Ada Hoffmann's Blog

Meet me at Can*Con! (And other news)

(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.

This is my first time making promo graphics in Canva, and it probably shows…

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.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS

[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?

2024 sure was a year.

(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.

Auction for Trans Lifeline

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.

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.

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.

A secret, silent story! + 3 book recs

Hi all,

It’s back-to-school time! I always enjoy the rush of new faces and new things to do at my day job (though it also leaves me very tired.) Whether or not you are involved in any school system in any capacity, I hope you’ve found something about this month to refresh and invigorate you.

Meanwhile, amid this rush, I just realized that I had a story come out back in July and never told you.

The Silent Sea appears in Issue Sixteen of Baffling Magazine. This is a themed issue, on the theme of “quiet,” and different authors interpreted the theme in very different ways – “From the quiet to the the cozy, the silent to the silenced,” as editor dave ring puts it.

My story is about an ocean that no longer makes the set of ocean sounds you would expect, and a protagonist who craves that silence more than anything.

“The Silent Sea” started life as a writing exercise given by Marianne Kirby. The assignment was: imagine something that normally makes a sound. Now imagine it doesn’t make that sound anymore, and describe it using your other senses. I ran with it from there. 🙂

*

Meanwhile, here are three books I’ve read lately that left an impression on me.

RB Lemberg – Everything Thaws: A poetic cycle (Ben Yehuda Press, February 2023)

Ok, so, full disclosure: RB is my friend and I love everything that they write. But don’t go in expecting it to feel like Birdverse. Everything Thaws is a memoir in verse, and in many ways it’s a striking departure for Lemberg. The themes of trauma and loss that always haunt their work are rawer here, and visible in a way that’s closer to real-world home. You’ll like this if you like real-world stories of immigration and how pain is passed down from generation to generation. I liked it a lot.

Akwaeke Emezi – Content Warning: Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022)

Speaking of raw and close to home – whew. The title is accurate; this one’s not for the faint of heart. It’s a poetry collection, brief but powerful, and what I love about it most is the way it blends the mythic with the real – it almost seems unfair to call it mythic when it’s so obviously and intimately drawn from the author’s own experience. Figures from more than one religion accompany Emezi through their turbulent life, not objects of worship so much as family and confidantes who participate with them directly even in the most difficult moments. I’m going to keep thinking about this one for a long time.

RB Lemberg – Yoke of Stars (Tachyon Publications, July 2024)

Two Lembergs in one email? Is that allowed? Am I breaking some rule of reviewing? Well, whatever – I happened to read two of Lemberg’s books in close succession recently and I love them both. Yoke of Stars is their latest work and it is a return to Birdverse in its finest mythic form. It’s the story of an encounter between two characters – a linguist and an assassin – with two very different stories, who find that their fates are intertwined in ways that neither of them could have imagined when they began. Its central question – can people be in community with each other and still free? – is one that haunts me, and one that I happen to have been chewing on in therapy for a while now. Lemberg handles it with impressive sensitivity and depth, and you will want to hear their answer.

The Neurodiversiverse is out!

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Or actually it came out a week and a half ago, but I’ve been avoiding my newsletter. But anyway, Thinking Ink Press’s anthology of alien encounter stories featuring neurodivergent protagonists is out now and you should buy it!

I’m honored to be one of the anchor authors for this anthology – it features my flash story, “Music, Not Words,” about a minimally verbal teenage girl who starts hearing alien messages that aren’t verbal at all. “Music, Not Words” was solicited specifically for this anthology. I’m even more honored that this puts me in a category with other anchor authors that include Tobias S. Buckell, Jody Lynn Nye, and Cat Rambo.

(I think of myself as midlist small potatoes, but when it comes to the very specific niche topic of Autism In Speculative Fiction, it looks like I still am that bitch.)

Even better, you can read the first page of “Music, Not Words” as an excerpt on the book’s website. (You’ll need to scroll down a bit.)

I’ve been writing less short fiction and less poetry lately so I can focus on novels (there is a lot of novel stuff going on behind the scenes; I will have a novel related announcement for you eventually I swear) but I still do enjoy these forms and it’s great to get something of them out in the world.

