Nick Hubble

Last month I was feeling guilty I'd run into so few cool pieces of SF-related criticism, so of course this month I am positively drowning in them. Some really good reads here.

What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Betty Gilpin vs. AI, Round Two - Reactor Plus: Buffy and Beavers

This weekend, @mollytempleton.com encourages rewatching Buffy, reading about reading, and perchance allowing warmer weather and later sunsets warm your heart:

just the same thing as modernism in a book, which would have linked to my book on why proletarian literature and modernism are really just the same thing. The goal being to really piss EVERYONE off. As Marx: criticism aims to understand literature, but my goal is to use it to change the world. (2/2)

So, am I going to write something on this question of SFF as history as social science as changing the future and whether this is something that distinguishes it from lit fic per se or is that just going to piss people off? Once upon a time I was going to do this by arguing that SFF is really (1/2)

Our panel at @modernistudies.bsky.social @moderniststudies.bsky.social has been accepted!

To the weird (quite possibly) village (probably not) village of Loughborough Alice Dodds, @thehubble101.bsky.social, @mcmccluskey.bsky.social and I go…

Claire Lynch wins Nero Gold prize for debut about 1980s homophobia The £30,000 award went to novel A Family Matter, about a lesbian affair and a custody battle

Congratulations to my former colleague, Claire Lynch, on winning the Nero Gold prize for A Family Matter.

And of course the USA sponsors the new government in Syria, so Rojava is threatened at the same time USA is now sponsoring armed revolt of Kurds in Iran. So, impossible now for Rojava to be a bridgehead to a properly independent Kurdistan (?) and even more likely that Rojava will be expunged?

50-Year Reread of The Lord of the Rings – 3: ‘Elves, Elf-friends and “Friends of Gandalf” A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76: Introduction: Three Different Books 1: A Sequel to The Hobbit 2: On Hobbits In the previous …

This is the next instalment in my #LotR re-read. Here I discuss the moment when Frodo, Sam and Pippin pass into darkness like a rustle in the grasses and there meet talking animals, exiled elves and, a bit further on, a pagan water spirit. And what do 'friends of Gandalf' have in common? #Tolkien

50-Year Reread of The Lord of the Rings – 3: ‘Elves, Elf-friends and “Friends of Gandalf” A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76: Introduction: Three Different Books 1: A Sequel to The Hobbit 2: On Hobbits In the previous …

This is the next instalment in my #LotR re-read. Here I discuss the moment when Frodo, Sam and Pippin pass into darkness like a rustle in the grasses and there meet talking animals, exiled elves and, a bit further on, a pagan water spirit. And what do 'friends of Gandalf' have in common? #Tolkien

What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.

This sounds very NOW! I'm backing it!!!!

You're welcome. I really enjoyed it!

Such a joy to read this brilliant review of my novella in Strange Horizons! 🥹 Also, published in March - timing couldn't be better 🌱🌸

Huge thank you to Nick! It's a real honour to have their eyes on my work. And I'm always so grateful to Dan who's a fantastic editor and a lovely, supportive person.

Britain Elects | Substack Cutting through the noise with Ben Walker. Click to read Britain Elects, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

📊 Ref lead of 2pts, Grns in second
Westminster voting intention

REF: 23% (-1)
GRN: 21% (+4)
CON: 16% (-2)
LAB: 16% (-2)
LDEM: 14% (-)

via @YouGov, 01 - 02 Mar
Chgs. w/ 22 Feb

👇 Read this
www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

I don't know. I just saw Wuthering Heights and I really liked it. They are actually like that in the book you know. And it is one of my favourite novels.

The Inescapable March by Hana Carolina When fantasy combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear …

Up at SH today: @thehubble101.bsky.social on Hana Carolina's The Inescapable March. They find it an "engaging and emotionally intelligent" fantasy which "combines wit, humour, and magic."

Nick also has Thoughts on contemporary fantasy. That the novella sparks them seems another sign of its quality.

