Surreal, and yet true: I am a Hugo-nominated book blogger. I’m deeply honored to accept the nomination for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, and I’m incredibly grateful to those who nominated me, as well as anyone who has read and shared my work over the years.
The introduction back in the depths of my blog is more than five years out of date, so I’ve decided to take this opportunity to reintroduce myself. My name is Jay Brantner, and my bookish social media handle is a pun based on one of my favorite series (The Wheel of Time) and two places I’ve lived (North Carolina and Tennessee). I currently live in Maryland with my wife and three children, and I am a nerd about many things. For the purposes of this blog, the most relevant of my nerderies is print speculative fiction. I started this blog to review books, and while those reviews may allude to my perceptions of high-level genre trends, the reviews are still the focus.
My primary goal is to help readers filter through the deluge of content to find sci-fi and fantasy that they will love. I aim to do that by reviewing in the way that would appeal to me if I were looking for things to read. That means I review very nearly everything I read, whether I like it or not, and I try to get at the heart of its appeal—again, whether I like it or not. Sometimes that means digging into thematic exploration, sometimes it’s talking about the emotional connection, sometimes it’s about the plot, and sometimes it’s simply the words.
In my negative reviews, I aspire to be fair and kind. One of my most gratifying moments as a reviewer was being told that someone had purchased a book based on my account of why I didn’t finish it—that tells me that being honest about my subjective experience didn’t distort the elements that may draw a different reader to the work. In my positive reviews, I allow myself to be a little more carried away by the excitement of the thing. After all, this is for fun, so why not have fun?
While I started out reading almost exclusively novels, I have shifted more and more toward short fiction over the past few years. Most of my reviews are still for novels, but I write 2-3 posts per month that collect short fiction mini-reviews, and those are the posts I most value in my own blogging. Lots of people review novels, but genre short fiction is a small niche that deserves more attention. I do my best to shine a little more light on it by reviewing as widely as I can, by regularly sharing my favorites, and by creating space to facilitate community discussion. That last one mostly occurs outside this particular blog, but my fan writing certainly includes setting up public discussions as the co-lead of r/Fantasy’s Short Fiction Book Club and Hugo Readalong. I also participate in r/Fantasy’s annual Bingo, an absolute blast of a reading challenge which has itself been Hugo-nominated. You’ll see small notes for Bingo planning at the end of the bulk of my reviews.
Whether you’ve been following for a while or whether you’re new to the blog, thank you for reading, and I hope I can help you find something you’ll love!