'France has been the laughing stock of the world'

'Eliminating it altogether'

Speaker Johnson Makes Pledge Over Epstein Records

'I just can't put up with it anymore'

'It was so disrespectful'

'Oversight is not the problem — abuse of power is'

'How did Dems lose?'

A few problems with the data

News Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall Wins 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Award for Fiction The award comes with a $25,000 cash prize By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 21, 2025 Vajra Chandrasekera photo by Sanjeewa Weerasinghe Comment 0 Share New Share Vajra Chandrasekera photo by Sanjeewa Weerasinghe Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation announced that Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera has won the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Award for Fiction, a $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. The prize recognizes those writers Le Guin spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now. A panel of authors—Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse—selected Rakesfall as the winner from a shortlist of eight books. They had this to say about the novel:  “As fluid and changing as water, Rakesfall funnels genre, narrative structures, characters, and our conception of time into a spiritual kaleidoscope. Rakesfall trusts us to follow, across the literary equivalent of light years, a deeply felt and moving story of grief, loss, and ultimately hope to savor in dark times. Like Le Guin, Vajra Chandrasekera writes about colonialism and power with a kind of moral clarity and strength that speaks to the heart as well as the mind. He has created a masterclass of the possibilities inherent in fiction. Rakesfall is an extraordinary achievement in science fiction, and a titanic work of art.” In his acceptance speech, Chandrasekera expressed his gratitude for receiving the award and said, “Rakesfall is a book about power, and it talks about the arrogance and undeserved self-belief of the powerful, their bottomless desire for more power, more wealth, until they shamelessly strive for not only a throne but godhood. This is actually the world we already live in, which is why our oligarchs are obsessed with longevity, AI, and transcending mere humanity. “Late capitalism’s death drive is so perfected that it is not only willing but eager to sacrifice the real present in pursuit of an imaginary future, and the language, the concepts they use to construct that imaginary, come from a vocabulary and a grammar built by science fiction.” Check out the video below of actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach announcing Chandrasekera receiving the award, as well as Chandrasekera’s full acceptance speech. [end-mark] The post Vajra Chandrasekera’s <i>Rakesfall</i> Wins 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Award for Fiction appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews A Fine Specimen: Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Martin Cahill reviews a sensual, horrifying, electrifying, and deeply human erotic horror novel. By Martin Cahill | Published on October 21, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share This is one of those reviews that’s going to be incredibly on the nose, and I don’t mind leading with that. Why? Because if you love Sarah Gailey’s work, well, you’re going to love this. So please keep reading, I love having you here, but this is going to be worth adding to your shelves. And if you haven’t read anything by Gailey before, if this is your first experience with them and their delightful brain, then Spread Me, their newest horror book from Nightfire, is going to be your gateway drug. Sensual, horrifying, electrifying, this book is deeply human, and worse, incredibly fascinated by desire and bodies—the body itself, the shape our desires take, and what lengths we’ll go to in order to sate them.  Let’s get into the meat of it. Literally.  Kinsey is a scientist in isolation at a research station deep in the desert, where the only other living things around her aside from her teammates are the organisms in the cryptobiotic layer under the sand. Said organisms are exactly what she’s there to study and where her passion lies; most of the time, she’s thinking about how to extend her four year season of solitude because going back to civilization is so unappealing. Sure, she’s used to her teammates Jacques, Domino, Mads, Nkrumah, and Saskia, but she’s sure as hell not a part of their web of sex, desire, and complicated relationships, hell no. When Kinsey blows through protocol and brings in a specimen they find in the desert, a strange coyote-like entity with more legs than usual, she exposes all of them to some kind of fever that isolates each of them in quarantine, a fever that every member of the team burns with… except Kinsey. Not that she tells them that. Rather than own up to masturbating for days on end in isolation to a picture of a T2 bacteriophage (fun fact: this is a virus that kills E. coli!), she says she also was struck with illness. But as the six of them resume life after the virus races through them, not all of them are who they say they are. Kinsey and the crew are in for the lockdown of their lives, and it’s going to get messy.  Physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, Spread Me gets messy every which way at top speed. It is a sexy, haunting, jaw-clenching ride of a story. Obviously, John Carpenter’s The Thing is a massive influence on this story, to the point that Kinsey and her teammates have the equivalent of a Swear Jar for even mentioning the movie or the titular creature. But take that level of claustrophobia, deception, and paranoia, and then introduce the language of sex and consent, probing and pulsing, the sharing of bodies in small, confined spaces, and you will have an idea of Spread Me. Much like Sam J. Miller’s “Thing With Beards,” Spread Me is a piece of fiction that looks at those themes inherent to The Thing and reexamines them through lenses of queerness, sexual non-conformity, desire, attraction, love, and self. And the Covid-19 Pandemic has certainly raised the dramatic stakes on discussions of trust, exposure, assuring others you’re safe, and lying when you’re not. As this virus moves through the station, we see how each researcher reacts to it, how it reacts to and changes them, and how each of these factors into how Kinsey is treated throughout.  Buy the Book Spread Me Sarah Gailey Buy Book Spread Me Sarah Gailey Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Because Kinsey is attracted to the virus. Like the bacteriophage she masturbates to, the thought of this virus—its own motivations, its purpose and function—are intoxicating to consider. And as it begins to move through her teammates, it causes them to act in a way Kinsey has never seen them act towards her: flirtatious, sexy, invading personal space, reaching out with eager hands and lips. While Kinsey is horrified to witness the takeover of her teammates from an outside entity, she realizes: The virus is merely acting through those it infects. For some reason, it wants her the way she wants it. Gailey never provides easy answers, and watching Kinsey wrestle with what her body wants versus fighting to preserve her teammates, to study this virus and understand it, all while desperately keeping herself apart from it is some incredibly compelling character work, and Gailey does not disappoint. And that’s before we get into the discussion of whether or not it’s moral to let anyone in the base live, to prevent spreading it. (::looks at title ominously::)  Neither does Gailey disappoint with Jacques, Saskia, Nkrumah, Domino, and Mads. Each of these people are more than their function at the base; they all harbor contradictions and deeply held beliefs that fuel their own side of the story, as we see from multiple angles what the virus means to them, and how the loss of comrades affects each throughout the story.  There are surprises in this book, no doubt. Gailey pushes body horror to new limits, to the point that at several points I went, “AAAH,” out loud while reading. If you’re familiar with The Thing or work borne from its influence, you may think you have an idea of where and how this book ends (not that I’ll whisper a word about it), but Gailey will keep you guessing until the very end. Spread Me shines best, viscous and captivating as an oil slick, when we see the contradictory machine of lust, desire, intelligence, and self-preservation that is the human body and mind at odds against an intelligence that, in many ways, wants the same thing. To survive. To be seen. To live on.  I’m still thinking about this book and cannot recommend it highly enough. It continues to cement Gailey’s status as one of the leading voices in fiction and horror, using their talent to not only weave thoughtful stories of identity, community, culture, and society, but also freak you out while doing it. I can’t wait to see what dark corners of the heart they take us next! [end-mark] The post A Fine Specimen: <i>Spread Me</i> by Sarah Gailey appeared first on Reactor.