Catherine Baker
An alarmingly waterlogged Yorkshire winter opened 2024 and put more near-future climate fiction on my reading list (Stephen Markley’s The Deluge; Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock). Kate Heartfield’s The Embroidered Book had finer-grained radical histories woven into its magical eighteenth-century Vienna, Naples, and Paris than its publicity suggested. Arthurian queens and witches told their own stories too (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name; Juliet E. McKenna’s The Cleaving), and N. K. Jemisin’s sarcastic, hopeful avatars of New York boroughs finally joined forces with the planet’s other living cities in The World We Make. Juno Dawson’s riotous insistence that trans people equally deserve to imagine themselves within British fantasy’s traditions of witchcraft and sisterhood is only part of the charm of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, which dropped two new instalments this year (The Shadow Cabinet and the Tudor-set Queen B), but was still a tonic amid so much abandonment and repression. So were the lesbian bounty hunters of Lyda Morehouse’s Welcome to Boy.net, defying militarized transphobia in space.
Dysfunctional American millennials kept confronting dark magical experiences from their 1990s teenage years (Kiersten White’s Mister Magic; Shaun Hamill’s The Dissonance; Freddie Kölsch’s Now, Conjurers), which I kept reading tirelessly. The Wolds in milder summer were the perfect setting to catch up with Nicola Griffith’s Hild and Menewood, re-enchanting this landscape’s early medieval past with political, social, and (super)natural possibility, and finding language for what we would call genderfluid and disabled representation that perfectly fits the worldview of Hild’s time. Marie Brennan’s The Waking of Angantyr sprang from her frustration that the Norse shieldmaiden questing to retrieve her father’s sword from the world of the dead gets no resolution in the saga that (sometimes) bears her name: its gay vikings, brutal outlaws, and ragged forest-witches are first up for re-reading as another winter draws in.
E. C. Barrett
One of my favorite novels of 2024 was Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a captivating and weirdly imagined account of what happens when a working-class writer is suddenly thrust into the limelight by winning a prestigious literary award.
The novel opens with Corey Fah attempting to collect their trophy for the ‘Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils,’ a prize that comes with prestige, but more importantly for Corey, £10,000.
Two unusual sights await Corey at the pickup spot: an unidentified flying object “radiating neon beige, what a concept,” and the eight-legged, many-eyed Bambi Pavok (p. 1). Part Bambi of the Disney tale, part spider, fully rambunctious whelp, Bambi Pavok spooks the UFO, which flies off into the night. Bad news for Corey, as the prize coordinator will soon tell them, because the UFO was the trophy, possession of which is the required evidence that Corey is the actual Corey Fah, prize winner, and not some imposter. “The assumption had been that a winner would know how to collect” (p. 3).
Indignities abound as the novel follows Corey’s search for the trophy, hounded by constant reminders that they are running out of time to utilize the opportunities afforded by the award. Spatio-temporal anomalies, a countdown clock on Corey’s chance of fame, and an accidentally time-traveling TV show host add to Waidner’s surreal investigation of the questions: How much do these awards improve access for the working-class (or BIPOC or queer or women, etc.) writers they purport to champion, rather than upholding the existing hierarchies through tokenization and spectacle? What do marginalized writers really need? And how to honor the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hate?
Waidner’s writing is unexpected, clever, and liberatory in a scrappy, queer, creative sort of way, and, if you ask me, that’s exactly the energy we need as we head into 2025.
Redfern Jon Barrett
This big ol’ enby has never limited themself to one form of media. When it comes to speculative fiction, I enjoy novels, short stories, movies, shows, board games, and—yes—video games. Despite my love of gaming going back as far as I can remember, I almost never actually write about the format, which is weird, because several games grasped my imagination as I grew from a curious and playful kid to a curious and playful adult: Alpha Centauri sparked my love of world-building and alternate societies; Deus Ex drew me in with its bleak dystopian setting and conspiracy-laden lore; I even played the point-and-click Blade Runner PC game before I ever saw the movie, and it made me fall in love with cyberpunk.
And gods, do I love cyberpunk. Give me a towering city, mass transit hundreds of metres in the sky, and enough neon to rival the sun’s generative capacity, and I’m in absolute heaven (there’s a reason I wrote a queer cyberpunk novel). So it’s no surprise how much I’ve enjoyed getting into Cloudpunk this year. Floating around a bleak, unfathomably dense dystopia while making deliveries was apparently my life’s calling all along—a fact helped by Cloudpunk’s sharp writing and bleak sense of wit. The blocky graphics add to the world’s odd charm, and the intricate architectural spectacle is no less awe-inspiring for it. Sometimes I even forget I’m supposed to be delivering something and just drift around new neighbourhoods with my robo-dog companion, marvelling at the cruel wonders of unrestrained capitalism. It’s the silver lining to an otherwise grim future.
