(1) TOLKIEN FANFIC SURVEY. The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild shared “Six Demographic Takeaways from the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey”. Here’s the first one:

Takeaway #1. “Fanfiction Is a Woman’s Genre” Gets Complicated

When I first started doing fan studies research, “fanfiction writers are 90% women” was canon. It was initially stated in 1980 by Johana Cantor, restated in the foundational scholarship on fanfiction in the early ’90s, and backed up by a few studies in the 2010s, including the original data for the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey. I discuss these studies in some detail in the Who Are We? article.

Probably the most substantial demographic shift across the ten years described by the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey is the reevaluation of “fanfiction as a women’s genre.” In the 2022 article, I note a decrease in survey participants who identify as women. The number of fans identifying as women dropped from 90% in 2015 to 75% in 2020, then further down to 68% in 2025—a 22% plummet in ten years.

So what is happening here? It is not increased participation by men, which has remained fairly steady—4%, 6%, and 5% of participants in 2015, 2020, and 2025 were men, respectively.

Instead, the explanation is an increase in nonbinary fans writing and reading Tolkien-based fanfiction. In 2015, 4% of participants chose a nonbinary or other identity as a gender minority. By 2020, 19% of participants identified as nonbinary or self-described as a gender minority.¹ By 2025, that number was 27%. The data to the right show this demographic shift across the three surveys.

I want to take a step back and consider these data in the larger context. In 1980, Cantor introduced the idea that fanfiction writers are 90% women, a number that held steady through the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey—thirty-five years. In ten years, that “canon” was completely upended, and while women are still a majority, that majority is no longer such that “fanfiction is a women’s genre” is a simple given. In a single decade, the fandom has diversified substantially in terms of gender identity.

Part of this is likely an increase in people who identify as nonbinary overall. It was difficult to find data supporting this—it seems interest in nonbinary identities among demographers is fairly new, so I could not find longitudinal data to present alongside my own—but a 2022 study from the Pew Research Center offers two interesting insights. First, 1% of all US adults identify as nonbinary; second, the number of US adults who know someone who is nonbinary is increasing. The latter data is important because it suggests that nonbinary identities—or at least openness about nonbinary identities—is more common, at least in the US, which partially explains the dramatic shift in the survey data across the last ten years.

But this is still a partial explanation because the survey data, where 24% of participants identified as nonbinary and 3% self-described as other gender minorities in 2025, looms large next to the 1% of nonbinary American adults. Tolkien fanfiction spaces, in other words, attract nonbinary and other gender-minority folks at much higher rate than would be expected based on their prevalence in the population overall.

Here, I want to pan back an even larger context. I entered the Tolkien fanfiction fandom in 2004, and at the time, many communities were openly hostile to writing about LGBTQ+ characters—i.e., slash fiction—which I cannot imagine created a welcoming or safe climate for LGBTQ+ fans. Even as other fandoms came to see representation of diverse characters as an acknowledgement of social justice and human rights, there were pockets of Tolkien fanfiction fandom that felt emboldened by their assumptions of Tolkien’s intent to deny the existence of LBGTQ+ characters in Middle-earth and treat those who transgressed these self-invented rules with disdain, cruelty, and on at least one occasion that I know of, threats. The data we see now about the participation of LGBTQ+ fans is not to suggest that we’ve won; that fandom spaces are supportive or even safe all of the time. But the data do suggest that we’ve made progress.

(2) AND THE HITS KEEP ON COMING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A second volume of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits, edited by J. Michael Straczynski, will be released on March 2027 by publisher Union Square & Co. More information here.

A second collection of award-winning short stories and nonfiction essays by Harlan Ellison, an eight-time Hugo Award winner, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and four-time Nebula Award winner.

As an influential provocateur of the New Wave movement, Harlan Ellison’s prolific work shattered the traditional boundaries of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. His surreal, ambitious narratives are charged with an electric energy and a defiant prose style that has captivated audiences for decades and continues to resonate with new generations of readers.

