Abigail Nussbaum

2024! So much to talk about, so little space. In books, Julia Armfield’s Private Rites combined climate fiction, dysfunctional family drama, and folk horror, and convincingly argued that they are one and the same. Sylvie Cathrall’s A Letter to the Luminous Deep told a cod-Victorian epistolary tale of scientists exploring the secrets of a water planet, and falling in love along the way. Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time plucked a premise out of fanfic and turned it into a disquieting meditation on racism and immigration. Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands took a high-concept rom-com premise and used it to ponder the pitfalls of the quest for The One.

In film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga delivered some of the best action-based storytelling in years—a worthy companion to Fury Road, even if too few people appreciated it. I Saw the TV Glow grounded itself in 90s nostalgia and then used that energy to power a stunning, startling tale of perpetually delayed self-discovery. Mars Express was a slick cyberpunk mystery, with gorgeous animation that cleverly imagined a roboticized future.

In TV, the second season of Interview With the Vampire somehow outdid the already-amazing first, with sharp scripts that combined reverence towards Anne Rice’s novel with a willingness to prod at its foundations. Some little-seen shows shone brightly before being snatched away after one season: Dead Boy Detectives, a sweet and funny supernatural mystery show; Constellation, which turns an accident in space into an eerie, atmospheric ghost story; KAOS, which delightfully transports the Greek pantheon and mythology to a modern world.

And, oh yes, in the summer, Briardene Books published Track Changes, a collection of my reviews, summing up nearly twenty years of work in the fantastic genres. Looking at 2024’s output, I see that I already have the foundation for the next volume.

Sally Parlier

This year, I gravitated towards books in translation, particularly from authors writing in Spanish. My favorites were You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue and You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi. The Enrigue book is a delightfully absurd alternate history of the fall of Tenochtitlán—Moctezuma is essentially a horse girl gone 24/7 on entheogens and one Spaniard is so relieved to have clean underwear that he abandons the life of a conquistador. With Colanzi, I happened to read her work right after a trip to see the prehistoric art at Rouffignac, so the opening story “The Cave,” and how it dealt with deep geologic time and space, felt particularly resonant. It was also not too long after the flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. I felt a kinship between the ecologies of Appalachia and those of Colanzi’s book, spaces at the margins where the violence of politics and extraction is impossible to ignore.

On TV, Interview with the Vampire continues to exceed my expectations at every turn, somehow both faithful to the best parts of the novels and improving on the source material with its choices in adaptation. And, even though it has never managed to hit those marks, I’m still trash for Outlander, back for the second half of season seven. At the movies, I loved how Heretic got increasingly grimy and dreamlike as the story twisted, I Saw the TV Glow had me fully sobbing in the Alamo, and Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was so tender and surprisingly lighthearted. But the film that promises to be my favorite of 2024 is one I haven’t yet seen: Robert Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu. I even blind-bought the Heretic Parfum movie tie-in fragrance—the notes of lilac, petrichor, orris butter, violet, and ambergris are an intriguing departure from the usual incense and leather of vampire-inspired fragrances. I’m going into 2025 smelling like a wet cave filled with dead flowers, hoping it lives up to the hype.

Roseanna Pendlebury

My 2024 reading was a rich parcel of strangeness, starting with Vajra Chandrasekera’s. 2023’s The Saint of Bright Doors walked so 2024’s Rakesfall could run cackling into the sunset, unfettered (as it were) by the need to conform to any usual constraints of genre, both willing and able to tackle the grand alongside the grimy. This first novel of the year was well bookended by a December read: Metal from Heaven by august clarke, which likewise unites the grand and the philosophical with the gritty realities of life within an oppressive regime. Here, too, there was a focus on intense and vivid prose, though turned more towards the experience of physical reality, however overlaid with the fever-dream Weird of the protagonist’s affliction.

Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage looked backwards into medieval manuscripts for its own oddities. While its journey narrative may be a more traditional fantasy staple, nothing about the worldbuilding, prose, or tone can be said to be usual—and the story that resulted left me tugging at the threads of plot that snagged on my brain, and its nonsensical imagery will remain with me for some time.

In Universes by Emet North leaned in hard on the philosophical implications of parallel worlds, wandering swiftly away from anything that might feel like a familiar take on the concept into strange landscapes haunted by hints of the almost magical and the definitely horrible. The corpse art of one of the chapters will be haunting me for a long time, but in a good way.

