Theodore Sturgeon is an author whose work is starting to fade from view. Once a big wheel down at the SFF factory, his name may continue to ring out but that name has become unmoored from any particular works of fiction.

This is partly a product of the way in which media franchises dominate the cultural landscape and partly a product of the fact that Sturgeon was a writer operating at a time when normal people still paid attention to short fiction. If you want to get into Sturgeon here in the 21^st Century, you can choose between PDFs of a small selection of not-particularly famous short novels and a seven volume anthology set aimed at collectors and academics. To be honest, I’ve been reading science fiction since I was a teenager and the only reason I hit upon this novel is that it was being made available for free on Audible. So Yay Jeff Bezos and Boo SFF publishing as this is one of the most enjoyably psychological horror novels I have read in a long time.

This book is so savage that it opens with a scene in which a baby gets eaten alive by rats and then moves on to a scene in which a woman tries to burn down a church in retaliation for God killing her big-dick Irish boyfriend.

As I worked my way through Eric LaRocca’s second novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, I kept amusing myself with the idea that someone was going to cancel LaRocca for committing an act of cultural appropriation against people with picrew avatars. Well… it turns out that I was pretty much bang on the money.

Things is an interesting example of how the market for horror rebuilding itself by seeking out new audiences and creating new systems of cultural reproduction. Published in June 2021 by Weirdpunk Books, LaRocca’s novella found its way onto subscription services that seem to be more interested in Instagram and Tiktok than Twitter or Facebook. By avoiding traditional avenues of bookish publicity, the book wound up getting pushed into the faces of people who were perhaps not all that familiar with the more extreme forms of literary horror and so people unaccustomed to that kind of literary affect got angry and tried to argue that LaRocca was smearing and stereotyping lesbians by writing a book about an insanely abusive and co-dependent online relationship. It is now a year later and the calls for cancellation have been buried under a flood of gleeful disgust but it is worth acknowledging that Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is not only an enjoyably gross and fucked-up horror novella, it is also an incisive piece of social satire inspired by spaces where the language of acceptance often masks the reality of social bonds with hidden costs.

A bridge between the decaying institutions of childhood and the scary but ultimately more rewarding realities of adult life

Nearly sixteen years after her untimely death, Octavia Butler is having a bit of a moment. Over the last few years, a concerted effort has been made to re-discover and re-claim the legacy of the first ever science fiction author to receive a MacArthur fellowship.

It is not hard to see why this would happen… Though widely-respected and a winner of various awards during her lifetime, Butler’s name has started to fade from view for the simple reason that she was never one of the four or five (predominantly white and male) authors whose continued sales keep the lights on for genre publishing. The institutions of SFF publishing are barely interested in live mid-list authors, so why would they give a shit about dead ones? Especially when the dead mid-list authors in question write books as difficult, problematic and profoundly unfashionable as Fledgling.