Featuring these stories and many more:  

• “A Boy and His Dog” —Nebula Award winner and a major influence on the Fallout video game series
• “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans” —Hugo Award winner, Locus Award winner
• “Croatoan” —Locus Award winner
• “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty” —Twilight Zone episode
• “Grail” —World Fantasy Award nominee
• “The Discarded”
• “Paingod”

 This volume also collects many of Ellison’s nonfiction essays, including An Edge in My Voice, a series of impassioned and acerbic columns Ellison wrote for LA Weekly in the early 1980s under the condition that they would be published uncensored.

(3) WHEN AI SLIPS BY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Bona Books has had to reschedule their “Wrath Month” anthology because it turns out they bought some AI-generated stories.

They’ve got an article on how they discovered this (fortunately, before they went to print). “Honey, We Bought an AI Story”.

For a micro-press with a volunteer team, this has been a nightmare of epic proportions. Months lost, huge energies expended, new emergency procedures built from scratch. Bona Books is dedicated to promoting human authors, and will never tolerate AI-generated work. If we’d caught this even two months later, we’d have been in production and facing the very real prospect of pulping an entire print run, without money for a reprint.

Since June 2025, the team at Bona Books have been ploughing our energies into our sophomore release: Wrath Month. A scrappy, angry, punk anthology of queer speculative fiction. We hoped it would be a way to channel some of the anger that so many LGBTQIA+ people (ourselves included) have been feeling at the state of the world into something meaningful.

The community seemed to agree because stories flooded in: 606 wild, furious tales from queer writers around the world. We had magical punk rockers, trans weredingoes eating cops, zombie gays refusing to be buried. Cutting it to just twenty stories was a challenge, but we were punching the air.

One chosen story was a steampunk, anti-colonial fantasy, titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”. It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.

We also accepted an epic fantasy romance called “The Rot Beneath”, in which a young man merged with a mycelial network to bring down a fascist regime (and rescue his boyfriend). The worldbuilding was messy, but it offered an imaginative, epic scale that expanded the tone of the anthology. As far as we could tell, this would have been the author Stephen Jackson’s first professional publication.

(Note: We are naming both authors here because we are confident of the process we have run and able to defend the claims we have made. We also note both these names are pseudonyms.)

Much later, after months of diligent work from our tiny team, Wrath Month was inches away from going to print.

Then everything went wrong.

Another editor alerted us to the problem. Several SFF magazines had received numerous submissions with AI hallmarks from an author publishing under a familiar name: Bella Chacha….

(4) NOT SIGNING THAT. P.A. Cornell shared more discussion of the field’s response to Must Read Magazines’ contracts in “A busy Spring gives way to a busy Summer”.

Last month I talked about having to walk away from a sale to Analog magazine due to being unable to come to a contractual agreement with the publisher, Must Read Magazines. The good news is that this same story, “A Game of Go,” has since sold to Adventitious and will be out in their August issue.

I bring this up again because, relevant to this, David Steffen, who runs The Submission Grinder, recently posted on Bluesky about his decision to keep the five magazines owned by this publisher delisted on his site. In his post, David made it clear that the editors of these magazines have nothing to do with his decision, and also linked to both mine and Scott Edelman’s public statements on our experiences with this publisher.

To make a long story short, David communicated with MRM for quite some time in an attempt to help them come up with a boilerplate contract that would be in keeping with the industry standard. This was done in partnership with SFWA. David made it clear to MRM that if he saw a fair boilerplate from them, he would re-instante the listings for these magazines. MRM, however, continued to send contracts that varied from author to author and that contained non-standard clauses that each individual author had to negotiate on their own. To this date, David has not seen a “boilerplate” contract from MRM and they have not communicated with him in nearly a year.

David felt the need to comment on this after several people asked why the magazines continue to not be listed, despite SFWA saying they’d seen some contract improvements. I can relate as, over the past year, I’ve also had people reach out to tell me they signed the contract and thought it was fine.

Here’s the thing those people may not be aware of:

The contract they’ve seen is not the contract I was sent. I was one of the first authors to receive the new contract after MRM bought the magazines—before even SFWA was involved. My seven-month negotiation with MRM did yield some changes. For one thing, they ended up walking back the most infamous clause; the one that asked authors to waive their moral rights. To be clear though, while the words “moral rights” no longer appear in the contract, the last version of it I saw did include wording that asked for something similar, which I was still not on board with despite SFWA spinning it as an improvement.

