Scarred by The NeverEnding Story—and More SFF Links

Hello, my little rare squids! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share with you about award winners and nominees, cover reveals, helpful ants, and a new story from Nisi Shawl!

Here are the Winners of the 2025 Nebula Awards

Love means never having to say you’re sorry for trying to lay your eggs in someone: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell’s queer debut about a shapeshifting monster, has won this year’s Nebula Award for Novel! It’s a really great almost-cozy monster love story. From the publisher description:

“Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by impolite monster hunters, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

Badly hurt by the hunters, Shesheshen’s nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human. Homily is kind and would make a great co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young can devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, Shesheshen realizes that eating her girlfriend isn’t an option.”

Already sounds amazing, right? If you hadn’t heard already, we’re big fans of this novel here at Book Riot. And I am very excited to read his next novel, Wearing the Lion, which just came out! As for the other winners and nominees, you can read more about them here.

And speaking of awards, the nominees for the Shirley Jackson Awards have also been announced. These are given to works of horror, psychological suspense, and dark fantasy. If you love those genres, you will find a lot of great recommendations among the nominees!

The NeverEnding Story: Childhood Trauma and the Stories That Change Us

As a child of the 1980s, I have a long list of movies that were marketed for children that terrified and upset me. This was before the PG-13 rating, so many of them were rated PG or even G. The Dark Crystal, Watership Down, Mr. Boogedy, Return to Oz, and Gremlins, to name a few. (How was The Secret of NIMH rated G??! That movie was so upsetting.) But one movie from that time seems to have really scarred kids for life: The NeverEnding Story. You already know what I’m talking about just by saying the title. Yep: Artax and the Swamp of Sadness. And over on Reactor, Tyler Dean does a deep dive into that scene and more.

“For most millennials, the scene in which Atreyu’s horse, Artax, sinks and drowns in the Swamps of Sadness—clearly a take, as my viewing partner pointed out, on Bunyan’s Slough of Despond—is an elemental nugget of our collective childhood trauma (just admire this incredible cosplay). And, while it holds up as an unsettling scene, it’s striking to me how much of the rest of the movie is equally frightening and suffused with unnameable sorrow: the Rockbiter’s speech about his ‘big, strong hands’ and his despondent wish for oblivion after he’s unable to save his friends from the Nothing; the laser-eyed Sphinxes at the Southern Oracle, bare-breasted and perversely serene, turning an armored knight to slag and cinders while the twitchy gnome, Engywook (Sydney Bromley), cackles in delight; and of course, the very concept of the Nothing, depicted through darkening skies and howling winds, shredding the scenery while Deep Roy, decked out in Victorian country finery and seated atop a delightfully canine racing snail, cries out in mortal fear.”

Read the Short Story “Slippernet” by Nisi Shawl

Also up on Reactor: An empathy-generating fungus that can help you acquire the job of your dreams is at the center of this new short story from award-winning author Nisi Shawl. It’s a sequel of sorts to their books Everfair and Kinning, but you don’t have to have read them to enjoy the story! Here’s a taste:

     “Bake it in their bread.”

     “Not everyone eats bread.” Ross objected to plans of action easily. He had three older brothers; he’d seen plenty of mistakes made. “Some people are allergic. Besides, then we’d be just as bad. Forcing them—”

     “Spare me the false equivalencies!”

     “It ain’t false!” That was Kitt. They could be counted on to defend Ross, or anyone else they thought was getting ganged up on. “We need some way to make people wanna connect. Set up Meshes of their own, even. We need carrots insteada sticks.”

     “If we could make them want to Mesh with people—each other, anybody—there’d be no need for the Threads.” The Grove sat around a small, slick-surfaced café table, their usual meeting spot. Evening gloom pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding their bay; the café’s few other customers occupied tables near electric outlets on the big room’s far side. The latest member of the Grove to speak, Aavo, stared down at a corked glass tube, spinning it slowly back and forth between thumb and finger. The tube’s whitish-purple contents reflected blurrily in the tabletop’s glossy black. “We have to approach the problem indirectly. Make them want something else. Something this gives us.”

     “Love? Everyone wants that.”

Nisi Shawl is the author of several books, including Everfair and Kinning, Speculation, and the story collection Our Fruiting Bodies.

Cover Reveals Galore!

What’s better than a cover reveal? Three cover reveals! These are three fabulous recent covers of upcoming SFF books that I thought were cool. First up is the adult fantasy debut An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole. It’s a dark academia set at a magic university and will be out January 20, 2026 from Poisoned Pen Press.

Then there’s this trippy cover for the debut Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill. It’s a speculative horror about a community where the wives are covered in fungi and a woman who rebels against tradition. It’s out April 14, 2026 from S&S/Saga Press.

And last, but not least, is the cover to Adam Christopher’s latest novel, Crawlspace. It’s a sci-fi horror about a mission in space that starts to get really weird and scary. You can pick this Tor Nightfire title up on March 17, 2026.

And, To End, Check Out These Helpful Ants

Scientists have discovered that the longhorn crazy ant (that’s its name, really) has swarm instincts and will make a clear path for other ants who are carrying food. That seems fair. Nobody likes it when they trip and spill their dinner. (Although I did like it when the baker fell down on Sesame Street.)

According to the article, “Like many ant species, crazy ants are known to alert their sisters to the presence of large food items by laying odor trails: running erratically (hence their ‘crazy’ name), they touch the ground with the tip of their abdomen every 0.2 seconds to deposit a tiny droplet of a pheromone. This pheromone swiftly attracts other workers to the food. But here, the scientists found this pheromone to play a key role in clearing behavior as well.

Their observations showed that workers were most prone to clear beads that lay approximately 40mm away from food towards the direction of the nest. They moved these beads for up to 50mm before dropping them, away from the route leading back to the nest. The record holder cleared 64 beads in succession.” (I bet I could break that record.)

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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