Sapphic Moby Dick in Space—and More SFF Links

And John Wiswell has done it again! His novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which recently won the Nebula Award for Novel, also won the Locus Award for first novel. More like Someone You Can Build a Trophy Room In, amirite?

There are a bunch more categories, including horror novel, novelette, short story, anthology, magazine, and publisher. Interestingly, Tor Publishing Group voluntarily recused themselves from the publisher category this year because they have consistently won so many times, they wanted to give others a chance to be recognized. You can check out the full list of winners and nominees!

Gideon the Ninth Meets Murderbot? Don’t Tease Me.

Speaking of Tor, they recently announced Alexis Hall’s science fiction debut Hell’s Heart and shared the eye-popping cover designed by Lydia Ortiz, which immediately has become my favorite cover of 2026.

Hell’s Heart is about a future where Earth has died and people live on other planets in domes fueled by space monsters. The main character hunts these monsters through the starry skies. The book is being billed as ‘sapphic Moby Dick in space’ and the publisher description calls it “Gideon the Ninth meets Murderbot” which is a huge flex. I need this book right now.

From the publisher description:

“Earth is dead. Which leaves us stuck living in atmospheric domes on planets that will kill us if we blink wrong, or run out of fuel. And by ‘fuel’ I mean “the cerebrospinal fluid of gargantuan, quasi-psychic space monsters”.

I joined the hunt hoping to get paid and maybe laid, but mostly paid. Instead, I followed a captain chasing abominations in the skies of Jupiter.

We battled the Möbius Beast itself, there in the red eye of the world.

Spoiler: we lost.”

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall will be out March 10, 2026 from Tor Books.

10 Science Fiction-Sounding New Medical Treatments

I randomly came across this recent post from Listverse, and I couldn’t help but check it out. One day, this will all seem so commonplace, but for right now, it’s some pretty wild stuff. There are indeed some really weird medical treatments mentioned here, many of which involve tiny robots, plus a pufferfish poison painkiller, knee goo, and wound-healing microscopic flowers.

“We’re lucky to exist in the era of incredible medical technologies, and the future promises to be even wilder, thanks to medical headlines like ‘wound-healing nanoflowers.’

Nanotechnology represents the next frontier in health, as per the just-mentioned nanoflower recently dreamed up by the American Chemical Society. It’s made of copper phosphate and tannic acid, which you may recognize as the acid associated with wine and leather-making.

Nanoflowers are self-forming and volumetrically tiny (i.e., nano), but they have lots of surface area for attaching drug molecules. When added to bandages and other dressings, the flowers offer multiple benefits: they’re antioxidant, they fight inflammation, and they neutralize bacteria in a natural, cost-effective way. As a bonus, they fared well when used to treat lab-grown human cells.”

I hope we don’t have to remember to water our nanoflowers, because I do not have a green thumb.

Malka Older on Her Sherlockian Sci-Fi Series

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, the third book in the sapphic sci-fi mystery series, was recently released. If you haven’t checked the series out yet, we are big fans here at Book Riot. It’s about detective Mossa, who works with her former girlfriend Pleiti to solve cases, which also possibly rekindles their romance. And Malka Older, the author of the series, recently talked to Alex Dueben for Crime Reads about adding mystery to her science fiction.

“Alex Dueben: You mentioned that you find mysteries relaxing and many of us find a certain type of mystery relaxing. We love reading and watching British people get murdered in the countryside.

Malka Older: Well, it’s not just British people.

AD: It’s not just British people. We find the murder of all kinds of people comforting.

MO: Yes. We’re equal opportunity. But the British certainly have a good line in people being murdered in small villages or very picturesque places. It is a good question. I’ve asked myself a lot about why I found it comforting. I’ve done a series of Comfort Read Panels with Martha Wells and KJ Charles and T. Kingfisher, who’s Ursula Vernon. Martha Wells is the writer of Murderbot, and there’s a lot of murder in there. We’ve talked about this. One is the traditional, literary analysis answer, which is, something has gone wrong, and it is put to rights by the end of the book. There’s definitely a whole genre of murder mysteries and other detective fiction where things don’t get put right. But in a lot of them, someone’s going to solve the mystery. There’s going to be justice meted out. Or if not, the unknown is going to be revealed.”

And To Close, a New Short Story from Wen-yi Lee

Author Wen-yi Lee debuted in the book scene in 2024 with her queer YA horror novel The Dark We Know, and her adult fantasy debut, When They Burned the Butterfly, will be out in October of this year. It’s about magic, gangs, and secret societies in Singapore. And while we wait to read it, check out her new short story “The Name Ziya” from Reactor. It’s about a young girl who must change who she is if she wants to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious school.

“When the namecutter sliced the first part-name from my chest, I screamed. I had promised not to, I had sworn to be brave, but it ripped from me with a pain like I had never felt in my life. Blood was running down my chest. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ my mother whispered into my hair. ‘It’s all right.’ She had sold one part of her name to feed us during the drought a few years ago. My father had sold one when I was a child, and one before I was born. Now inducted, I pressed into my mother’s arms, fighting back tears. I thought of my name being carried to the anchorites in the hills, whose prayers from our names the bethel claimed kept the soil rich and the rivers flowing through the valleys. There were even those devout who offered up their part-names willingly. Though our village did not particularly subscribe to the faith, who was I to judge it when the bethel were willing to open their treasuries like this?”

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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