit, 2015)

Holy shit. Why did I wait this long to read this book? Why did I wait eleven entire years? Why did the historic three Hugo awards for all three books in the trilogy not convince me?? I should not have waited. The Fifth Season made my head explode, but in a good way. You know when you pick up a book and it’s so good you get mad because why can’t I be this good, what is the point of writing if I can’t be this good? Yeah? Yeah.

Anyway if you are coming in as late as I am, then I’m not even going to spoil anything for you, because this is the kind of book where the less is spoiled, the better. I’ll tell you what you’ll already know from the buzz and the back cover copy: there is a world beset by near-constant earthquakes, volcanoes, and (occasionally) civilization-ending disasters. Some people have a magical ability to control what the earth beneath them is doing, and are feared for it. That’s already a pretty interesting premise, but you need to know that Jemisin starts with this premise and then does not stop. Things just keep unfolding, breathtakingly, revelation after revelation, for the whole book and also presumably the next two. Now I need to go get the next two. Argh.

Aliette de Bodard, “A Game of Three Generals” (originally from 2017, but I read it in The Sunday Morning Transport, July 5, 2026)

This lyrical story from the Xuya universe starts with a woman imprisoned on a lava planet, being cared for and entertained by an artificial Mind. It’s clear from the beginning that she has memory problems and is not fully aware of what’s going on around her. One begins to suspect that what’s going on around her is probably bad. One is, of course, eventually proven correct, and heartbreakingly so.

The Pitt, Season One (TV show, HBO Max, Jan-April 2025)

I mean, I barely need to say anything about this? Everyone knows about this show already. I don’t even watch medical dramas actually but I decided I would try it, because it was on Bell Crave and everyone on Bluesky was raving about how good it is. All I will say is that (a) the gifted, burned-out, PTSD-addled, trying-their-best characters are all very relatable, (b) I needed tissues a lot, and (c) the pacing is fun. I get bored easily with procedurals; if I can already tell that the current suspect in your mystery-of-the-week is not the culprit because not enough minutes of runtime have gone past, then you’ve lost me. But in the emergency room there are constantly 35 things going on and there’s no telling which ones will resolve easily vs which ones are going to spiral into a huge ongoing problem. You get lulled at about the 2/3 mark into thinking surely the characters have already managed all the crises they can possibly manage in one day, and then lol, lmao, that’s when the actual crisis starts.

(If the show does have one flaw, it’s that it sometimes feels like every possible Very Special Episode is happening at once; but then, given what a hospital emergency room is for, and given the way today’s social issues are real phenomena that directly affect the health of actual random humans, it is pretty plausible that a group of harried emergency room staff might actually have to deal with all them at this pace.)

Also, yes, it’s very obvious that Dr. Mel King is supposed to be autistic (even though only her sister is actually called by that word) and she is adorable and I love her.

I also have decided that the way the later episodes in this season handle violence – not showing the violence itself or the perpetrator at all, but being extremely graphic and unflinching about the aftermath – is one of the most effective ways you can possibly get an anti-violence message across in today’s media landscape. Whew.

S.L. Huang, “The Language of Liars” (novella, Tordotcom, April 2026)

This is another book where I don’t want to spoil much beyond what’s already in the back cover copy. The setting felt retro to me in a really fun way – one of these galaxies that we don’t see as much of in serious SF anymore, full of teeming multitudes of nonhuman beings. So did the dense reliance on linguistics to drive the worldbuilding, as full of expert jargon as the hardest of hard SF, but easy to follow (for me, at least) because of the narrator’s sheer joy in the knowledge they have and the investigation they’re doing. That narrator is Ro, a neurodivergent member of a burrowing mammal species, who longs to “jump” into the mind of an enigmatic space-dwelling species called a Star Eater and see things through the Star Eater’s eyes. For Ro, the lure of a jump is about language and cultural learning; unfortunately, for his elders, it’s more about espionage. The back cover warns very loudly that when Ro succeeds, it will have large-scale, civilization-ending consequences, but it’s vague about exactly how that happens. When the big, tragic twist did come, it was original enough to take me completely by surprise – but it gave immense new meaning to everything that had happened before it.

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (video game, ZA/UM, May 2026)

You knew this review was coming! After falling so hard for Disco Elysium in my last newsletter, I was very excited to play this next. While I don’t love it quite as wildly as I loved Disco, I like it a lot. It’s a worthy successor that preserves the most interesting game mechanics of Disco while also expanding the world and taking some interesting risks with its story.