Which brings me to my next point: just because one author thinks the current contract is fine, doesn’t mean we all feel that way. What’s a dealbreaker for me, may not be a dealbreaker for you. Even if your agent says the contract’s fine, it’s your signature that goes on it. YOU need to be okay with what you’re signing and that begins with understanding what each clause means.

And finally, it’s not just about the contract. Selling stories is a business. The contract is only part of that business. For me at least, it also matters who I do business with. Ultimately, if a publisher is in breach of a short story contract, writers are unlikely to go after them in court. Lawyers, after all, cost a hell of a lot more than the 8 cents per word (if we’re lucky) we make on a story. So there’s an element of trust there that’s inherent…

(5) DOUBLING UP. “International Booker Prize Doubles Purse, Changes Name” reports Publishers Weekly.

The U.K.-based Booker Prize Foundation has announced it will double the purse for the International Booker Prize from £50,000 to £100,000 starting next year, thanks to a commitment by Bukhman Philanthropies to fund the next 10 years of the award.

The prize, which honors translated fiction and this year celebrates its 10th anniversary, will be renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize in recognition of the partnership. The purse will continue to be split equally between the winning author and translator; each shortlisted title will continue to be awarded a prize of £5,000, also split between the author and translator.

In the announcement, the foundation also named the panel of judges for the 2027 prize, which is now open to publisher submissions, including author Katie Kitamura, who will chair the committee; critic and novelist Patrick McGuinness; author Caleb Azumah Nelson; poet and novelist Olga Ravn; and actress Tessa Thompson.

The Bukhman International Booker Prize longlist will be announced on March 16, 2027, with a shortlist to follow on April 15. The winning book will be presented at a ceremony in May…

(6) WORKING AROUND BOOK BANS. [Item by Jim Janney.] Utah state law says that if any three school districts decide to remove a book from their libraries, all districts in the state must do likewise. There are 41 districts across the state, of varying sizes, so not everyone is happy with that. “Utah book bans: Local bookstores now giving away free copies of banned titles” reports The Salt Lake Tribuune.

A group of LGBTQ organizations and independent bookstores have teamed up to hand out free copies of books that have been banned from all Utah public schools.

The giveaways will continue, they say, until the state ends its practice of removing titles from school shelves statewide.

Organizers of the “Read Between the Bans” campaign include The King’s English Bookshop, Under The Umbrella bookstore, The Legendarium bookstore and Weller Book Works, along with Utah’s LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce and Safe Zone Utah.

Together, they were able to raise around $450 to support the first giveaway Sunday during the SLC Pride festival, said Liz Pitts, president and CEO of the chamber.

There, atop a table, free copies of banned books sat stacked and available to grab,including “Looking for Alaska” by John Green, which was banned from all Utah public schools in March.…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 7, 1968 — Jeff VanderMeer, 58.

By Paul Weimer: In some ways, Jeff Vandermeer, although he didn’t know it, helped get me into reviewing and criticism. Back around 2000, I started to get interested seriously in science fiction and fantasy and the field of SFF. I think I’ve mentioned before elsewhere that this is when I cast my first Hugo ballots, was reading Locus assiduously, etc.  I also got interested in reviewing. 

In those wild days, getting into reviewing and getting arcs and books and getting involved in that community was easy, although no one would really see my work extensively for years. I was mostly reading reviews and not writing my own at this point, though. One of the reviews read in a newsletter was for City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. Given my usual tastes, this book sounded off-the-wall bonkers and way outside my comfort zone. But the reviewer, whose name sadly I cannot remember alas, convinced me of two things: I wanted to write reviews myself, to help be a signpost to others. And, germane to this birthday, to try Jeff Vandermeer.

I was stunned by the visceral, immersive, New Weird experience that City of Saints and Madmen, in its original form gave me.  I bought the later edition, too (sadly both were lost in book moves) and started reading Vandemeer ever since. He does sit outside my typical comfort zone on a number of levels (much like M John Harrison does) but his fearlessness in trailblazing the New Weird, to this day, makes him one of my must-reads. 

