Welcome to meteorological autumn! It is still very hot, but it’s exciting to have cooler weather on the way. Most of my readings this month have been earmarked for their own reviews, so the miscellaneous section is a little bit sparse. But I do have a couple short stories to talk about, a whole bunch of links to other reviews, and a few words to say about my second ever trip to WorldCon!

Short Fiction

My favorite short fictions this month were covered in my Magazine Minis, where I talked about seven quality stories, four of which were tagged as favorites. I also had a particular recommendation in my Clarkesworld review, and there are a handful of true standouts in the two-year-old Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume Two, which I am belatedly reading and hope to review in September. As always, I won’t repeat those reviews here. So let’s move to:

Others I Enjoyed in August

• Revolutions, As Told by a Humble Rice Farmer (2026 short story) by Lia Lao. The conceit of telling of seismic geopolitical shifts through the eyes of those on the margins is an appealing one, and this one manages to introduce a compelling central character even when he’s only indirectly touched by those changes.
• The Tu-Chuan with No Name (2026 short story) by Chen-Fu Hsu, translated by Coco Zhou. Another small-scale story, this delivers a melancholy tale of lost family and disappearing species through an investigation of what may be an unknown rhododendron varietal.
• Precogs in the Machine (2026 novelette) by Nat Katz. I don’t often love heist stories, but I do get a kick out of precognition stories, and this is a twisty tale that offers a lot of compelling interpersonal drama, even if it had me wanting a bit more at the end.
• Love or Lizard Island (2026 flash fiction) by Jackie Rogoff. Flash fiction doesn’t generally stick with me, but that doesn’t mean it can’t provide a pleasant read, and this send-up of reality TV published in Unidentified Funny Objects 10 certainly manages that, with a consistently amusing voice and an excellent finish.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• What Stalks the Deep (2025 novella) by T. Kingfisher. The third entry in Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier novella series, which builds the tension quickly with the Appalachian mining setting but falls off a bit toward the end.
• Cinder House (2025 novella) by Freya Marske. A Cinderella retelling that manages to feel fresh, with the role of Cinderella played by a girl who dies on the opening page and returns to haunt her stepmother’s house.
• A Trade of Blood (2026 novel) by Robert Jackson Bennett. The third Ana and Din mystery in the Shadows of the Leviathan series may be the best yet, taking on rivalries between a pair of houses owing their wealth to the magical beef industry.
• The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass (2026 novel) by Leslye Penelope. The story of a twin who disappeared not only from the world, but also from memory, turns into a Y2K Era thriller, but with much more careful characterization and thematic work than your standard technothriller.
• Preaching to the Choir (2026 novella) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A horror novella featuring a newcomer finding herself in the middle of an obscene rite on ancestral grounds of a powerful family, this is genre-aware and still manages to offer some surprises.
• Slow Burn (2026 novel) by Amal Singh. A multiversal life-swap story, featuring a down-on-his-luck Mumbai actor tasting success beyond his wildest dreams, with compelling characterization that becomes increasingly fragmented and dreamlike as the story progresses.
• North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (2025 novel) by Ethan Rutherford. A bit of magical realism set at the end of the whaling age, this can make it difficult to grasp some details but delivers emotional heft and thematic power.

Other August Reads

• The Lost Conspiracy (2008 novel) by Frances Hardinge. I don’t read middle grade especially often, but this feels like exceptional middle grade. I tore through it in no time, and it had something to say. Full review to come.
• Engines of Reason (2026 novella) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The sequel to Elder Race is. . . well, it’s not Elder Race. But it’s still a great read in its own right, partially for returning to a beloved world and partially for the reflections on the ways stories shape the world.
• The Strangers (2026 novel) by Naomi Alderman. This feels almost like a memoir with a heavy magical-realist glaze, which makes it difficult to evaluate. The memoir elements don’t allow for much plot structure, but I can’t deny it’s interesting.

WorldCon/Hugos

I went to my second-ever WorldCon this month, along with my first-ever Hugo Awards ceremony! I finished last of the Fan Writer finalists, but that also means I was in the top six in the first place, which was truly an honor. Even more gratifying was meeting so many people who told me how much my fan writing meant to them. I am a guy on the Internet, writing because I love stories. It’s sometimes hard to believe that makes a difference to anyone except me, and it’s utterly heart-warming to hear otherwise.

I also posted my ballots for Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story and was extremely pleased to see my favorites win in both of the latter two categories.

I met a ton of new people and had some wonderful discussions about genre and about life. I never considered myself a con person, but I may be changing my mind. I had a blast last week and hope to make it to Montreal next year.