Meanwhile!

I said I owed you some more recommendations, especially for nonfiction/poetry/other formats, but then I never did it, partly because I was so comically behind that I found myself trying to put together thoughts about stale blog posts that I read months ago when they were already months old, and that was so cringe, I just could not do it. So I’m giving myself amnesty! Clean review slate! Next newsletter, you will get a fresh set of recommendations that are strictly for things I’ve read in the time since this current one. Everything else goes in the trash, sorry, bye.

(Although, speaking of poetry: How ‘bout that poetry Hugo. I am excited about this.)

In the meantime, though, I want to give a quick shout-out to two things I watched in the last couple of months that I’m still absolutely feral over.

The Acolyte (Disney+)

Everyone knows I am Star Wars trash, but I was honestly getting so bored with it after Ahsoka that I let my Disney+ subscription lapse. But then the trailer for this thing came out and it reeled my little Dark Side heart all the way back in. Look, there are certain ways of looking at and interpreting Star Wars that are very personal to me and that I don’t go around expecting the rest of the fandom to share. And it’s like Leslye Headland reached in and plucked those things right out of me and put them on the screen. I’m not even okay about it. I love this so much.

If you want a more objective type of review then I will say that The Acolyte intelligently questions some of the underlying assumptions of the rest of Star Wars in a way that no one else has been brave enough to do since The Last Jedi; it stands on its own merits as a twisty little mystery-thriller instead of putting all its emotional weight into tie-ins and callbacks; and it trusts the viewer enough to throw some really fun unreliable-narrator curveballs into the mix. It’s worth watching. I wish the hatey fanboys weren’t so loud.

The 2024 Paris Olympics

I know, I know. You all already know what this is, and you either watched it too, or are sick of the entire concept. Okay but here’s a fun fact about me: I really love the Olympics. For the rest of the year I do not really think about sports at all, but then every two years this thing happens and for a couple of weeks I get completely obsessed. I love the spectacle! I love the drama! I love how it’s all the countries in the world, competing at everything at once! RIP to everyone who tried to talk to me between July 26 – August 11, because it was nothing but Olympics Infodumps all day.

(Like: Did you know that every different cycling sport has a different style of bike helmet, and women boxers wear helmets but men don’t, because their different styles of boxing lead to slightly different types of head injury risks! Did you know how many different ways there are to score in freestyle wrestling! Did you know that they had to pause the women’s speed climbing competition because the climbers are supposed to hit a big button to register their time when they get to the top and the buttons stopped working! Did you know that the girl who got dogpiled for breakdancing badly has actually been breaking competitively for over a decade, but took time off so she could write a PhD thesis about gender in Australian breaking culture! Yeah? Yeah. Also Canada broke our record for the most number of medals at a non-boycotted summer Olympics, although given Russia’s conspicuous absence from every sport this year, I would question whether it is appropriate to call it “non-boycotted” for this purpose…)

Anyway, that’s all from me. Hope you are all well, and are also finding plenty of things to be excited about, despite gestures around you know, the world lately.

Best,

Ada

Notice: I'm stepping back from Goodreads.

Hey all,

I've decided that I'm not going to list the books I'm reading or my ratings of them on this site anymore. For a lot of reasons, I increasingly feel that this isn't the right space for me to do this as an author. I've removed the books from my "currently reading" list and will no longer be adding any to that list or to my "Want To Read."

This won't result in any change to my author page or the listings of my own books. If you subscribe to this account so you can see my blog posts, then my blog posts will continue to be synchronized to Goodreads, but you can follow them more directly by going to Buttondown (https://buttondown.email/ada-hoffmann/) or to ada-hoffmann.com.

I still plan to talk periodically in my newsletter about things that I've read and enjoyed or found thought-provoking, but I want to do it in my own space and in my own style.

Thanks for understanding and for your continued support.