Tristan Beiter
This year I did a lot of excellent reading, though (as usual) much of it was playing catch-up. I finally read Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke and All the Horses of Iceland (2022) by Sarah Tolmie. Both are delightful, dreamlike, and stylistically rich. I also want to quickly shout out to my friends and family for participating in my summer Ursula K. Le Guin reading project, in which we read seven of her books, including Always Coming Home (1985), which was recently rereleased (2023) by Harper Perennial with a new introduction. It’s a great edition of a book which I will be thinking about for a very long time.
However, on to things that were actually released this past year! I read a lot of great stuff this year, including several titles I have reviewed. I think my favorite new prose fiction is Ursula Whitcher’s North Continent Ribbon, a real gem from Neon Hemlock’s novella lineup (and one that definitely has me keeping an eye on the press moving forward). Politically astute, fun, and full of feeling, I can’t recommend it enough. My other favorite new work this year is a video game: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes developed by Simogo Games and published by Annapurna Interactive. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a haunting and haunted slipstream puzzle adventure about art, games, stories, technology, and laser eyes. The puzzles are mostly excellent and always tightly linked to the narrative; it takes a bit of time to get rolling, but the thoughtfulness of its construction, eerie atmosphere, temporal uncertainty, and pleasantly unnerving writing reward exploration. Raising the question of the nature of the work of art in the age of technological production, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes speculatively proposes a vision of modern and contemporary artmaking in/for our digital world.
Bill Capposere
2024 was a great year for us myth-lovers. Claire North’s aptly named Last Song of Penelope wrapped up her stellar Songs of Penelope trilogy, a work that, along with books by Pat Barker and Madeline Miller, stood out amongst the recent flood of Greek story retellings. Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword offered up another original take on familiar legend, giving us an Arthurian tale that is both of its time and ours as well. The treasure that is Alan Garner gave us a macaroni or taradiddle of a book (to use two of the many words Garner introduced me to) in Treacle Walker, based in British Isles folklore and myth. And George O’Connor, having wrapped up his Olympians series of graphic novels, turned to the Norse stories with the equally fantastic Asgardians: Odin and Asgardians: Thor.
I remain ever surprised and ever joyful at how skilled writers can reshape such well-plumbed myths into wholly original works. More fairy than myth, and more faerie than fairy, Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest wonderfully captured the otherness of that realm in a darkly bittersweet tale. And turning to an entirely created mythos, Tad Williams wrapped up (maybe?) his decades-long Osten Ard series with The Navigator’s Children, as sadly rewarding or rewardingly sad as any such end should be. Finally, a tip of the hat to Daniel Abraham, who wrote or co-wrote two of my top fifteen reads this past year with Blade of Dream and, writing as James S. A. Corey in collaboration with Ty Franck, The Mercy of Gods. In media, I want to highlight some smaller films I enjoyed this year: A Samurai in Time, Flow, Robot Dreams, and Dead Talents Society. All highly recommended.
M. L. Clark
2024 felt like many years packed into one, with a range of highs and lows.
In the “highs” department on screen, Dune: Part 2 and Alien: Romulus celebrated the role of colour, contrast, and minimalism in staging a SFF spectacle properly for theatre release (and I’m an Alien: Romulus fan: there’s a split between “homage” and “knock-off” among viewers, which created lively debate). Two Star Trek shows came to an end, neither a personal favourite but Lower Decks closed out its Office-in-space hijinx in a form that showed real love for the fans, and Discovery was fortified by excellent costuming and design. Prodigy: Season 2 was more to my taste with respect to bringing back and remediating old favourites while advancing thoughtful themes for adults and children alike. A surprise hit for me was A Quiet Place: Day One, in which Lupita Nyong’o plays a hospice patient whose death is rudely delayed by the arrival of killer aliens; this was a lovely piece for grieving worlds we know are lost.
