SFcrowsnest Weekly Wrap: Puppet Vulcans, Vengeful Mountains and a Siren Without a Tail (news).
Another seven days have hurtled past at their usual disrespectful pace, and the genre world has, as ever, refused to sit still long enough to be summarised politely. Ships have been haunted, mountains have taken offence, a Vulcan has apparently done a puppet episode, and at least one author has sold a duology about Norse gods to a publisher presumably hoping lightning strikes twice. Here is what actually mattered:
New Releases: The Shelves Groan Anew
July is traditionally the industry’s holiday month — editors on beaches, manuscripts festering gently in inboxes — and this year has dutifully obliged with a thinner-than-usual harvest. Which is not the same as no harvest. Jean Kwok opened her Silk & Iron trilogy with Dominion, featuring tyger-bonded riders and the sort of deadly inter-faction competition that never seems to end well for anyone wearing a name tag. M.A. Carrick offered up The Eye of Leviathan, an alt-Spanish-Golden-Age fantasy in which a human trapped in the fae Sea Beyond squares off against a fae impersonating a human, presumably badly.
Larry Niven and Steven Barnes turned up with Ice Vegas, in which a security chief who would very much like to retire is denied that basic courtesy by a nuclear facility full of saboteurs. Seth Haddon’s Null Entity continued the Volatile Memory series’ corporate-revenge-in-space brief. Christopher Golden delivered Carry Me to My Grave, a high-concept horror about protecting your dead mother’s body from whatever wants it, which is either a metaphor or a very specific fear Golden has been nursing for years. Ellen Datlow assembled Lovecraft’s Brood, nineteen fresh stabs at cosmic dread for Tachyon, while Chiara Bullen’s The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance gave a research fellow the pleasure of turning an actively hostile mountain into thesis material.
Also worth a nod: Nadia Afifi’s A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe (sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars), E.M. Anderson’s enchanted-forest romance The Lord of the Wood, Mary Helen Specht’s post-apocalyptic Mudlark, and Chloe Lauter’s Mojave-set family-curse horror The Flayed Man. And for the diary: Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood, the third Ana and Din mystery, is already picking up advance notices ahead of its 11 August release — the Hugo and World Fantasy-winning kind of author whose books arrive with their own weather system.
Screen & Streaming: Mostly Boldly Going, On Schedule
The marquee item of the week: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returned for its fourth season on Paramount+ on 23 July, opening with “Valles Marineris” and running ten weekly instalments through to a 24 September finale. Early word, as reported by the cast in interviews, includes a Jim Henson-produced puppet episode, which is either the boldest thing Starfleet has done since inventing the transporter or a sign the writers’ room has finally snapped. Either way, cowboys and dinosaurs are apparently also on the menu this season, because why not.
Apple’s Silo continues its unhurried march through season three, new episodes landing Fridays, Juliette Nichols still working through the sizeable trauma of a forced “cleaning” gone sideways. Paramount+ served up an Avatar: The Last Airbender animated special on 25 July, sending Aang after an ancient power because apparently one genocide-scale war wasn’t enough plot. Over on the cyberpunk front, Apple’s Neuromancer adaptation dropped a teaser back on 6 July — neon-soaked Chatsubo bar, Callum Turner as Case — timed to the novel’s 42nd anniversary, though a premiere date remains as elusive as ever. House of the Dragon also had a moment, its 20 July episode drawing praise for the visual-effects team dragging a genuinely rough instalment across the finish line, per Gizmodo’s recap.
On the adaptation-rumour beat: H.D. Carlton confirmed via Instagram on 15 July that Haunting Adeline, the divisive dark-romance phenomenon, is officially heading to film — no studio, cast or director yet, so file under “watch this space, cautiously.” Less happily for fans of a certain faerie court, Sarah J. Maas has quietly got the television rights to A Court of Thorns and Roses back after Hulu dropped Ronald D. Moore’s version, meaning the long-mooted adaptation is, for the moment, not happening. She is, at least, keeping the printer busy: Book Six lands 27 October, Book Seven on 12 January 2027.
Industry, Awards & Deals Worth Knowing About
Hugo Award voting for LAcon V — this year’s Worldcon, in Anaheim — is open now, closes 8 August, with the ceremony on 30 August. Consider this your reminder to actually vote rather than just complaining about the shortlist afterwards. The 2025 Shirley Jackson Awards were handed out at Readercon 35, with Best Novel going to Kylie Lee Baker’s Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. The Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award for Best Novel went to J. Kenton Pierce’s A Kiss for Damocles, while Suzette Haden Elgin picked up the 2026 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, as noted by SFF Gazette.
On the deals desk: Ada Palmer sold a Norse-mythology duology — And Loki in His Prison and And Odin on His Tree — to Tor, according to Locus’s July people-and-publishing round-up, which also confirmed Robert J. Sawyer as writer-in-residence at Calgary’s Alexandra Writers’ Centre this autumn. Hachette Book Group added graphic-novel publisher Rippaverse to its distribution slate as of 6 July. And Publishers Weekly’s book-deals column for the week of 20 July was doing a brisk trade in romantasy: Seren Rose’s debut The Song of Salt and Shadow (a tailless siren, a cursed pirate ship, the usual enemies-to-lovers inevitability), Brittney Arena’s Prince of Night duology at Erewhon, Gabe Converse’s horror novel The Body Remembers at Bloomsbury Archer, and an ISS-set rom-com rather winningly titled We Have So Many Problems.
In Memoriam
Sad news to close on: Roanoke-based author R.S. Belcher died on 11 July, aged 59. He wrote The Six-Gun Tarot and its Golgotha sequels, the Nightwise urban-fantasy series, and the Locus Award-nominated The Brotherhood of the Wheel. Before all that, he ran a comic shop called Cosmic Castle and won the grand prize in the Strange New Worlds SF-writing contest — a nice, quiet piece of symmetry given what’s currently airing on Paramount+. He’ll be missed by readers of weird westerns and street-level magic alike.