Zero Parades is a spy thriller, not a detective story, and its most audacious departure from Disco’s formula happens right at the beginning: instead of meeting up with a helpful, steadying, Kim Kitsuragi-like influence, your character CASCADE arrives to find her assigned partner catatonic under mysterious circumstances and her controller angrily warning her off the case. Naturally, the story instead demands that you stick around to figure out what happened; by the time you find out who the real villains are, you’ll have managed to assemble a whole ragtag crew to help you take them down. But for the earliest and largest parts of this story, CASCADE is on her own.

Or, seemingly on her own: fortunately, the chorus of inner voices that were so striking in Disco are back for another round. In Zero Parades, the conceit is that CASCADE learned to have this type of internal dialogue as a part of her spy training. Compared to Disco, Zero Parades seems to have a little bit of a clearer awareness that they’re actually depicting some form of plural spectrum experience. (“Doppelgäng: When you must do more than a single ‘you’ could.”) I mostly like this, but the downside is that CASCADE and her voices – while undoubtedly a mess– are not quite as colorful as Disco’s. There are a lot of skill facets that can speak up for themselves and give variously helpful or questionable advice, but there is nothing approaching the dysfunctional absurdity of Disco’s Horrible Necktie – or even, say, Limbic System. (I miss Limbic System.)

The actual story is mostly really good. Zero Parades’ map feels bigger and more elaborate than Disco’s map, although you don’t get to see it all at once; the story feels more complex, and with more spots where you can choose to approach a problem in more than one, substantively different way. (I occasionally got confused and tried to solve the same problem in both or all three ways, but that’s a me problem.) There are some modest but interesting updates to Disco’s mechanics, including an anxiety/fatigue/delirium system and a distinct way of presenting urgent, combat-like encounters without having to use separate skills for combat. I found it occasionally hard to figure out how to act like a proper spy, as opposed to just wandering around and going through the dialogue trees, but the dialogue trees are never boring. The tone is as wearily, spitefully cynical as Disco, and if anything, a bit darker; I found myself making moral compromises, as CASCADE, that I would never have considered as Harry Du Bois. The plot gets interestingly weirder as it goes – its influences, apparently, include both Le Carré and Le Guin – and the finale is dramatic as heck. I finished the game a bit exhausted, but glad to have taken the ride.

As a side note – since talking about this is my brand – there’s a minor character here who I totally read as autistic. It’s not the most flattering depiction, but I have met some autistic men who, if they went through the same things as HOLOCENE and were isolated for as long, would absolutely go off the rails in the exact way he does.

You may have already seen, from the tone of this review, why it’s going to be an uphill battle for this game: it’s impossible to talk about it for more than three sentences without comparing it, positively or negatively, to Disco Elysium. And because of some drama with the game company, a lot of Disco’s original fans are likely not going to pick this one up. It’s a shame, because – as I mentioned last time – I want interiority RPGs to become a whole genre of their own. I want to get to a point where one talks about Disco-alikes in the same way that one discusses Souls-likes, or roguelikes, or Stardew-likes, or Metroidvanias. Zero Parades has a strong enough creative vision to stand on its own – unlike Esoteric Ebb, the other Disco-alike I’ve played, which was cute and fun but felt only half like itself and half like a big pile of Disco references. But the second, third, fourth entries in a burgeoning new subgenre will inevitably struggle in the long shadow of the first. I hope Zero Parades is remembered kindly. I will certainly be looking out for the next few of these, either from Zaum or from the various competitor companies that Disco’s writers have scattered to.

Sofia Samatar, “Mirror Mirror” (short story, Future Tense Fiction, June 26, 2026)

This is from a bystander’s perspective – a personal assistant who stumbles onto the story after the fact – but it’s mainly the gorgeously told story of a tech company that tried to build a perfect simulation of empathetic eye contact, which Went Horribly Right.

For obvious reasons there are a lot of stories lately about the tech industry and its problems, and about generative AI in particular. Many of them fall flat for me, not because they are bad stories, but because I am just already inundated with this stuff (and tasked with trying to explain this stuff to students) at my day job. The average post-2022 AI story spends too much time righteously explaining how aware I should be about a set of issues that I am already aware of – exhaustedly, and often in greater detail than the story’s author. (Mind you, I’m sure there are some readers who feel this way about my own AI book. Let’s just say I was not nearly this exhausted back in 2023.)

Sofia Samatar, of course, is too smart to write the average post-2022 AI story. She spends no time preaching to the choir and just the bare minimum of time showing hints of the real world problems that inspired her. What she does spend lavish and effective time on is feelings. First, the reckless and heady excitement of the tech company itself, swept up in the conviction that it’s going to change everything, without ever quite articulating what the expected results of this change are going to be. And second, the uncanny, slowly unfolding horror of what the company does create – the inescapable, singularity-like gravity of feeling a perfect connection to an empty and frictionless machine.