While I still have a strong affinity for Ambergris and the stories and novels set in it, I think my favorite is the braided, twisting, self-referential and convoluted and so out there Annihilation trilogy. I think that, even more than Ambergris, is the work that you hand someone who wants to try Vandermeer.  If you like this, you will like the rest of his work. If not, you will not.  The movie adaptation, which takes from more than just the first novel, is an interesting adaptation. It sits somewhat skewed from the main texts, but given the whole New Weird aesthetic and mindset…it makes it a good movie FOR that reason. 

And Vandermeer, along with his wife Ann, is a pretty damn good anthologist, in the bargain. (The Time Traveler’s Almanac my favorite of these.)

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY TOO.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 7, 1919 — Jon Pertwee. (Died 1996.)

By Paul Weimer: The Third Doctor.

My first encounter with him was in the episode “The Five Doctors”. I had seen the Tom Baker serials, and PBS had gamely gone on to the Peter Davidson serials. Among those was the 25th anniversary special, featured the recast 1st Doctor (Richard Hurndall), Patrick Troughton, and of course, Jon Pertwee. So this episode was my first exposure to all three doctors before Tom Baker. I loved the car (Doctor Who driving a car, what a notion!) and filed away Pertwee for the future. 

Eventually the PBS station went back to the beginning with a couple of episodes of the original 1st Doctor William Hartnell, and Troughton, before settling in on the Pertwee run. And here I could see the radical change in concept for the Doctor: A Doctor who was mostly stuck on Earth or returned to Earth. Sure, most Doctors visit the Earth time and again, but the idea of a Doctor that stays on Earth in the same time period, rarely does (or even can) use the TARDIS, and seemed like a science hero–this was strange and unusual stuff.  

I particularly liked Pertwee and the Third Doctor’s interactions, not just with UNIT (and I finally understood why people liked the Brigadier so much) but with Delgado’s The Master. The Master-Doctor relationship begins and is possibly at its best for the entire Old Doctor run. The Master of Baker, Davidson, Baker and McCoy is, frankly, a pale shadow of the one in these episodes. And I think it’s the chemistry for lack of a better word that Pertwee had with Delgado that really makes this possible. 

My favorite Pertwee episode is a tough nut to crack. Inferno, with the alternate world? “Planet of the Spiders”, with absurd chase scenes? Maybe “Frontier in Space”, because it was an episode that really brought home to me that the Doctor had great adventures we never got to see (just how he became a noble in the Draconian Empire is something I’ve always wondered about!) . 

If you didn’t like this birthday remembrance, I am sure you can simply fix it by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Brevity shows even the Kaiju know.
• Brewster Rockit tries to master an update.
• Dinosaur Comics has a genre preference.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal still needs a sense of self.
• xkcd mixes chess with World Cup.

(10) SOME WORSE THAN OTHERS. [Item by Steven French.] A timely critique by Keith Stuart in the latest “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “The history of brilliantly terrible World Cup video games” in the Guardian.

Icome with a warning to all football fans: if you’ve been enjoying the World Cup enough to think, “I’d like to re-enact this on a football video game”, do not go to Netflix and play Fifa World Cup: Launch Edition, the officially licensed game of the tournament, which streams via your smart TV or computer. Developed by the virtually unknown Delphi Interactive, it’s a juddering, dated calamity, with sluggish controls (via your phone, once you’ve downloaded the app) and commentary courtesy of Clive Tyldesley that delivers all the excitement of a robotic train station announcement.

Until this, it was largely agreed that the worst World Cup football game in history was World Cup Carnival, the first official Fifa tie-in, which was released on various home computers in 1986. Publisher US Gold thought it had a deal with the Manchester studio Ocean Software to repurpose its acclaimed title Match Day, but the agreement fell through. With three months to go before Mexico 86, US Gold was forced to effectively rebadge a dire 1984 sim, World Cup Football, by the fading developer Artic. To add some value to the package, the game was released in a fancy big box complete with a fixtures chart, a World Cup facts poster and some flag stickers. Nobody was fooled – the World Cup Carnival was a critical and commercial disaster.