I’ve been finding a lot of joy in novellas from smaller presses this year, and had a great deal of good options to choose from, but found particular delight in Ursula Whitcher’s North Continent Ribbon, Alex Jeffers’s A Mourning Coat and Lorraine Wilson’s The Last to Drown. All of them, among other things, are intensely character-focussed, in a way that makes their smaller size work to their benefit.

Across all of these books I found delicious prose, edge-of-genre messiness, experimentation with things like person and voice, and all the kinds of unusual and innovative playfulness which for me make the best kind of memorable fiction—and which I hope to see more of going through into 2025.

Electra Pritchett

My reading this year was warped by spending most of it on a book deadline. I greatly enjoyed Jeff VanderMeer’s surprise Southern Reach se/(pre)quel Absolution, which introduces time (travel?) and a really big alligator to Area X. Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil is a triumphant return to form for the author, a love letter to fantasy books and reading. Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage was my other favorite read of the year, a weird, queer, maximalist heir to Gormenghast. I read another bumper crop of excellent novellas: Sofia Samatar’s The Horizon, the Practice, and the Chain; Nghi Vo’s The Brides of High Hill; T. Kingfisher’s What Feasts at Night; Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest; and Veronica Roth’s When Among Crows.

In the first half of the year I eagerly read every John Wyndham book republished by the Modern Library that I could get my hands on. Ahead of his time, wildly feminist, unconventionally plotted: Wyndham belongs much higher in the genre’s esteem than he is. I also finally read Hagio Moto’s The Poe Clan, which is available in English and which deserves its reputation as a weird, romantic, melancholy classic manga about teenage vampires. I caught up on T. L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series after the Glasgow Worldcon, and I eagerly await the final volume of Ropa’s adventures.

I haven’t seen many movies either, but Dune: Part Two proves that the first movie was no fluke, and I’m eager to see Villeneuve’s take on Children of Dune. Star Trek: Lower Decks went out on a high note; it and Star Trek: Prodigy, whose second season was a triumph, are two of the three best Treks of all time. Agatha All Along was weird, witchy, and fun, and for what it’s worth I thought The Acolyte was enjoyable, as is Skeleton Crew. I finally watched the cult classic Sapphire & Steel, and you should too. One of these years, I will look forward in hope again.

Andy Sawyer

Possibly the most disappointing thing, bookwise, of the past year was the demise of Handheld Press. Their Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895-1954, like many such anthologies, contained some stories I knew well and some completely new to me. Perhaps the most interesting “archaeological” perspective came from M. R. James’s “View From A Hill,” in which a pair of binoculars manufactured from particularly unholy components reminded us that what we see when we take our first cursory glances at archaeological sites and landscapes can often be not at all what was there. So far, the British Library anthologies of weird fiction continue, and a recent trip to the BL resulted in a handful of recent books including Eleanor Scott’s Randalls Round, with an interesting introduction that links the stories to folk horror via the folk revival of the 1920s; although the more I think of the term “folk horror” the more I think it’s not quite the right term for what interests me.

An extensive writing project and various domestic things took up most of my reading time in 2024, so the books that gave me most pleasure were a mixed bunch. I was lucky enough to watch a couple of performances by Robert Lloyd Parry, who takes on the mantle of M. R. James telling his stories (as he did) to an audience. Parry is a brilliant performer, a master of emphasis and nuance. Some of his scripts have been published this year as Shadows and Gestures. They show how, rather than reading the stories, he is acting MRJ, emphasising James’s sly humour (and occasionally adding new jokes), occasionally rewording and editing passages, and using props to create an at times unsettling and spooky experience. There was more humour in Sandra Bond’s Three Men in Orbit, a revisiting of another of my favourite early twentieth-century writers, Jerome K. Jerome. Jerome’s famous trio are given a steampunk setting as they decide to take a pleasure trip to the Moon. Such reworkings have certainly been done before, but not, I think with such joy and sustained care in capturing the kind of jokes Jerome would have made had Cavorite offered Victorian travellers more choices than boating on the Thames or cycling through Germany.