On the book and story front, I had a more consistently enjoyable year. On top of reading for the Ursula K. Le Guin Award reading list, I had a great time with Kerstin Hall’s Asunder, an eldritch fantasy/political thriller that might appeal to readers of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall was also a satisfying extension of a reincarnation-driven, deep-time universe I loved in an earlier, shorter-fiction form, ”Peristalsis,” from The Deadlands in 2021. Seth Dickinson’s Exordia offered the sort of moral analysis of compounding atrocity that I needed in our difficult year, while Indrapramit Das’s Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art presented an excellently curated range of thought-provoking ideas from literary powerhouses, and Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain comes back to me often: its story of the complexity of escape deftly bridging the personal and universal. In the short-fiction realm, Rich Larson’s rollicking bait-and-switch “The Indomitable Captain Holli” (Clarkesworld’s April issue), Amal Singh’s potent migrant-body metaphor, "Arazem-2 Is Waiting for a Letter" (Asimov’s July/August issue), and Arula Ratnakar’s neuro-maths thriller “Fractal Karma” (Clarkesworld’s October issue) remind us that quality SFF writing abounds in prose—and should probably be getting a call from Hollywood and streaming networks more often, to flesh out their mastery of spectacle!
Rachel Cordasco
Looking back on my reading for 2024, I’d say it’s been a productive year. Of the thirty-three books I’ve completed (most of them speculative fiction), twenty-eight were originally written in a language other than English: Czech, Arabic, Spanish, Korean, Bengali, Vietnamese, Russian, Indonesian, Gikuyu, Swahili, Norwegian, Danish, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Estonian, Hungarian, Dutch, Catalan, Hebrew, and Turkish.
This wealth of languages is mostly due to the book I’m writing on speculative fiction in translation, my second on the subject. For this project, I’ve sought out books and stories I never would have looked for otherwise, and that has made this year particularly fruitful. One particular favorite from this year was the anthology The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction, edited and translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. Here, Anglophone readers can find some wild early-twentieth-century stories about safari adventures, interstellar travel, and Frankenstein-like creatures.
This anthology is just the latest in a number of recent works featuring Southeast Asian speculative fiction in English—a welcome addition to the corpus of SFF. As part of his introduction to The Inhumans, Chattopadhyay discusses how literary magazines in colonial Bengal were genre melting pots and that translations of Conan Doyle, Wells, Burroughs, and Verne (translated or adapted by the author of The Inhumans) appeared alongside stories, puzzles, news of inventions, and discoveries, etc. We learn, once more, that speculative literature, like other genres, is enriched by earlier or translated stories and genres, and it, in turn, influences later generations and texts. I look forward to reading more Southeast Asian SFT in the near future.
Shannon Fay
There’s a unique feeling to reading fiction set in a place you know well. When done badly it can grate, but done well it can ground the reading experience in the setting immediately. I had this pleasure twice this year, both times while reading a horror novella. Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris and Agony’s Lodestone by Laura Keating both deal with grief and loss, though with very different approaches. They are also both set in Atlantic Canada, with both sets of characters spending lots of time in the woods: In Green Fuse Burning, Rita is a painter spending a week at a creepy isolated cabin/artist retreat, while in Agony’s Lodestone a trio of siblings get stuck in a time loop at a national park. As someone who lives in Atlantic Canada, these books hit home for me, but even without that personal connection I’d still recommend them to anyone who likes thoughtful scary stories.
This year I read Mona Awad’s Bunny and loved it. I think I loved her follow-up, Rouge, even more. Bunny might pop more stylistically but Rouge felt more fleshed out and cathartic. As far as short story collections go, Sayaka Murata’s Life Celebration really shook me: if you enjoyed her novel Earthlings you will like her short fiction as well.
Something I’ve been into for a few years now has been detective board games. These games are like something between a murder mystery dinner party and a board game. Or like a dungeon master-less D&D game where you’re a detective with a crime to solve. Or like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book but with the choice of what to do next left up to you. My favorite game in this genre this year has been Bureau of Investigation: Investigations in Arkham & Elsewhere (2022) from publisher Space Cowboys. Does it deconstruct Lovecraft and re-examine his legacy in a new light? No, no it does not. But while playing it, you get both the trippy sense of what it would be like to be confronted with supernatural happenings beyond your ken, while also getting an endorphin rush as you and your friends slowly figure out just what the hell is going on around you.
Bee Gabriel
Hello! It’s been a while. I usually go long, but there was a surprising amount of great speculative fiction this year, so here are some quick hits.
Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall fundamentally changed my relationship with the color red.
The Novices of Lerna is not a trans novella, but Ángel Bonomini conveys gender dysphoria better than anyone else I’ve read.
The Tainted Cup introduced me to Robert Jackson Bennett’s playful prose and maybe too jam-packed worldbuilding.