The parallels between this horror and the horror that exists in real life – the AI therapist, for instance, that the narrator briefly notes her housemate using – are largely left for the reader to draw. But drawing them is easy.

(By the way: another really good post-2022 AI story that did a number on me, back in 2025 when I wasn’t reviewing anything, is B. Pladek’s “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” (short story, Lightspeed, January 2025.) Literally I had a little meltdown in the group chat about how good it was, like what is the point of me writing if I can’t be this good. (And then my friends were like “We love your writing and we love Pladek’s writing but you are two very different apple and orange types of writing!” which is the correct response to a meltdown of that type.) So if you are looking for heartrending stories about genAI that have enough nuance to go beyond the obvious points, you should go read that one, too!)

Cara Masten Digirolamo, “Promises, Promises” (short story, Strange Horizons, July 6, 2026)

I love a good fae bargain, or deal with the devil, or whatever you want to call the agreements and transformations that are made in this story. The premise is that a queer social worker has been trying to help a queer teen; now the teen has vanished, and the social worker suspects that a mysterious app that grant wishes is to blame.

What really clinches this one for me is the nuanced depiction of tensions between different generations of queer person. Neither the social worker nor the teen feel at home in their bodies, but they’ve made sense out of this feeling in two different ways; they have paid different prices and accepted different compromises in order to exist in the world. It’s more than a misunderstanding, and not the kind of tension that can be soothed away with the chirpy platitudes of a 101-level introduction to trans rights. But it leaves them at dangerous odds with each other in a way that cries out to be resolved, even though their hearts will ultimately lead both of them to the same thing.

Zoe Bellerive, “Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind” (short story, The Sunday Morning Transport, July 26, 2026)

The fae have their characteristic qualities, few of which make it a good idea to get close to them – entrapping forms of glamour, strict and opaque rules, harsh punishments. The genius of this little story is in showing why an ordinary guy might know the risks and still prefer them to his other options in the economically uncertain, pandemic-ridden present. It might not even turn out badly for him – depending on how you interpret that ending.

Meg Elison, “Small Wonder” (short story, The Rumpus, August 16, 2026)

Well, this is the one that made me hesitate and wish I was keeping my “The Ones That Haunt Me” category, because it is harrowing. It is about child abuse, in a way which is never directly shown but is increasingly, painfully obvious to the reader – and, eventually, to the protagonist, no matter how hard she tries to dissociate and displace what she’s remembering. (It is also, secondarily, about AI, in a nasty little way that you will not see coming until you trip over it.) It messed me up, but it’s really well done.

The More You Know!

Meanwhile, I also loved some things – relatively light things, for the most part – that weren’t fiction at all.

Cathy O’Neill, “Weapons of Math Destruction” (nonfiction book, Crown Books, 2016)

I’d been meaning for a long time to read this classic book on the social impact of algorithms as it becomes more and more relevant to my work. Most of the information wasn’t new to me, but I was looking for ways that certain problems can be explained succinctly for my students, with good examples, and I found those in spades. A lot has changed since 2016 but it surprised me how many of O’Neill’s concerns can be transplanted verbatim to the present day without significant change. A lot of the problems that we think of as AI problems did not spring into existence with ChatGPT – they have been with us for quite a while longer, and are only getting worse.

Ruthanna Emrys, “Seeds of Story” (recurring nonfiction column, Tordotcom)

I really should have put this in the June newsletter, because I read all the archived post in the spring and then continued to read it over the summer, but I forgot! It wasn’t until early July, when I mentioned in a Bluesky conversation that I loved this column, when I was like “oh, yeah, and I should write a review.”

So! In the Seeds of Story column, Ruthanna Emrys reviews nonfiction books that have been influential in science fiction – or that contain the kind of big, trending ideas that should be more influential in science fiction – pairing them with possible story concepts and ideas for further reading. A few of the books, like Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell and Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities, are books I’ve already read and loved. Many are the kind of books where I’d vaguely heard good things about them already but was delighted to hear more. Many more were fully new to me.

This kind of short form, upbeat-but-thoughtful writing about media is an immense type of comfort reading for me and catnip to my brain. But the comfort is a side effect and not the series’ actual point. More importantly, it’s whetted my curiosity, giving me a whole bunch of new books to add to my wishlist and new ideas to explore. I definitely agree with Emrys’s premise: more speculative fiction writers should be inspired, not just by other people’s fiction, but also by ideas like these.