Four years later, Sega’s World Cup Italia ’90 for the Mega Drive was another catastrophe, with its terrible controls, awful music and a weirdly zoomed-in view of the pitch that didn’t let you see beyond a few metres. For USA 94, US Gold somehow wrangled the official licence again and actually put out a decent footie sim … but only if you happened to buy the SNES version. The home computer alternative was memorably described in Amiga Power magazine as, “an inoperable canker on the lungs of the innocent children of the world”. Firm but fair.’

(11) AND ME SO YOUNG. [Item by Jim Janney.] There’s a bit in an old Pogo strip where Porkypine reminds the other characters that none of this will matter in a few billion years when the sun expands into the earth’s orbit, destroying all life. But now some astronomers think this may not happen after all. “Good News! Turns Out the Earth Will Never Be Swallowed by the Sun” reports WIRED.

…To understand what lies ahead for the planets of the solar system, you need to look inside the sun itself. At present, the sun is in its main-sequence phase, a long period of stability that has lasted for about 4.5 billion years, during which it is powered primarily by the fusion of hydrogen into helium.

This phase will continue for billions of years, but the sun will gradually become hotter and more luminous. Eventually, it will grow bright enough to evaporate all of Earth’s surface water, making our planet uninhabitable within the next two billion years.

About 5 billion years from now, the sun’s long period of stability will come to an end. By then, the hydrogen in its core will have been exhausted. The helium core will contract under its own gravity, heating up and triggering hydrogen fusion in a surrounding shell. As a result, the sun’s outer layers will expand enormously while its surface cools dramatically, giving it the characteristic red color of this stage in a star’s evolution. And this is where the mystery surrounding Earth’s fate begins…

… The new study, based on improved models of tidal dissipation and stellar mass loss during the sun’s transition into a red giant, points to a different conclusion. According to the researchers, tidal dissipation—the process that drains orbital energy and gradually causes elliptical orbits, such as Earth’s, to become more circular—would be less effective than previous models suggested.

At the same time, observations of the red giant L2 Puppis, located about 209 light-years from Earth, indicate that the sun could lose enough mass for this effect to outweigh the influence of tidal forces. If so, Earth’s orbit would gradually move outward, significantly increasing its chances of surviving the red giant phase….

(12) NASA ART PROGRAM. [Item by Steven French.] For those in the DC area or heading that way: “’Flight originated from the imagination’: how artists have captured space travel” in the Guardian.

Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.

James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos. From 1962 to 1974 it was led by James Dean, who then became the first art curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Dean transferred about 2,000 Nasa artworks to the museum, whose collection has now swollen to more than 8,000, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Henry Casselli, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas. A selection is on display in its revamped Flight and the Arts Center to celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary….

(13) NEW BATTERY IDEAS. [Item by Dann.] DARPA has a program looking at using material from radioactive waste stockpiles to create long-life batteries for drones, sensors, satellites, and other long term uses.  If successful, this would provide a valuable purpose for an abundant material that is currently more a problem than an asset. “These light-weight power cells run on nuclear waste and could power next-gen drones” at Defense One.

How many missions could a drone or satellite fly with a battery pack that can last decades? And what if that battery could be fueled by nuclear waste?

That’s the future scientists are working toward in DARPA’s “Rads to Watts” program, which aims to create lightweight batteries with a high energy density. And a recent $3.37 million contract award aims to fund a viable proof-of-concept device that can produce more than 10 watts per kilogram with a yearslong shelf life. 

“Solar cells directly convert sunlight into electricity…Ours directly convert radiation into electricity,” said Stafford Sheehan, CEO and founder of Project Omega, which describes their radioisotope power sources as mini-generators that replace traditional batteries.

“We already have some of these small devices running; the ones that are specifically designed to meet the DARPA figure of merit are going to come out early next year.”

Several organizations are participating in the program, with Morgan State University serving as the prime contractor and handling basic research and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory handling nuclear materials and testing. Northrop Grumman and ARA will bring computational modeling to make sure the prototype meets performance standards….

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Danny Sichel, Jim Janney, Daniel Dern, Robin Anne Reid, Dann, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]