The Angel of Indian Lake beautifully capped what might be the best horror trilogy of all time, and then Stephen Graham Jones followed it up with one of the most fun books he’s yet written in I Was a Teenage Slasher.
Speaking of horror: Rivers Solomon’s Model Home ranks among the most devastating books I’ve ever read.
I luxuriated in the world of P. Djèlí Clark’s (maybe slightly too) twisty The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.
Alongside doing all the stuff she does consistently well, The Seventh Veil of Salome has, for my money, the best character work Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s done to date.
Funny homunculus dads that turn out bitterly homophobic? A Choose Your Own Adventure story that actually uses the form productively? Some weird flash fiction I have no idea what to do with but somehow also really works? It’s a shame more people haven’t read Rubin Reyes Jr.’s There is a Rio Grande in Heaven.
In a year of notable historical reimaginings of literary characters, Nisi Shawl’s The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox stood out for its brevity and masterful control of voice. Plus the speculative elements rule.
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster is a novel in stories by Muriel Leung that’s really weird. Cockroach nightclub.
I really, really, really loved Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox.
Debbie Gascoyne
The book I’ve been urging everyone to read, and my number one book from 2024’s reading, isn’t fantasy or science fiction, but it is pretty magical and it has to do with someone who wrote metaphysical poetry, and its author also writes children’s fantasy, so I hope I can be forgiven for including it here. That book is Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell. I’ve seldom enjoyed a biography as much; not only can Rundell write beautifully, but she’s so infectiously enthusiastic about her subject. It’s not often that an academic work is laugh-out-loud funny, but this is, partly through Rundell’s own sly humour, but also through her use of present day idioms. For example, she describes something as Donne’s “super power,” and at one point she remarks that Donne told his critics (in poetic code) to “fuck off and die” if they didn’t agree with something he wrote. I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially as an introduction to Donne’s life and times.
My favourite genre book from this year was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. His Divine Cities trilogy were among the highlights of my reading from a few years back, and I think he is a terrific writer and can’t understand why he isn’t more acclaimed or better known. The Tainted Cup is the first of a new series to be known as Shadow of the Leviathan and I have to say first of all that the leviathan is the best monster encountered only by rumour and remains since the shark in Jaws. The world here is a fascinating one, dominated by the constant threat not only from gigantic monsters but from deadly, semi-sentient plants and other wildlife. It’s worse than Australia for things that can kill you. And, indeed, the novel opens with someone killed by a plant growing from the inside out of his body. The plot is a murder mystery, driven by two wonderful characters, a super-brainy Holmes-esque investigator and her neurologically enhanced assistant, who hides (unsuccessfully) a learning disability. Although the worldbuilding is rich and detailed, the novel is character-driven in the best way, and the mystery, while complicated, is never unbelievable, or impossible for an intelligent reader to keep up with. There is also political intrigue that suggests only a tip of the iceberg for future novels in the series. I’m very much looking forward to the next one.
Christian P. Haines
I read most of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s work this year, from his fantasy series, Shadows of the Apt (2008-2014), to his most recent novels. As I wrote for Reactor Magazine, Tchaikovsky is remarkably consistent in themes and perspectives: his fiction is ecological in its insistence on the complexity, interconnection, and strangeness of life; his stories rail against authoritarian fantasies of control, cataloging the massive damage such regimes inflict, while imagining the revolutionary possibilities of people fighting back. Tchaikovsky’s not a romantic, though. Alien Clay (2024) is a story of failed revolutions, prison colonies, and horrific alien symbioses; it also has a brilliant ending that calls into question the opposition between human and alien. Meanwhile, House of Open Wounds (2023) is M*A*S*H in Middle Earth—well, not in Middle Earth, but in a far more interesting fantasy world filled with tiny gods, janky automatons, flying cities, and an experimental medical tent. Tchaikovsky’s medics reckon with all the suffering, all the unheroic death, hidden in the background of so much fantasy fiction.
It was a good year for retellings of Arthurian legend. Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword asks what happens to Avalon after Arthur dies. It’s a brilliant account of empire’s disintegration, the cost of spiritual belief, and the value of personal transformation. The chapters telling the knights’ backstories were especially moving. But Robin Sloan’s Moonbound was better, or at least more interesting. In Moonbound, the Arthurian saga is media technology—myth tech—narrative means to make sense of a posthuman world in which beavers debate policy, mages wield biotech, and traumatized, sentient robot dragons hold the planet hostage. It channels the charm of a British school novel run through the mill of Silicon Valley’s ruthless will to invent.
Ursula Whitcher’s North Continent Ribbon is a gentle and thoughtful series of interconnected stories, perfect for readers looking for the kind of anthropological science fiction of an Ursula K. Le Guin or Becky Chambers. Whitcher eschews the grand drama of space opera in favor of the small-scale, yet no less social, dramas of a city councillor fixing bus infrastructure and a sex worker ferreting out corporate infiltrators in a mining union.
There was a lot more excellent speculative fiction this year. Nalo Hopkinson had a short story collection (Jamaica Ginger), as well as a novel, come out. The novel, Blackheart Man, is a funny, even slapstick, tale of empire, revolution, and history’s stubborn returns. Richard Powers’s Playground and Benjamín Labatut’s MANIAC dramatize the promises and pitfalls of AI, but while I’m a fan of Powers—Gain (1998) is the best novel about soap, cancer, and corporations you probably haven’t read—Playground is too in love with transhuman dreams of immortal sentience. On the other hand, Labatut’s non-fiction novel tracing the life and legacy of John von Neumman penetrates to the madness of the AI fever dream, reminding us that the roots of digital technology are in war and weapons development. (I’m not being metaphorical here. Modern computers were invented to map ballistics trajectories.)
Finally, Jeff VanderMeer graced 2024 with another Southern Reach novel, the prequel Absolution. Don’t be fooled by the title: it absolves nothing but lingers with the sins of conquest—the hubris of humans convinced that if they only try hard enough, they might one day control the material universe. This is VanderMeer’s most Florida novel, featuring a terrifying alligator (the Tyrant) that swims between realities, a backwater bar home to a murderous rock star (“Get in the barrel”), and psychotic rabbits.
Dan Hartland
The temptation when reviewing a year in books is to make a grand claim or seek to enclose twelve months within a neat capsule. This is a valuable but dangerous business, not least because trends do not proceed at annual intervals—any worth noting, and any with lasting impact, take many years to play out, and still more to demonstrate their impacts. Within the twelve months it compassed, 2024 felt like a year of fewer “big” books than 2023, but either coincidentally or consequently also a year in which many and disparate titles jockeyed for attention; both the players and their audience felt more multiplicitous than ever, and far less liable to respect, observe, or build boundaries between each other. Innovation, as far as it could be tracked, rested, or so it felt, more in the realm of theme and character than in mode or novum.
So much for feelings; what about the things themselves? Novellas were a special source of the good stuff this year, and the form seems almost to be at the centre of the genre after many years of relative marginalisation. Sofa Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain was limpidly unafraid of the analogous, Suzan Palumbo’s Countess unusually resonant and allusive, and Ursula Whitcher’s North Continent Ribbon, while strictly speaking a collection of short stories, appropriately enough offered sufficient thread from which to hang some real pearls of satisfyingly open future-history. It’s worth noting, too, that all three of these titles took the form effectively of space opera: If we’re in the business of trend detection, that might (or, in the eventual run of things, might not) be something to watch.
One of my novels of the year also features interstellar flight: Adrian Tchaikovksy’s Alien Clay, while a much older-fashioned and more familiar form of SFF than any of those novellas, incorporates a surprisingly wide range of interests—in the David Lodge-esque campus novel, in xenobiology, in thought under totalitarianism, in class solidarity, in Southern Reach-style body horror—within a smartly constructed, propulsive, and flawlessly crafted technothriller structure. At the other end of the spectrum, Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall came not to revivify the hoary bromides of SFF but dissolve them entirely into something new, batting around generic expectations like so many of Bosula’s tennis balls, whacking them beyond the court of play with real abandon, and treating the crowd to a quite different game than the one they’d paid for. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, meanwhile, wrote towards some of the tropes of SFF—the climate-ravaged future, the secret cult, even the last redoubt—from outside and beyond them, placing them in different contexts and using them to productively alternative effect.
To what end any of this? Well, we’ll see. As many as twelve years ago now, I was arguing that “not just the genre but our world isn’t sure what will happen next,” that the sorts of stories we had grown used to calling SFF were in a period of reformation around paradigms unimaginable when the first verities had gathered around a nascent “genre.” 2024 may (may) in posterity be the year in which the results of these reshapings—a more organic, more porous, less fixed thing, a stronger, more flexible, more connected one—began to seem clearer. Goodness knows the first quarter of the twenty-first century has applied its pressures not just upon the structures of a literature, but us all.