Finally, at the beginning of this year I ended my review of Debbie Urbanski’s After World by saying that it was highly likely it would feature among my “Best of the Year.” A complex work, I described it as “a novel about an AI writing a novel, written in the style of an AI writing a novel, in the fashion in which we may currently be seeing AIs approaching creativity,” which may not be very helpful to people wanting a fun read. But it was certainly the most imaginative and thought-provoking new novel I read during the last twelve months.

Phoenix Scholz

Among the books I read this year, two really stood out for me.

Hiron Ennes, a fellow non binary writer, establishes a strong foothold in a rare hybrid sub-genre suspended between the Gothic and the Weird with their debut novel Leech. The action is set in an isolated wasteland with a bit of an Arctic Gormenghast vibe, and the narrative moves smoothly, gathering suspense without resorting to infodumps. The horrors are viral (a parasitic hivemind entity that spreads a public narrative which paints it as a helpful symbiont), tentacular (a second, competitive Weird parasite coming from spider-like alien host bodies), human (colonialism, and various forms of what China Miéville would doubtless refer to as choice-theft). It’s hard to top this book, which uses a unique narrative perspective and very detailed storytelling to extremely captivating effect. In the end everything falls into place, first terribly, then beautifully. This makes it a horror novel in the sense of Chuck Tingle, in that it delivers catharsis.

Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones is also freaking good. Set on the Blackfeet Indian reservation (the author is Indigenous and deliberately chooses words like Indian, and whoa, does that have an impact too), this book fades in and out of historical eras as well as characters’ identities until they overlap and invade each other, revealing atrocities and colonial power play and their long-reaching shadow claws and consequences for members of the Blackfeet tribe. Reading this made me feel that this intertwined haunting is probably the best way to tell a colonial narrative. Read this if you want to experience quantum good and bad chills.

Aran Ward Sell

2024 was my first year reviewing for Strange Horizons. I began with Álvaro Enrigue’s superb You Dreamed of Empires, which still haunts me with its pulpy, hallucinogenic atmosphere. It fits into SFF Wrapped 2024 uncomfortably: it was first published in 2022, as Tu sueño imperios han sido. More significantly, its SFFness is questionable. As I wrote, it is sold (in the Anglosphere) as historical fiction but bamboozles that category nimbly, and even the literary fiction diehard must acknowledge You Dreamed of Empires teems with magic and alternative realities.

Such liminality is a hallmark of the best of both genre and ungenre, but has long been a red rag for literary gatekeepers. The late Sir Terry Pratchett’s umbrage at finding Discworld novels shelved away from the bestsellers, when they were the bestsellers, belongs to another era now, but such elitism has persisted: in the wagon-circling of “magical realism” to arrogate Borges’s or Murakami’s phantasmagoria to Real Literature, in David Mitchell’s apologia for Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 Arthurian fantasy The Buried Giant as literary fiction because it lacks “elves saying ‘Make haste! These woods will be swarming with orcs by nightfall,’” and in Amitav Ghosh’s 2018 manifesto The Great Derangement, which claims that most extant climate fiction fiction doesn’t count, because it dwells in the “generic outhouses.”

Yet this tendency, which once represented the hegemonic centre spurning the geek periphery, increasingly reads as crankish, and cranky. Climate change, as Ghosh accidentally suggests, may be the reason: both SF’s native subject matter and a matter of urgency for everyone, what once mouldered in the outhouse has slithered indoors, bringing SFF’s critical viability with it. In film, 2024’s closest engagements with our burning world—Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, with its visions of eco-terraforming, and George Miller’s oil-choked Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—are both mainstream and SFFnal, and will win Oscars only in technical categories. But in prose fiction, even prizegivers are swayed. In 2023, Martin MacInnes’ literary SF In Ascension was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but not shortlisted (and the victor, Paul Lynch’s near-future dystopia Prophet Song, is also “speculative” in the direct sense). In 2024, the equivalent candidate, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, won outright.

2024’s coronation of the “crossover” novel culminated with two heavyweights of literary SFF returning to their best-beloved settings: Excepting Sally Rooney’s continued omnipresence, no literary publications this year outshone The Wood in Midwinter, the great Susanna Clarke’s return to the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer’s paranoiac, claustrophobic prequel-sequel to 2014’s climate-catastrophic Southern Reach trilogy. The Southern Reach was always sold as crossover—no publisher who bid for it was from a genre imprint. VanderMeer himself wrote as recently as 2023 that many critical ripostes to Ghosh’s “outhouses” remark “fell back on a [genre] territorialism both justified and pointless.” After 2024 we might add “needless” as well, as we survey the collapsed divide between centre and periphery, ungenre and genre.

