A New Short Story from Quan Barry—and More SFF Links

Hello, my little chirpy dinosaurs! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share with you about the winner of the inaugural DAG prize for literature, the study of million-year-old ice, a new Quan Barry short story, and more!

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata Wins Inaugural Prize

This is cool news: The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata has won the inaugural $20,000 DAG Prize for Literature. The novel, which was published in 2020, was selected from a list of five finalists and given by the DAG Foundation. I thought this book was excellent, and I hope the award brings it more attention. It’s about a man in New Orleans in 2005 who is trying to find the grandson of a Latin American science fiction writer. He is hoping to return her lost unfinished manuscript, which he discovered in his grandfather’s home.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata is available now!

Scientists Plan to Melt the Earth’s Oldest Ice. (Sure, Because That Never Goes Wrong.)

Somebody hasn’t read How High We Go in the Dark (or watched The Thing, or the “Ice” episode of The X-Files, or…): A team of British scientists plan to thaw ice from the Antarctic core, which is over one million years old. The idea is that it will reveal all kinds of secrets about the planet’s climate changes and atmospheric composition. And it will most definitely not release some kind of ancient virus or alien life form that will wipe out the planet. Nope, definitely not.

“Over the course of seven weeks, scientists at the British Antarctic Survey plan to gradually melt 1.5-million-year-old Antarctic ice cores at their lab in Cambridge, England, unlocking whatever dust, volcanic ash, and even single-celled algae that might be preserved inside. These materials hold clues about Earth’s ancient climate and atmospheric composition, and could provide new insights into how greenhouse gases influenced global temperatures more than a million years ago. They could also help scientists understand how human-generated emissions will shape Earth’s future.

“Our climate system has been through so many different changes that we really need to be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different tipping points,” Liz Thomas, head of ice core research at the BAS, told the BBC.”

Welp. Fingers crossed! (Related: If you have never read The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, about the last human left on Earth, now would be a great time to pick it up!)

Check Out “Redemption Song,” a New Short Story by Quan Barry

We are still several months away from the unveiling of The Unveiling, Quan Barry’s new novel (which coincidentally also has to do with the Antarctic). It’s a literary sci-fi/horror mashup about a Black film scout on an Antarctic cruise in search of locations for a film about Ernest Shackleton. I, for one, am so excited to read it! And while we wait for its October release, there’s a new short story to check out! “Redemption Song” is a retelling of the myth of Pandora’s box, set in a post-apocalyptic future.

“There’s no more putting it off. On the exterior synchro-glass, Pandora comes into view, a pale mint green. Misty atmospheric tendrils flare out into space, some reaching as far as two hundred aerilons above the planet’s surface. Unlike a star with its fiery corona of superheated plasma, Pandora appears as if wrapped in an ever-shifting vapor. And to think there’s only one being somewhere down there wandering around in the mist and fog, one lone figure who calls Pandora home. Dio wonders how they’ll find her.

‘Don’t you remember? We won’t find her,’ says Sola. He flinches as Sola tightens the seal around her respir-shield. The thing is mostly transparent, her mouth and nose still visible, her lower face illumed with an eerie glow. Sola grins. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, bucko,’ she says. ‘She’ll find us.'”

You can read the whole story on Reactor now!

Come On, Don’t Get Happy.

Vince Gilligan, writer and creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is returning to his sci-fi roots after two decades off. Before his big break with Breaking Bad, Gilligan wrote episodes of several different shows, most notably thirty episodes of The X-Files. His most famous episodes include “Pusher,” “Monday” (my favorite X-Files episode), “Small Potatoes,” and “Paper Hearts.” (His first episode was “Soft Light,” which wasn’t very good IMO, but gets my love anyway because Tony Shalhoub is in it.)

Gilligan’s new show is called Pluribus, and stars Rhea Seehorn, who played Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. Not a lot is known about the plot, except that it’s about a woman named Carol, a.k.a. the planet’s most miserable person, and her attempts to stop the happiness in the world. A teaser was recently released, and it doesn’t tell us anything about the show at all, but I am still wildly intrigued. It premieres on Apple TV+ on November 7, 2025.

And To Close: There’s a New Book from Sylvain Neuvel Headed Our Way!

It seems hard to believe, but it has been almost ten years since the release of Sylvain Neuvel’s first novel, Sleeping Giants. I have been a fan of Neuvel ever since I got my metal hands on his first book, and I have enjoyed all his books since. So I was extremely delighted to learn that he has a new standalone novel coming in 2026! It’s a sci-fi story called The Many, about five people whose minds become one. It sounds like a wild time (and the cover fits right in with the recent soft rainbow trend!)

From the publisher’s description: “When advertising executive Carole Veilleux loses it at Booker’s donut shop and bites Booker on the arm, it’s about the most interesting thing to happen in the small city of Marquette, Michigan, in years.

But that’s only the beginning of the story. Carole and Booker find their minds merging, in a collective that extends to include Carole’s husband Shivansh and local doctor Evelyn Schlapp. The four of them become the beginning of something larger and stranger than they could ever have imagined.”

The Many by Sylvain Neuvel will be out April 21, 2026 from Solaris.

Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram.

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