Things I’ve Been Reading (short story edition)

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Hi all,

Before we get into any story recs, I want to tell you I’ll be at the virtual Nebula conference this weekend! I’m moderating one panel: Writing and Navigating Publishing as Persons With Disabilities, at 1:30pm PST, with the excellent panelists Effie Seiberg, Sumiko Saulson, and Vickie Navarra. If you’re at the Nebulas, stop by – I think it’ll be a great discussion!

But now, I’ve promised you I’ll tell you about some stories I’ve loved or found thought-provoking since last October. (Though many of them were published earlier than that; I’m not a super timely reader.) Here goes!

*

It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there.

Nic Anstett, “Monsters of the Drunken Shore” (Lightspeed, July 2023)

This is really short and packs an emotional punch, without anything necessarily “happening,” per se. I love the juxtaposition of the big, unknowable sea creature with the big, confused feelings of the college-age protagonists who are still just trying to grow up.

*

“You’ve left the doors open?”

“All of them. The child just goes and hides even further in the dark.”

Cynthia Gómez, “The Ones Who Come Back to Heal” (Strange Horizons, July 17, 2023)

Omelas stories are a bit of a hard sell for me. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s just that it’s getting to be a cliché. This one rang really true for me, though, with its focus on the slow, painful, uncertain reality of helping someone heal from heavy trauma, and on the consent and free will of the person being healed. [1]

*

Cynthia Gómez, “Lips Like Sugar” (Luna Station Quarterly, Issue 55)

Looks like Luna Station Quarterly’s website is under reconstruction, so I can’t get a pull quote or a proper link right now. And I actually didn’t realize, until just now when I was putting this post together, that I was reccing two stories in a row by the same author. But! I love this queer, working-class take on the vampire story. Vivi is an immortal creature of the night, but that doesn’t save her from having to deal with rent, menial work, relationship troubles, or the supervisor who’s sexually harassing her. Still, she’s powerful in new ways – and it takes her time to decide what she wants to use that power for.

*

What is worse, I heard that all those rejected by your magazine also die. This is of course all just silly rumours. I notice that your magazine only has one story on it, despite its ridiculously high pay rate of a hundred thousand dollars per story. These are just the silly worries of a newbie writer, and your standards are probably just high.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, “The Magazine of Horror” (Apex Magazine, Issue 139, August 2023)

This is a fun little story that I read in two different ways. It works just fine as a bit of silly, fluffy horror about a magazine that’s more than it seems and a naive author who doesn’t believe the clear warnings. But I think there’s also a metaphor here for some things that really happen in publishing – in particular for the idea that there can only be one, best author from a particular group, especially a marginalized group; and that, once you’ve had your turn being the best, the only remaining path is a dramatic fall from grace.

*

“I like the little singing you do to yourself,” Ashley said nonchalantly, not even looking up from her console. “You have a really nice voice.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said quietly, “I put a lot of work into it.” I wanted to say so much, about the challenges and frustration it had caused me, the intense dysphoria I felt about it from an early age, the agony and joy of learning to sing again—but I knew if I opened up, it would only fan the fires of the feelings I had towards Ashley. For me, vulnerability was a dangerous substance, a doorway to desire.

Tessa Fisher, “Morning Star Blues” (Rosalind’s Siblings, September 2023)

Kelsey, a trans woman scientist, is on a long-haul flight to Venus with another trans woman to search for signs of life. After a sexual assault scare between a cis man and woman on a previous mission, Mission Control hopes that fielding all-trans-women teams, with their hormones purposely adjusted to keep their sex drives low, will prevent any repeats of that situation. Despite this, Kelsey is developing a crush on her crewmate. There’s a lot to unpack here about how trans people – especially trans women – are simultaneously desexualized and seen as sexual threats, and how delicate it can be to form intimate relationships in spite of all this; and Fisher does unpack the latter part of it gently and vulnerably.

*

“But she wasn’t you,” she goes on, when I don’t respond. “I looked into those big baby eyes and I saw absolutely nothing.”

Lindsay King-Miller, “Changeling” (Baffling, Issue Thirteen, October 2, 2023)

You know I’m a sucker for changeling stories. This one comes at it from a queer & eating disordered perspective, not an autistic one, but it makes the underlying toxicity of changeling folklore – the idea that a parent can and should hurt a child, if it’s not the child they wanted or believed they deserved – painfully and beautifully clear.

*

So the queen wavin’ and I only know that I have to throw flowers at she. The queen so close to me, I can almost go up to touch she. So everybody cheering and throwing flowers, and I go to throw my flowers, and I pelt it—stem, leaf, thorn and all, right up next to she face.

Sarah Ramdawar, “I Attack the Queen!” (Strange Horizons, October 30, 2023)

I love what this quick, punchy piece of flash fiction does with POV and with defamiliarization. How something that looks expected and mundane in one way, to the dominant culture, can be completely surreal in another. (I don’t know if it would be defamiliarizing in the same way to someone who is actually from Trinidad – probably not! – but all I can really report is my own response.)

*

I’m overriding the doors. You all know as well as I do that—can you hear me? I’m not getting anything on the speakers in here. You all know as well as I do that no one can come in until the shielding is back in place.

Premee Mohamed, “Imagine Yourself Happy” (Small Wonders, Issue 5, November 2023)

This is, again, very short – it’s literally just four minutes of a dying scientist’s last monologue. Given that premise, it’s surprisingly matter-of-fact and accepting; it ends up saying something that really resonates with me about the nature and purpose of a finite life.

*

“Did they catch you, Ol. Did anybody see you?”

“Oh. Oh, no.”

I let the silence stretch. They reached to turn on the road trip playlist, and I interrupted to ask: “Then why did I have to drive that fast?”

I let my eyes drift from the road for a split second to assess what was going on with my friend. Their eyes were huge in the lights of a passing semi. Their face was set, stoic. “You know how my parents are.”

Marissa Lingen, “A Piece of the Continent” (Uncanny, Issue Fifty-Five, November/December 2023)

I don’t know why this little trans ghost story hit me as hard as it did – but then, Marissa Lingen’s short stories always knock it out of the park.

*

i think I believe that. But the human mind can hold such contradictory thoughts. At the same time that I say the words “time in the sun,” I am thinking of Ann falling. As if spliced into a disorderly film, my many memories of Ann’s falls run together…

Beston Barnett, “Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe” (Strange Horizons, November 20, 2023)

METI is an artificial intelligence designed to greet extraterrestrials, in the depths of space, by showing them a single human memory. But memory is complicated – perhaps more complicated than METI’s designers anticipated – and to understand the meaning of even one memory requires an enormous depth of context and acceptance of contradiction. This one seems like it could be pretty abstract at first, but it gradually blossoms into something devastatingly human.

*

A tide of unrelenting change, of complete and perfect impossibility, washes over them in the tunnel. The walls taste metallic when she looks at them; her skin feels like the smell of rain on sun-warmed pavement. Her fingers are willow branches and her tongue is the colour of fear.

Richard Ford Burley, “After Angels” (Haven Speculative, Issue Twelve, December 2023)

I absolutely love the weird, surreal, numinous horror in this story. Like, yes!! This is how it’s done!!

*

The sketch showed a young woman, her face a perfect oval, holding our base in her cupped hands. Behind her head, Saturn hung golden within its halo of rings. That was the first sign that religion had come with us to Enceladus.

Zohar Jacobs, “The Enceladus South Pole Base Named After V.I. Lenin” (Clarkesworld, February 2024)

I’ve been experiencing an enthusiasm lately for realistic stories about space travel. I don’t necessarily mean stories that could 100% happen in real life – but I do mean stories in a future world where there hasn’t been any massive advance like FTL, cryosleep, or artificial gravity that would fundamentally change the experience of spaceflight compared to what it is now, and where there’s attention to the little details of what present-day spaceflight and the solar system are actually like. This story scratches that itch, but it also does much more – it’s an impressively nuanced story about politics, religion, and the messy inevitability of social change.

*

[1] Before you ask, yes, I did also read Isabel J. Kim’s Omelas story that went viral a few months ago. Kim’s version is clever and hard-hitting – and I love everything Kim writes, generally – but I still like Gómez’s version best.