Safia H. Senhaji

In many ways, I’d characterize my 2024 SFF reads in terms of finally getting around to reading them or finishing a series. While I could write pages upon pages about all of the amazing books I read, a few standouts include two series I finally managed to finish.

I’d put off reading The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik for a long while, in part because it was such an anticipated book, thus making me hesitant to actually read it. In the end, I did read it in two sittings, and it was as lovely and powerful and compelling as I’d known it would be. I’m definitely grateful that I knew a bit about the author playing with the theme of Omelas before going in, and while I’d perhaps have wanted the plot to go in a slightly different direction, the themes overall worked very well. I only wish I could’ve discussed the book with a friend who is sadly no longer here.

The Crescent City trilogy was a blast. I just adore how Sarah J. Maas writes, especially when it comes to friendships, worldbuilding, and evoking raw emotions. The way she frames themes of agency, hope, and healing after trauma never fail to touch me. I reread House of Earth and Blood and House of Sky and Breath, this time via audiobook; I loved the first book just as much as on my first read-through, and even sobbed my heart out at the same scenes, and the narrator Elisabeth Evans drew me into book two as I’d hoped she would. While it took me some time to finish House of Flame and Shadow, I loved it. I loved the intricate worldbuilding, how the characters grew and continued to interact with each other, the themes of love, friendship, second chances, and breaking away from old systems. The callbacks to earlier books and the plot threads finally weaving together were a lovely bonus, and I truly believe this series is her best work to date.

Finally, the latest in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm series, Seasparrow, brought me out of a book slump. I listened to the last part at work, which I honestly do not recommend; I spent that morning trying not to laugh and cry and punch the sky jubilantly at my desk, and the afternoon dealing with my worst book hangover of 2024. Healing, empowering, with a little mystery that I gratifyingly figured out before the eventual reveal, and such good character growth.

William Shaw

Looking back on my 2024 reading, only one science fiction novel stands out as exceptional. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer was much fêted, and rightly so: A layered, compulsive thriller, it confronts the misogyny of modern tech with a fascinating study of its automatic heroine. It feels apt for a year when bullshit engines so thoroughly polluted the discourse, and the Federal Trade Commission felt compelled to remind us that “AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends.” I plan to return to this novel in a longer article next year.

Most of the real standouts from 2024 were in the short fiction field. I enjoyed Eliza Clark’s debut collection, She’s Always Hungry, especially the title story with its aquatically matriarchal antagonist, along with the adolescent body horror of “Shake Well” and the haunting climate crisis story “Extinction Event.” I was also taken with Maggie Cooper’s brief but vivid collection The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, and with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s translations of classic Bengali science fiction in The Inhumans and Other Stories.

Outside of collections, I was compelled by the book version of Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter, and there were some lovely contributions from the magazine field. I’ll shout out “A Carapace of Coral” by Amanda Helms (a gorgeous parental horror story), “Automatic Return” by Candice Wuehle (a “post-COVID” story worthy of the name) and “The Lost Park of Max Westgate” by Kay Hanifen (a rich and funny Doctor Moreau riff with an anti-corporate slant).

And so we face down another year of reactionary horrors and avoidable catastrophes. Hopefully there will be some more good books to be found amongst the garbage. Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Once more.

Nataliia Sova

To me, The Substance was one of the most anticipated movies of 2024. In this short review I will express my personal, biased opinion of the film.

The premise is simple: An aging Hollywood actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), gets a chance to transform into a better, younger, more perfect self (Margaret Qualley). The transformation happens with the help of the drug called “The Substance.” Sue, Elisabeth’s other self, gradually takes control of Elisabeth’s life, escalating the conflict between them.

The color scheme, visuals, soundtrack, and cinematography make The Substance an engrossing experience. I appreciated the neatly done expositions. In the opening scene, in just under three minutes we learn Elisabeth’s backstory. This beginning foreshadows the future events and perfectly mirrors the closing scene.

