Happy New Year’s Eve! 

2025 was really… something. I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully 2026 will be at least a bit better for everyone.

I had a couple things come out this year:

• The King Must Die – A science-fantasy novel about a reluctant bodyguard-turned-rebel and her arch-nemesis, a technomancer prince.
  • AKA a sci-fi love letter to my friends. If you love multicultural, hella gay stories about revolution and found families, chances are you’ll like this. Of my three books, it’s the one I’m proudest of.
• “The Fire Burns Anyway” – Some dreams are worth more than others.
  • This one’s for all the people out there who love art and love making art, despite everything.
• “High Tide” – In a near-future, post-war United States, a young research assistant’s past catches up with her. But she’s not going down without a fight.
  • Baby’s first nearish-future dystopian short fiction. 
• “Teeth” – A monster-slaying priest investigates a series of disappearances across the Fringeworlds. He’s in for a surprise—one involving a fugitive supersoldier, a black market fishmonger, three gap-toothed kids, and a grocery list.
  • Was this inspired by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier??? My lips are sealed.
• “Kadrik and the Pod” – Kadrik, Eumidian vanguard and runaway, finds a mysterious pod out in the wilderness. What secrets might it hold, and could they maybe be edible?
  • This story is linked to Magic the Gathering’s brand new space opera set, and I wrote it for a friend of a friend who’s a huge MTG fan—the human character is named after him!

And here are some great stories from 2025 that cool people I know wrote! Alphabetically:

• Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei. An adventurous ecological thriller about a trio of sisters.
• Spread Me by Sarah Gailey. A very spicy love letter to The Thing (a truly top-tier horror movie if you haven’t already seen it).
• “We Begin Where Infinity Ends” by Somto Ihezue. A deeply touching story about friendship, complex emotions, and recovery.

I normally don’t talk about grad school stuff here, but my first paper is out as well! It’s about a survival study I finished up last summer exploring one of the potential reasons why bivalves (e.g. clams) did so much better than their distant relatives, brachiopods, in the wake of the worst mass extinction on Earth. There are a lot of hypothesized kill mechanisms for the end-Permian extinction, but there’s not a ton of quantitative data on how normal marine animals react to severe environments, and this project (along with several others) aimed to help fill this gap. You can read the paper here, if you’re interested. I also got the chance to chat about this work on NPR’s Shortwave podcast, too!

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What I’m reading right now:

• The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.

Some of what I’ve read recently:

• Messy Roots by Laura Yuyang Gao. A cleverly-drawn, funny, sometimes painful, and bold autobiographical graphic memoir about a Wuhanese American artist’s coming-of-age.
• Old Soul by Susan Barker. I put off reading this for a long time. Barker’s previous novel, The Incarnations, rearranged my brain, and I knew I’d be crushed if I didn’t enjoy this as much. I’m glad to report that Old Soul is a phenomenal read. It felt a little long in some places, and the ending was frustrating (though in a way I think is ultimately due to Barker’s skill at making her readers care for her characters, even—and especially—as they hurtle toward their less-than-optimal fates), but it’s an utterly bewitching story, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
• Electric Cowboy by ansel kite. In this surreal sci-fi comic, a scientist traverses their missing partner’s memories, uncovering love, tragedy, and—perhaps—themself. Absolutely gorgeous.
• Ex.Mag, Vol. 04: Mecha by Aseyn, Ayako Ozaki, Beto Irigoyen, Casey Nowak, Emil Friis Ernst, Inkee Wang, Luca Negri, Sebastien Sunstrum, Simon Roy, Tatsumi, and Sean O’Mara. This mecha comics anthology was freakin’ fantastic. Please please please give this series a chance.¹ Favorites from this volume: “Tiempos Híbridos: Chab’s Hands” (I’m not crying!! You’re crying!!), “Pride of the Central Republic,” and “Inferiority Complex.”
• Carrion Reborn by v4eril. This year, I took no chances with the ShortBox Comics Fair. If you’ve never heard of it before, basically at the beginning of October, ShortBox releases a metric ton of incredible short indie comics, all of which vanish at the end of the month. If you don’t buy your comics by then, all you can do is hope that the artists put their stories up for sale on their websites later, which isn’t guaranteed. Anyway, I put the fair on my schedule and got a bunch of comics. Carrion Reborn follows two former friends who cross paths on the same pilgrimage after the end of the world as they know it. The landscapes reminded me of Mœbius’s best work.
• On an Even Moon by B. Mure. Also published by ShortBox, this gentle comic is about a couple making ends meet and taking care of each other on a small desert moon. It’s a short piece, but this story has the emotion of a 500 page graphic novel.
• Cell Division by S.J. Miller. Another ShortBox comic! On a strange planet made of meat and bone, a stranger searches for their target. If you like dangerous settings and cool, gooey worldbuilding, this is for you. 
• Prism by Sebastien Sunstrum. This collection is composed of the comics “Knight Errant” (about a mecha pilot duel in the distant future), “Cascade” (atmospheric deep-space horror), concept art, and assorted illustrations. I really love Sunstrum’s style.
• “The Showrunner” by James Frankie Thomas. This short story, about a closeted showrunner and the actor he’s obsessed with, is a nail-biting blend of vulnerability and cruelty—unintentional and otherwise. You can definitely see the beginnings of the writer that wrote Idlewild, one of my favorite general fiction/literary fiction/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-but-it’s-not-speculative-fiction novels, which I also highly, highly recommend.
• “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells. As you may be sick of hearing by now, I love The Murderbot Diaries with my whole dang heart², so it was no surprise to anyone that I really liked this short story from ART’s point-of-view. 

1. Okay, necessary disclaimer: The Ex.Mag comics are kinda hard to get your hands on, because the OG publisher shut down sometime after printing Vol. 04, and the revived publisher has only reprinted Vol. 01 and 02 so far. (Vol. 05 is new, and available for sale. Vol. 06 is upcoming, so keep your peepers peeled for that!) However! If you’re motivated and a little lucky, you can read most of ‘em if not all. I bought 01, 02, and 05 from Silver Sprocket Comics in San Francisco, snagged Vol. 03 and 04 through Stanford’s Interlibrary Loan (the middle anthologies are completely sold out online everywhere, and none of the public libraries I have cards at had a copy). ↩︎
2. I decided to pursue publishing five-ish years ago mostly because I thought authors could get pretty much any book early and for free (not exactly true), and I really wanted an ARC of System Collapse. (This did, actually, somehow end up happening.) ↩︎