Things I’ve Been Reading (novel edition)

(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)

Hi all,

So I said I wanted to talk more casually, outside of a traditional book review format, about books that I liked or found thought-provoking. Now I’m putting my money where my mouth is!

It’s been an entire while since I posted any Things I’ve Been Reading, or any formal reviews either – like, checks notes since October, good Lord, and that was just a Short Story Smorgasbord. So rather than giving you a giant deluge of everything I found notable in every format in those last seven months, I’m going to break these next few posts down by genre/format until I’ve caught up again. This week’s newsletter is for novels and novellas. In upcoming weeks you can expect a couple of big dumps of short story links, poetry links, essay links and maybe (maybe!) a few other things.

Some of these are autistic books, and some of them are just books that I happened to like.

Malka Older,  THE MIMICKING OF KNOWN SUCCESSES

I don’t know if Malka Older meant for Mossa – the lesbian Sherlock Holmes character in this cozy, queer, Holmesian mystery set on Jupiter – to be read as autistic, but I read her that way, especially given the autistic tendencies of Holmes himself, which are always being interpreted and reinterpreted in different retellings. Pleiti, Mossa’s Watson character and love interest, already tried having a relationship with her once and failed. Now the two of them are thrown back together by the apparent suicide of someone who works at Pleiti’s university, and Pleiti starts to wonder if it would be worthwhile to try again.

What I really like about this is the nuance with which it approaches the difficulties of a mixed-neurotype relationship. Mossa is brilliant and principled but it’s easy for her to get swept away in the intensity of a case, to neglect communicating with Pleiti or to forget to include her. Older doesn’t shy away from showing Pleiti’s anguish as she tries to interpret Mossa’s actions and wonders if there is really a place for her in Mossa’s life. But this isn’t the kind of romance where Mossa has to change herself to be worthy of love. Rather it’s a question of Pleiti deciding that she’s in a different place now, and that she has become capable of loving Mossa as she is.

Chuck Tingle,  CAMP DAMASCUS

At this point, Chuck Tingle needs no introduction, but I feel like his status as an autistic author should be more widely known. People are like “How could this guy be so prolific? How could he write so quickly, so consistently, with such a particular schtick, all the time? Is he, maybe, three or six guys in a trenchcoat?” But no, literally this is just what it looks like when an autistic person gets really really dedicated to their special interest in writing a particular kind of thing, and decides to throw caution to the wind re: what other people are going to think of it.

CAMP DAMASCUS is an interesting departure from form, in that it’s a horror novel rather than a work of niche erotica. It’s super queer in ways that are obvious from the back cover blurb. It is also, low-key, stealthily, super autistic. Rose’s arc is so familiar to me, as someone who’s known so many autistic people who grew up in a high-control environment. She starts out a true believer, to the point of out-“good girl”-ing the other good girls, but then she finds one little inconsistency and can’t leave it alone, like tugging on a thread and unraveling a whole sweater. (It helps, of course, that this “little inconsistency” involves having creepy demonic visions and coughing up SO MANY FLIES, aaaaugh. 😀 ) Rose can’t help but be ruthlessly true to the facts that she knows, whether these facts support the faith she was raised in or start to go horrifically against it. The process hurts, but she can’t look away or deny what she sees. Her own wiring won’t let her.

Seth Dickinson,  THE MONSTER BARU CORMORANT

So I finally read the first and better-known book in this series, THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT, which I honestly should have read years ago. TRAITOR is really smart and well-done and also devastatingly stressful to read, and I wasn’t sure if I was up for a second round. But I’m glad I stuck it out, because MONSTER is one of those rare second books that I love even more than the first one. The world of the story gets bigger in MONSTER – not just in the sense of Having More Things, but in the sense that it feels more expansive and has more room to breathe. Baru is still having a very bad time and the stakes are, if anything, higher; but the clock isn’t ticking quite as hard, and there’s more space for the book to play with different ideas and different perspectives. It’s hard to really describe without a lot of spoilers, but I feel like there is so much theory of mind in this book. Everybody has different backgrounds and different motives and opinions and interpretations of the mess that they’re all in, and nobody’s opinion is ever held up by the book as, like, The Correct One. Things are just allowed to be messy! I need to see that in books more. Anyway, some readers liked how tense TRAITOR was and were disappointed by MONSTER being slower, but to me it’s a perfect sequel and a masterclass in how to write a second book that doesn’t just repeat the first one with slightly higher scope and stakes, but expands on it intellectually and emotionally.

Tim Pratt,  THE KNIFE AND THE SERPENT

Okay, so I made Travel Friends with Tim in Barcelona and then he asked me if I’d blurb his book, so I did. It’s super-fun! It’s a loopy, goofy, quick-moving, self-indulgent space adventure with everything thrown in including the kitchen sink. It’s also kinky as hell, but in a wholesome way. I forget what I said in my blurb, but I still have positive emotions about it.

Clara Ward,  BE THE SEA

All right, hands up if you like slow-paced books? Hands up if you liked the pause-y, “too introspective” parts of THE OUTSIDE and wished the whole book was like that? I don’t know how many people’s hands are up, but have I got a book rec for you. Reading BE THE SEA felt like diving into the rhythm of a character’s actual life – not “skipping to the good parts,” but watching everything, a day at a time, an hour at a time. It’s an interesting life, which involves sea voyages as well as a gradually unfolding set of psychic experiences and intrigues, but you get to watch not just the intrigues but the way they fit into a larger pattern of routines, career struggles, relationship negotiations, eating, sleeping, and storytelling as our protagonist, Wend, struggles to articulate why they’re here on this voyage and what they feel. The result is a weird feeling of realism – or, at least, I don’t know a better word for it. Because the rest of a person’s life doesn’t actually stop to make room when a speculative element drops in. It’s a cozy book [1] with so many loving and vivid descriptions of marine wildlife, sensory-friendly objects, eco-friendly architecture and delicious food. (Seriously – I’m not even vegan, but this book made me really hungry for vegan food.) I had a few quibbles with aspects of the plot, but overall I’m just so here for the type of experience that this book offers.

This book is from a small Canadian press that does a lot of good work, and they’ve been holding a fundraiser lately, in case that interests you.

Andrew Joseph White,  HELL FOLLOWED WITH US

Meanwhile, if you want your queer autistic rep to be edgier, how about this book. It’s YA but it’s visceral, violent, and bursting full of the (justified) anger of a trans teenager against a fascist cult that has infected him with a bioweapon they’d like to use for genocide. Obviously, he escapes the cult and fights back, along with a ragtag group of other queer teens. The autistic character here is the love interest, Nick – a sniper who, to his own occasional bafflement, has managed to leverage his own natural deadpan and reliance on scripts into a reputation as a calm, tough leader. I loved Nick ever since the first page of his first POV chapter, which discusses how he slowly learned to lie (and then became “disturbingly good at it.”) I love a lot of things here.

*

[1] I actually have no idea if I’m using this word correctly. There’s a ton of discourse floating around about what’s actually cozy and what’s not and I feel woefully unqualified to comment. I don’t think that I read books, generally, in the same way as the kinds of people who have impassioned discourse about tone labels. I felt an emotion of coziness while reading large parts of the book, that’s all I mean here.

Announcement: Autistic Book Party is shutting down.

(You can also read this on Buttondown.)

Hi all,

It’s been a quiet few months! Actually, this year’s winter semester (Jan-April) was the busiest I’ve ever been at my dayjob. The newsletter fell by the wayside. Fiction writing didn’t – I’ve actually written a ton of words, these last few months – but so far it’s all been behind the scenes. There’s a few things I’d hoped I would have an announcement about by now, but publishing is slower than ever lately, so I don’t.

But I do have a couple pieces of public-facing news:

Bogi Takács ran a very cool interview with me on eir Patreon about RESURRECTIONS. I love when the colleagues who “get” me ask the questions I can really sink my teeth into, and this interview is definitely that kind.My story “Music, Not Words” will appear in Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters – an anthology of stories about neurodivergent protagonists encountering aliens. I procrastinated so hard on posting this that their Kickstarter is over now, but it funded successfully and met several stretch goals, and it was also chosen as one of Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love”! Definitely look out for the book itself when it’s published; I have high hopes about this one.My story “The Silent Sea” will appear in the upcoming “quiet” issue of Baffling Magazine.I wasn’t actually involved with this in any way, but if you like my work enough to be on this mailing list, you should definitely check out the Strange Horizons neurodiversity special issue.

I also have one piece of news that will be sadder for some of you, which is that after about twelve years running, I’m shutting down Autistic Book Party. Existing reviews and the existing book list will remain as an archival resource, but they won’t continue to be updated.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly it’s become apparent to me that I can’t keep up with it anymore. And the fact that I can’t is a good thing – in a way. Hold on; I’ll explain.

Autistic Authors Are Everywhere

When I started this project, back in 2011, it was genuinely hard to find openly autistic authors of speculative fiction for adults. I knew there was interest in that topic, as a part of the big, post-RaceFail wave of interest in representation; but my list was pretty tiny and janky. The only one I knew of who worked with traditional publishers was Caiseal Mór. In 2011, it seemed to me that, if I worked hard and focused, I could get through the entire list.

(In retrospect: LOL.)

This was not because there weren’t autistic people in speculative fiction. We’ve always been here. I remember back in 2009, when a then-partner took me to Montreal Worldcon, and someone on a panel referred to spec fic fandom as “the world’s largest Asperger Syndrome support group.” [1] The actual number of autistic authors wasn’t different in 2009, but back then, many didn’t know they were autistic, or secretly knew but weren’t ready to say so to the world.

In the baker’s dozen of years since 2011, I’ve watched as authors I already knew and admired obtained diagnoses, self-diagnosed, or came out publicly. I’ve watched #ownvoices autistic authors like Essa Hansen, Alex White, and Caitlin Starling burst into Big 5 debuts. I’ve watched an even bigger explosion of autistic and neurodivergent voices in self-publishing.

More recently I’ve watched some very big names quietly, casually come out as autistic. Seanan McGuire tweeted about being autistic in 2023. Neil Gaiman casually came out as autistic on Tumblr this spring. (Which, oh my God. He is one of my big, early influences. Whew.) These are mega-famous, massively-multi-award-winning authors. I’m sure more like them are coming, and I’m sure others have already said something that, for whatever reason, I just haven’t seen.

I love that Neil Gaiman is one of us, but in a weird way, Neil Gaiman was the last straw. What does it actually mean to boost autistic voices in a world where there are autistic authors who’ve won staggering numbers of Hugos already? I designed Autistic Book Party at a time when the known number of us was tiny, and when 99% of everything written about us was crap. We are no longer living in that world.

It feels weird to say, when there is so much else wrong in the world – and when injustices like electric shocks, sheltered workshops, and ABA therapy are still being done to us. I’m not saying we’ve won the war for disability justice. I’m just saying that, in this particular battle – the battle for autistic and other neurodivergent voices to be recognized in the field of science fiction – we kind of already won a while back. And I’m sitting on my little blog about it, beating a dead horse.

This Is No Longer A Job For One Person

The fact that there are lots of autistic authors doesn’t only mean Autistic Book Party’s mission has become less urgent; it also means the mission has become more difficult to do. Guys, I have a day job which is more or less full-time, I have a writing career of my own, I’m not the fastest reader in the world, and I have other mental health stuff going on. I don’t have the time or spoons to review every autistic author’s book, or even an appropriate, representative sample of these books. And with every book I don’t read, while ostensibly running a blog like this, I end up snubbing someone who deserves not to be snubbed. I end up blatantly playing favorites and reviewing my friends more often, not because I think playing favorites like that is okay, but because my faves and friends are the ones I have the motivation to keep reading when life is tough. I’ve been embarrassed for a long time at how inadequate my efforts are to the task of actually representing the full range of autistic writing in this genre, and I want to stop.

I’ve tried bringing more people in and making it a team effort. We’ve had some great guest posts by Richard Ford Burley, for instance. But in the end, all the other autistic writers I know and trust are as overloaded as I am – if not more. I don’t have the personnel or the project management expertise to successfully expand this way.