Both leading actresses give engaging performances. I found the social commentary valuable too. Despite all the efforts to change beauty standards and people’s attitude to aging, popular media still seems to favor younger, prettier, slimmer women. The Substance explores this theme through metaphors and body horror imagery.

As for the flaws, the sci-fi aspects are pretty confusing. From the very beginning, the audience is left wondering whether Elisabeth and Sue are the same person or different entities. The scenes start to drag and become more drawn-out. By the end, the grotesquerie of body horror elements borders on the cartoonish. First, The Substance unnerves you, then it bores you, then it makes you laugh. I understand that the tonal shift might be a social commentary in itself, but I don’t think it worked well in this film.

The Substance has a strong start, but a disappointing end. Still, the movie is a good addition to the SF and body horror genres, and I look forward to more films directed by Coralie Fargeat.

Aishwarya Subramanian

For Various Reasons, much of what I read in 2024 had to do with Paddington Bear. Theoretically speculative fiction, in practice great, but neither new nor in particular need of my recommendation. (The 2024 movie, Paddington in Peru, is not great, by the way.)

Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, and Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, have both been referred to elsewhere in this three-part list, and also don’t need my recommendation, but they have it anyway. Not enough people have read Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar, a set of short stories about the natural world and (sometimes) humans in it. The collection is uneven, but in ways that both wrongfooted me and moved me. Sofia Samatar’s Opacities is nonfiction in fragments; exploratory, generative, and a good complement to Tone, her book with Kate Zambreno (to whom this book is also addressed). I wasn’t expecting Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time to be on this list, though I did really enjoy it when I read it. But in the weeks since, now that the charm of it has worn off (it is very charming, and very funny), I find that I’m more and more impressed and unsettled by how it depicts, and implicates its audience, in collusion with power. 

I watched very few movies or TV series, but Delicious in Dungeon was consistently great.

Nileena Sunil

2024 was the year I really got back into reading SFF. While backlist titles comprised a lot of what I read, there were also a few incredible new releases I enjoyed. Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar was a huge highlight. I thought this collection of short stories, all revolving around the natural world, did something truly new and innovative. I am also a huge fan of Anton Hur’s work as a Korean-to-English translator, and I was really happy to get an opportunity to read his debut novel Toward Eternity, in which he explored topics of immortality, conflict and artificial intelligence. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, a character-driven tale following three sisters in a dystopian world that always rained, was another highlight. I’ve also been getting through all of T. Kingfisher’s books, and I really enjoyed her latest work A Sorceress Comes to Call, which combines cozy fairytale vibes with darker themes.

It was also a great year for me in terms of SFF TV and movies. Dune: Part Two, and the Fallout TV series were two popular works I really enjoyed. I also got into the dark gothic drama of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire series, the second season of which came out in June. Last, but not least, I watched two incredible fantasy anime: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, a rather moving look at what happens after the end of a typical fantasy adventure, through the point of view of an immortal elf; and Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon, a rather wacky, but heartwarming anime about a group of adventurers exploring a dungeon and cooking up the monsters they slay.

Rebecca Turkewitz

Literary horror is having a moment. I’ve read so much rich, thought-provoking, and compelling horror this year that I hardly know where to begin.

Tananarive Due’s tremendous (and almost universally lauded) haunted historical fiction novel The Reformatory pulled me into its grasp completely. Immersive and captivating, the novel is a classically well-told tale, an eerie ghost story, and an unflinching examination of the horrors of the Jim Crow era.

Emily Carroll has been a favorite author since I read their deliciously creepy 2014 collection Through the Woods, and I adored their new graphic novel A Guest in the House. In it, a newly married woman becomes fascinated with her husband’s dead first wife, falling into a fog of obsession and disorientation. The illustrations are stunning—vibrant, visceral, and dark.

The book that left the biggest impression on me this year was Lisa Tuttle’s slim but magnificent Gothic novella My Death. I can say almost nothing about the plot without spoiling the story’s magic, so instead I’ll just say that the moment I finished it, I had a fierce urge to turn back to the beginning and start the whole journey again.

Some other horror titles I read and loved this year were Paul Tremblay’s delightfully metafictional novel Horror Movie, Gabino Iglesias’ mythic and atmospheric noir House of Bone and Rain, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s supernatural thriller Silver Nitrate, and Cherie Priest’s autumnal Southern Gothic novel, Cinderwich, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons.