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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest,

@megapolisomancy.bsky.social

2.8K followers 1.8K following 4.3K posts

Nonfiction about weird fiction at Seize the Press, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nightmare, and Ancillary Review of Books, where I am also an editor. Also jazz, metal, leftism. he/him https://doomsdayer.wordpress.com/writings/

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · Jun 13

I've been threatening for a while to start a column on collections of weird fiction, and so: Profane Illuminations, a quarterly series where I'll look at a few in tandem and see what threads I can draw out about their stories and the genre at large. Quick intro here, first full entry next week.

Profane Illuminations: An Initiation

Zachary Gillan Everyone knows that the short story is the ideal form for weird fiction. But why? What is it about the form and the genre that makes them so symbiotic? What might we learn by explori…

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

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Ancillary Review of Books @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org · 1d

A Blighted World: @thefatherswork.bsky.social reviews Yume Kitasei's SALTCROP (@flatironbooks.bsky.social)
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/07/a...

A Blighted World: Review of Yume Kitasei’s Saltcrop

Noah Micah Under Review:Saltcrop. Yume Kitasei. Flatiron, September 2025. Yume Kitasei’s novel Saltcrop takes place in a near future ravaged by climate change and a constantly evolving blight that …

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

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Liz Ryerson @ellaguro.bsky.social · 22h

trans rights are non negotiable, this man is trash

LGBTQ Nation @lgbtqnation.com · 23h

Gavin Newsom vetoes gender education bill, declines to sign other trans protections - buff.ly/MTUAV85

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 2d

Jinxed myself here: the editor decided they didn’t want this essay (I guess?), and conveyed that by totally ghosting me. Back down to $100 being the most I’ve ever made for a piece.

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · Jun 26

The most I’ve ever been offered for an essay, by a wide margin, is $150 (for a draft that’s currently ~3k words). In terms of time invested vs dollars paid, criticism is essentially the opposite of a job, which means it’s time to tap my favorite sign again:

The Onion opinion headline:

Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 1d

Compare this with a more oral/aural/literary mode of story-telling, where it's actually *less* common to slow down and do a beat-by-beat script-style screen description (which can be startling, used sparingly), where fiddling with the chronology and pace is natural: seconds to years in a paragraph.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 1d

Lots of writers have no problem at all telling braided, non-sequential stories; but in-chapter the pace, the frame-rate, the speed at which time passes, is unchanging, and tied to visuals/externals or scripty narration. So huge numbers of leaden pages pass because, well, "the camera's rolling".

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 1d

I've been seeing a lot of this even in books that seem like they should be more driven, pulpier, more plot & action-focused. What frustrates me about it—to be clear, I adore a contemplative lost-in-the-landscape literary meander—is when it seems to stem from a televisual concept of *time*.

The Girl with the Green Ribbon 💀💀 (Jenny Hamilton) @readingtheend.bsky.social · 1d

I'm seeing a lot of this in the romantasy space! there are books with minimal story apart from the romance, so you end up with an iterative structure where the leads go to a series of locations or make a series of small advances on their MacGuffin quest, as set dressing for their escalating intimacy

Mythcreants @mythcreants.bsky.social · 2d

A new thing we’re noticing is books where way less happens than you’d expect for their length because of worldbuilding info dumps or long scenes of explaining plans. You get through a 100,000 word novel and realize the whole story was spent picking up magic groceries.

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 1d

A REcently renAmed branCh of a corporaTion-Owned publisheR, for me

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 1d

🫠

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 2d

It’s bleak out here! (I did manage to rehome it with a venue I respect much more, so there’s a silver lining)

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 2d

Jinxed myself here: the editor decided they didn’t want this essay (I guess?), and conveyed that by totally ghosting me. Back down to $100 being the most I’ve ever made for a piece.

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · Jun 26

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A Meal of Thorns @mealofthorns.bsky.social · 2d

For Episode 34, @yarntheory.bsky.social joins to talk about structure, art & endings, relationships, and much more in Melissa Scott's 1993 cyberpunk space-Venice thriller BURNING BRIGHT:
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/06/a...

A Meal of Thorns 34 – BURNING BRIGHT with Ursula Whitcher

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!Guest: Ursula WhitcherTitle: Burning Bright by Melissa ScottHost: Jake Case…

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

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Steve Rasnic Tem @stevetem.bsky.social · 2d

I highly recommend this new collection by Thomas Ha from Undertow Books. Ha is one of the most exciting writers of short fantastic fiction to come along in years. undertowpublications.com/shop/uncerta...

Uncertain Sons and Other Stories — Undertow Publications

Sept. 2025 Cover art by Ove Tøpfer Trade paperback (284 pages) Uncertain Sons is a startling and masterful collection exploring familial love and trauma; societal and technological anxieties; ...

undertowpublications.com

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jeff @jazyjef.bsky.social · 3d

Bill Dixon was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts on this day in 1925, one hundred years ago today.

📸 Steven Albahari, 1981

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Eric Williams @geoliminal.bsky.social · 3d

Q: what's a ghost's favorite branch of metaphysics?

A: Ooo!*

*Object-Oriented Ontology, commonly abbreviated as OOO, the pronunciation of which aloud as if it were a word and not an acronym would, roughly, sound like the wailing moan of a ghoul from a graveyard on a moonless night

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 3d

I Would Haunt You(r Ebook Reader) If I Could

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Heckin Spoopy Mutilated Corpse @jrbolt.bsky.social · 4d

The New Weird thrives today in unlabeled and often unrecognized forms. Disco Elysium, Dorohedoro, The Locked Tomb, Dishonored, their well of fucked-up cities and punk necromancers was fed from a distant reservoir of Ford, Gentle, Swanwick, Leiber and Peake

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 3d

New work by James Nunn, I believe, but I’d bet big bucks it’s intentional Peake homage

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 5d

Swing for the fences, they say

Black text on white background:

Weirding
Toward a critical theory of weird fiction/a weird fiction of critical theory

H. P. Lovecraft, who sometimes dabbled in fiction, is most importantly
remembered as a critic of the weird.

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

“I’m finally Mor-doing it” was right there, idiot

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

Ok finally carved out some time in between reviews, it’s Mordew o’clock

Alex Pheby’s Mordew, with a hatch marked black and white line drawing of a kid looking up at a bird on a wall with some grotesqueries in the distance

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

It seems to be setting out to do exactly what I want from fantasy novels!

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

“I’m finally Mor-doing it” was right there, idiot

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

Ok finally carved out some time in between reviews, it’s Mordew o’clock

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 4d

@thomasha.bsky.social you’ve been picked and tagged

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John MacNeill Miller @snarlsdickens.bsky.social · 4d

Finished *Uncertain Sons* by @thomasha.bsky.social last night. Fantastic collection that does all the best literary and intellectual work of classic weird fiction while expertly updating and adapting the genre to address our present moment. Not a dud in it—every story’s a gem. Highly recommend!

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