I’m also aware that, as my career advances – and I think it is advancing, very slowly – the power dynamics at play here start to look hinky. What does it mean to autistic authors who are just starting out if there’s one person sitting on a blog like this, declaring themselves the foremost expert on good autistic writing, and if that one person doesn’t like their book? [2] Or if that one person ignores them? What does it mean, in particular, to autistic authors who are marginalized in ways I’m not?

I also don’t like the dilemmas that a supposedly-comprehensive review series & book list draws me into with regards to categorizing people. What if someone publicly identifies as “neurodivergent” without specifying further – do I make my best guess based on whether they come off to me as autistic or not? Do I exclude everyone unless they specifically say “autism” in public? What if they kinda-sorta mentioned autism in public but in an ambiguous way, or a way that they deleted later, or that got buried and no longer comes up easily in search results? What if someone has a lot of different mental health diagnoses, and autism is just one of them, and not an important one to them? What if a third party tells me an author is autistic, and I note that down, and then I look it up later and can’t find a direct source? What is the impact of any of these choices on some of the most marginalized groups, like Black authors, who are more likely than white authors to identify as “neurodivergent” without further details, because accurate diagnosis is less accessible to them? What is the impact on other, less visible neurodivergent groups who routinely get drowned out in a sea of Autism Awareness?

I think it’s still valuable to talk about autism, the autistic experience, and the ways that this is or isn’t represented well in fiction. I hope that this conversation continues. But I think that it needs to become decentralized and diffused between many different sources, the same as most of our other discourse about identities and books.

I Still Want To Talk About Autistic Books

I want to read and talk about autistic books, but I want to do it on my terms, which are different from the terms I had in 2011. I want to do it more casually. I want to do it as part of a broader conversation about things I’ve enjoyed reading or found thought-provoking, whether they have to do with autism or not. And while autism will always be important to me, it’s becoming less so. I’ve been finding out in the past few years that I have other forms of neurodivergence besides “just autism,” most of which I’m not ready to talk about in public, and although you may not believe it, I also have other interests besides my own neurodivergence. [3]

When I read autistic books, I want to focus more on the autistic authors I would naturally enjoy reading, even if that’s just personal taste. I want to keep broadening my horizons and reading a diversity of different autistic authors, but in ways that work for me at the time, instead of trying to take on responsibility for having the correct opinions on everything in an entire field. I like doing “Things I’ve Been Reading” posts; I’m hoping I can do more of those in the coming months.

Since last fall when I was last able to post about it, there are several autistic books I’ve read and liked and just haven’t had the time to write up my thoughts on. [4] Some of these will go into “Things I’ve Been Reading” in a shorter, more casual form. With others, honestly, my main thought is “I liked it!” and maybe, instead of trying to spin up a long review that sounds erudite, I can just leave it at that.

You haven’t seen the last of me and my autistic thoughts, but it’s time for a change.

Thanks for understanding.

———-

[1] The term “Asperger syndrome” is no longer in common use, for good reasons that I’ve addressed elsewhere, but this was 2009 and that’s what they were calling it then.

[2] A multiply-marginalized neurodivergent person once told me that they’d stopped writing poetry because of how I criticized one of their poems. This still haunts me. Like, what the fuck. If that person is reading this, I’m really sorry.

[3] I know, I know. It gets navel-gazey in here sometimes.

[4] Such as: Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus; Essa Hansen’s Ethera Grave; Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us; Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes; and Clara Ward’s Be the Sea. Also shout-out to Avi Silver’s Pluralities, which I initially read for Autistic Book Party with its old publisher years ago but then couldn’t review because it got pulled, and which is out in revised form from Atthis Arts now and finally getting the recognition it deserves, but which I literally can’t remember anymore why it was an Autistic Book Party book or whether Avi is autistic or not and I just get confused when I think about it. There’s good neurodivergent stuff in that book, but in a different way from what I usually write about and which I’m not sure how to approach in a review. Anyway, if you’re the author of one of these books and you’re reading this, then again, I’m sorry.