(1) ALIENS RECOMMENDED. James S.A. Corey (the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the authors of the Expanse series), picked the “Best Alien Books by Octavia E. Butler, Ted Chiang and More” for New York Times readers. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

Science fiction is, among other things, the literature of talking about things you’re not talking about. It can be easier to grapple with the seductive nature of tribalism when you’re dealing with Mars vs. Earth. You can use the suffering of asteroid miners to ruminate on class conflict and worker exploitation without appropriating the lived experience of real people. Like horror or fantasy, science fiction is a literature of literalized metaphors.

In that context, aliens become vessels that can hold many different cargos. An alien can be a lost traveler from the stars desperate to save a dying home planet, an invader bent on the destruction of humanity, an incomprehensible oddity that assaults the nature of reality, a victim of human colonialism, the re-imagination of ancient Babylon as seen by the peoples they conquered or any of a thousand other things.

Many of the best works of science fiction drop a net into these waters and come up with very different — and often wonderful — catches. Here are some of our favorites.

Their list includes a number of titles that have been on Hugo ballots, including this nominee.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

It’s a rare novel that is incandescently inventive enough to showcase half a dozen ideas that even a seasoned sci-fi fan hasn’t seen before, dark enough that you have to take breaks to process the brutality of the story and gorgeous enough to inspire a gushing fan letter as soon as you turn the last page. “Blindsight” does it all.

A crew of transhumans — including one “vampire” — are sent to investigate a mysterious signal coming from a comet at the far reaches of our solar system. What follows is a first contact story, a haunted house tale and a darkly persuasive philosophical essay about the nature of consciousness and the mistakes evolution made when it made us. The aliens here challenge our assumptions about the connection between intelligence and self-awareness.

(2) OTHERWISE AWARD. The winner of the 2025 Otherwise Award, Luminous by Silvia Park, was announced by Locus Online on March 25.

(3) DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD. Six novels have been shortlisted for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award – however, none of them appear to be works of genre interest.

The shortlisted titles are Gliff by Ali Smith; In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević, translated from the Croatian by Anđelka Raguž; Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell; Perspectives by Laurent Binet, translated from the French by Sam Taylor; The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong; and What I Know About You by Éric Chacour, translated from the French by Pablo Strauss.

(4) WHERE TO SEE ELFQUEST. Richard Pini chronicles the fate of all the options granted over the years to produce an animated ElfQuest and why they (deservedly) failed, in the end declaring that “The ElfQuest Movie 2026” exists in fans’ heads – and will never exist anywhere else.

…On January 23rd of this year, after six more long years, the Fox option expired. Wendy and I looked at each other and, quite calmly, resolved that after pushing this particular boulder up a hill and having it tumble back down over us for almost 50 years … we’re finished. Hollywood has tried over and over, and let us down over and over. We will take no more options, no more meetings. We will mount no Kickstarters. We will answer no questions like “Have you asked (studio name)?” or “Have you considered anime?” We are done and we’ve made our peace….

…The better news – and you need to stretch your mental muscles – is that the perfect ElfQuest movie already exists. What?! Yes! It’s the one that’s been playing in your imaginations since you began reading the Wolfriders’ saga. This is true beyond doubt. How do we know? You’ve told us, over the years. Every reader who’s ever written to us or commented or posted about the film you want to view on the big or small screen has described what you already see and hear. You’ve said Cutter’s voice sounds like this or that actor, the music behind such-and-so scene needs to be by Loreena McKinnett, and so on….

(5) ALAN MOORE Q&A. “Alan Moore Interview: Magical Consciousness, Disowned Works, and the Long London Quintet” at RetroFuturista.

If comics had never become so popular, and/or if they had evolved without the dominance of superheroes, what forms do you think the medium might have explored more deeply? What do you think the medium would look like today?

While the comics medium is an astonishing art-form, the full potential of which has been barely scratched, I fear that my personal experiences in the comics industry during a not especially enjoyable career, have led to me disowning all of the work that I do not own – around 95% of it – and not wishing to be associated with comics any longer. I don’t have copies of those books around the house, I don’t wish to discuss them, sign them, see them or, if I can manage it, even think about them or about that strip-mined and brutalised field ever again. With regard to your question, what first attracted me to the comics field was that it was ignored by culture and regarded as a trash medium suitable only for children or the working classes. It was cheaply mass produced, with tens or hundreds of thousands of copies distributed each month or week, and it seemed to me that in the right hands, comics could become a field where useful, powerful, potentially liberating ideas, represented in an attractive and engaging form, could be transmitted to young or poor people throughout society, quickly and captivatingly, to the people in society who most need those ideas.

So, that was what I’d hoped the comics industry might become, rather than, predominately, a medium that has priced itself beyond the reach of children or the poor, and which seems to be, even in its more worthy examples, a field that is generating product largely by, for and about middle-class people. Nothing against middle-class people, of course. It’s simply that the comic strip form was originally conceived as by, for and about the working classes, who were its audience and, for my money, its very best creators. That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere.

(6) MAGIC CASTLE UPDATE. Craig Miller posted to Facebook more news regarding the fire at the Magic Castle earlier this week.

While there’s still some repair work to be done, the city inspector came, inspected, and passed the building for occupancy. (This is apparently a requirement after any fire.)

The Magic Castle will be back in operation Friday. Unfortunately, not in time for Friday lunch but it will re-open for Friday evening and thereafter.

(7) BUSTED: ILLICIT AI USE AT MAJOR CONFERENCE. “Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers” – Nature tells how they were detected.

A major artificial-intelligence conference has rejected 497 papers — roughly 2% of submissions — whose authors violated AI-use policies in their peer reviews of other articles submitted to the meeting.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), to be held in Seoul in July, has a reciprocal review policy, meaning that, bar certain exceptions, every paper must have an author who reviews other conference papers. Authors whose reviews violated the conference’s large language model (LLM)-use policy had their papers rejected.

Conference organizers detected the illicit AI use by hiding watermarks in research papers distributed for review. If a researcher used an LLM to generate their peer review, instructions hidden in the watermark prompted the LLM to include telltale phrases in the review text. The presence of these phrases revealed that an AI model had been used to generate the review.

“We hope that by taking strong action against violations of agreed-upon policy we will remind the community that as our field changes rapidly the thing we must protect most actively is our trust in each other,” said the organizers in a blog post on 18 March.

“What the ICML case shows is a research community in need of clear guidance on responsible AI use, including use in peer review,” says Marie Soulière, head of editorial ethics and quality assurance at the publishing company Frontiers in Lausanne, Switzerland….

(8) CANNED BY THE MOUSE. “Disney To Lay Off Up To 1,000 Employees In First Cuts Under New CEO” reports Deadline.

Disney is planning to lay off as many as 1,000 employees over the next few months, Deadline has confirmed, the first cuts to come from the entertainment giant since naming its new CEO Josh D’Amaro.

The company’s global head count stood at a bit more than 230,000 as of the end of the most recent fiscal year, with most of that being part-time theme park workers.….

(9) FLYING SOLO. Keith Stuart reflects on the cosmic isolation of astronauts in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “How games capture the awe and terror of cosmic isolation” in the Guardian.

Last week’s launch of the Artemis IIspace mission was a stunning spectacle, the 17-storey-high rockets erupting into cacophonous life before wrenching the craft through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the images that have come since hold just as much impact: the tiny Orion craft and its four-person crew drifting silently through space, further and further from home.

In his autobiography, the Apollo astronaut Michael Collins described this feeling perfectly. Left in the command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface, he wrote: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

Although most science-fiction video games are set in distant galaxies or far-off futures where space travel has become routine, a few have attempted to explore this sense of solitude and vulnerability. As a Nasa-obsessed child in the 1980s, I loved the classic space trading game Elite, which rendered an entire lonely universe in monochrome vector visuals. I would play for hours, navigating between silent space stations in a small, single-seater craft, watching the stars pass by through the windows, planets rotating in the darkness far away.’…

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales

Now let’s talk about two volumes of stories that are among the best ones ever done. Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, and that is where this Beginning is from, and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice are some of most delightfully female centered tales that pass the Bechdel test continuously. 

Bantam Spectra published The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden seventeen years ago as lavishly illustrated by Michael Kaluta who of course would illustrate In the Cities of Coin and Spice too.  It would win both an Otherwise Award and the Mythopoeic Award as well as being nominated for a World Fantasy Award. 

Observing Valente riffing off the much older A Thousand and One Nights with Scheherazade is a sheer delight. Not saying anything explicit about them, they are connected but they are such that each stands on alone its own rather well too.

Though they are available as digital publications, I recommend purchasing the two trade paper editions because of the sheer delight of holding them and thinking that they were being written just for you.  

They would’ve made extracts oral tellings but that was not to be.

Oh and you can hear SJ Tucker’s take on the girl in the garden in this song which is up on Green Man. She was, once upon a time, our Summer Queen as was once Terri Windling was a Winter Queen.

And now we meet the girl in the garden. 

PRELUDE

ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD WHOSE FACE WAS LIKE THE NEW MOON SHINING on cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds. She was a strange child, full of secrets. She would sit alone in the great Palace Garden on winter nights, pressing her hands into the snow and watching it melt under her heat. She wore a crown of garlic greens and wisteria; she drank from the silver fountains studded with lapis; she ate cold pears under a canopy of pines on rainy afternoons.

Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes were stained a deep indigo-black, like ink pooled in china pots. It gave her the mysterious, taciturn look of an owl on ivory rafters, or a raccoon drinking from the swift-flowing river. It colored her eyes such that when she was grown she would never have to smoke her eyelashes with kohl. 

For this mark she was feared, and from her earliest days, the girl was abandoned to wander the Garden around the many-towered Palace. Her parents regarded her with trepidation and terror, wondering if her deformity reflected poorly on their virtue. The other nobles firmly believed she was a demon, sent to destroy the glittering court. Their children, who often roamed the Garden like a flock of wild geese, kept away from her, lest she curse them with her terrible powers. The Sultan could not decide—after all, if she were a demon, it would not do to offend her infernal kin by doing away with her like so much cut grass. In the end, all preferred that she simply remain silent and far away, so that none would have to confront the dilemma.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal red shifts.
• xkcd timeshifts.
• Off the Mark has a different view.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal also has a five-part series:  Spheres Part 1; Spheres Part 2; Spheres Part 3; Spheres Part 4; Spheres Part 5.

(12) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 157 of the Octothorpe podcast, live from Eastercon 2026, “Moist or Shiny?”, has landed with guest star Claudia Rapp! An uncorrected transcript is available here. (Thanks to Simon Bubb for the photograph.)

John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Claudia Rapp discuss the Eastercon, as well as Metropol Con and the Nuremberg and Brisbane Worldcon bids. . 

(13) PLANNED YA SERIES HITS THE WALL. “Netflix Abandons Plans To Develop Brian Jacques’ ‘Redwall’ Books” reports Forbes.

Netflix confirmed on Thursday that it is not moving forward with plans to adapt Brian Jacques’ popular children’s novel series Redwall.

In 2021, the streamer revealed it had acquired the rights to all 22 of the Redwall books to create multiple TV series and a feature film from the IP.

At the time, the deal was seen as major coup for Penguin Random House, which controls the rights to the novels.

“We couldn’t be more delighted to announce this deal,” said Ben Horslen, Fiction Publisher, Penguin Random House Children’s. “These perennially popular stories have been etched onto the hearts of millions of readers, and we are thrilled to partner with Netflix to bring those beloved characters on screen for families worldwide to enjoy.”

But the project had long been rumored to have been in trouble.

Netflix hired writer Patrick McHale, who wrote Cartoon Network series Over the Garden Wall, to write a feature film based on the story of Redwall. But McHale exited the project in 2023, and there hadn’t been much of a public update on the project since then. In interviews at the time, McHale told journalists he believed the project would become a series instead of a full-length film….

(14) LIGHT SHOW. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] For those that have been to Cowie Towers, and the upstairs gallery on the southern wing, will have noticed a framed poster of the Earth at night.

It was made back in the 1990s and is a mosaic of numerous pictures of the Earth taken over may areas where there were no clouds.

Now, in this week’s Nature the cover story relates to the latest such assessment.

The cover image offers a night-time view of Earth, capturing human activity across the eastern hemisphere of the planet through the emissions of artificial light. Derived from satellite images taken daily over the past decade, the image maps the dynamics of the human night-time activities, with golden areas experiencing brightening, purple areas featuring dimming, and white areas experiencing both. This changing footprint is explored in this week’s issue by Tian Li, Zhe Zhu and colleagues. The researchers reveal that, rather than being a story of universal brightening, the human light footprint is a dynamic system in which brightening and dimming both occur, often simultaneously, and are intensifying. In the area surveyed, they found 51% saw only gradual changes in light, 14% experienced solely abrupt changes, and 35% saw both. These reflect changes at a local level — from power cuts to growth in urbanisation. Globally, the team found that brightening contributed a 34% increase in artificial light between 2014 and 2022, but this was offset by an 18% dimming, resulting in a net 16% increase. The researchers suggest that, far from being a static beacon of growth, the pattern of artificial-light usage fluctuates with increasing volatility, echoing the heartbeat of human activity.

(15) DON’T YOU WISH YOU NEEDED ONE OF THESE? From Heritage Auction’s “April 24 – 25 Americana & Political Signature® Auction”.

[Andrew Johnson]: 1868 Impeachment Ticket. 3″ x 5″ yellow pasteboard “Diplomatic Gallery” ticket to the impeachment trial of the President. These are not seen as frequently as the “Reporters Gallery” tickets, and is also good for the entire trial, not just one day. 1,000 spectators were allowed tickets each day of the trial, but only 40 were designated for the Diplomatic Corps. The total number of trial tickets issued is unknown. Accompanying the ticket is a 3 1/8″ x 5 1/2″ envelope addressed to “Perry Mason & Co. / Youth’s Companion Office, Boston, Mass.”

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Jed Hartman, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]