Eluned Morgan pledges to "end homelessness in Wales by 2034".

This will seemingly replace their previous 2021 plan to "end homelessness by 2026".

Plaid's social media game obviously causing some irritation.

Cover of Vector 302: Zoefuturism. Cover art featuring fossils in chalk from Botany Bay, Margate, is by Mika Tohmon.

Contents of Vector 302. Editorial by Phoenix Alexander. Guest editorial by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram. Kincaid in Short by Paul Kincaid. The Resistance by Nick Hubble. 'Princess Donut Will See You Now': Inside the Crawl Making Waves in the LitRPG Genre. A Review of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Marta F. Suarez. Zoefuturism & the Nature of Life by Jesse Rowell. Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens by Joey Eshrich and Ed Finn. A Very British Genealogy of Zoefuturism by Christine According. The Natural History of the Future by Grant Wythoff. This Art Will Die by David Polfeldt. The Making of Asian Pirate Musical by Zhui Ning Chang. Zoetology, Vitalism and the Anthropocene Refugio in the Southern Reach Series by LYU Guangzhou. Relational Cosmology and the City of Mind by Jasper Kang. Relational Activism: Introducing the short story The God in the Box in relation to ZOEFUTURISM by Bette Adriaanse. Eternally Displace Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time.

Fantastic new @bsfa.bsky.social Vector on #Zoefuturism, guest edited by Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram. I don't think I've ever felt quite so connected to the other contributions to a publication. We've moved beyond the closed/open binary to reach the fluid cultures beyond. 'Always multiple, never one'.

Getting longer all the time.

Everyone who has been nominated for a BSFA Award deserves applause, but we are particularly delighted to see PictCon2 Guest of Honour Neil Williamson nominated for Best Collection, Blood in the Bricks.

www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.as...

I'm always fascinated that some people lie about having a PhD. I'm sure others lie to conceal it because it's not actually that useful (apart from in academia) - people often react funnily when you say 'no, it's Dr actually'. Also, it's kind of an expensive way to out yourself as a masochist.

I haven't started thinking about that one yet. I guess it depends how quickly we get to it. I assume it will be before 2029: maybe 2028, maybe sooner. But the context might be different in even a few months time. Labour might just die completely after May!

Given it's not FPTP, it's quite difficult to work out how to tactically vote Reform other than not voting for them. Ok, might be possible to make an educated guess as to how to reduce Reform from 3 to 2 or from 2 to 1 in some constituencies but still going to be difficult.

A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 10 – Two Beardy Bois Only two chapters today, IV – Treebeard and V – The White Rider, but still plenty to mull over (harum barum), so we shouldn’t be hasty. Joking aside, while Chapter IV at least is …

New LotR post is up! This time, a chapter of Treebeard and a chapter of Gandalf, with a lot of exposition and some properly mythic narrative.

The BSFA Awards shortlists are up, highlighting an array of excellent work. Do take a look, whether or not you're voting. (Especially if you're in need of an alternative to doomscrolling)
bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards-...

My Locus piece on 2025 reading, in which I don't really know what's going on with American SF, find some unexpected pairings elsewhere, and have lots of good books to recommend throughout. locusmag.com/feature/the-...

'Change is not a force of goodness, knight. It is the death of history... Change muddied the Isle, and erases what is eternal at its heart: what it was, and what it must always be. You, and your Elsewhere folk... are a canker in the Isle's heart' #change #history #sff #fantasy #romantasy #Britain

There is no such thing as Science Fiction/ Modernism/ English Literature (*delete as appropriate) I was lecturing on Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ this week as part of my Genre Fictions module. During the first 6 weeks of the module, we read a couple of short stories a week ranging from the…

As we're talking about genre and litfic, it seems like a timely moment to repost this piece from four years ago.

All my life I’ve watched America bombing other countries and killing their civilians. My first memory of TV news was seeing dead children in Vietnam when I was about four years old. I’m 56 now and I guess I’ll see more children die from American bombs today. I’d like this to stop before I die myself