Dylan Haston
In newer novels, I thoroughly enjoyed august clarke’s Scapegracers, and their adult debut Metal From Heaven astonished me. The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed is an indescribable, important book. Max Gladstone’s Wicked Problems was so good that I ended up rereading the entire Craft Sequence, and similarly Seth Dickinson’s Exordia was so good that I finally read the rest of his Masquerade Series, which did not disappoint. This year, I dove into Sofia Samatar and absolutely adored every moment I spent with her writing. And Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is my pick for most slept-on book of this year—a sumptuous and passionate book about food, culture, and empire. Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera moved in and around all of my favorite books this year and was an undercurrent to my thoughts and life. Check out Chandrasekera’s essay, “Every Throne Will Fall,” here. (His blog posts are, without fail, superb.)
As for older titles, The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed knocked my socks off. A damned good book about queerness, whales, and the Internet that could go toe to toe with the most ambitious books in the English language, and Fire In the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam spun my head around and made me see the world through entirely new eyes. I look forward to rereading both in years to come.
In other media, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One from Worlds Beyond Number defied my expectations of what tabletop podcasts could be and do. If you liked any of the books I’ve mentioned, I strongly recommend checking it out. And Dungeons and Daddies continued to make me laugh and cry consistently and is just the best.
Aaron Heil
I’ve never played Fallout, any of them. It’s been around forever, but I’m not really a gamer, so it always slipped under my radar until Amazon came out with the Fallout show this spring. I couldn’t ignore it. The retropunk aesthetic leaves a vivid impression straight from the original source that translated surprisingly well to a TV setting. Walton Goggins has played a cowboy on TV a few times and I’m hoping for a few more seasons in the coming year. Showrunner Jonathan Nolan produced easily the best TV of the year.
Speaking of Nolan, or his brother, rather, I’ve been on the high from Oppenheimer since last year. That’s a really long movie and I watched it three times in 2024. It’s just not the kind of movie that gets made anymore, more like a David Lean film than anything contemporary: It’s immersive and grounded in reality and, visually, it looks neat, too. After I watched the film, I read American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Shewin, which actually flew by because it turns out the history of physics is pretty interesting.
My interest in the works of C. S. Lewis continued with one of his less critically acclaimed novels, That Hideous Strength. However, I favor this novel, with its commentary on the detachment of theory from human existence, and unconditional love in the face of betrayal, among all of Lewis’s fiction. It’s such an odd book because it features Ransom Stoddard from earlier novels, but the love between Jane and Mark carries an independent story that is set apart from Ransom’s earlier adventures. So it’s not really a sequel, but it exists adjacent to the other works. For an alien invasion novel, it’s definitely unorthodox—in one of the rare instances where that word can apply to Lewis.
Still, however odd a book That Hideous Strength turned out to be gave me an appreciation for trying things that don’t have a great critical reputation. Venom lives up to every bit of praise it managed to scrounge up. The image of She-Venom macking on Tom Hardy is burned into my brain forever. It’s just too bad that Venom: Let There Be Carnage completely fell on its face, and Venom: The Last Dance stumbled to a lackluster finish. Those movies featured a really killer blend of Eddie Brock’s self-loathing set against the Symbiote’s unrestrained power, while both Eddie and the Symbiote mask their fragility in aggression.
I’ve also only just discovered Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas. Whoa. Celaena Sardothien represents a really well-written character who straddles genres—in this case, fantasy and romance. Tropes of both writing styles are incorporated well into the story, which comes to a wild turn midway that opens up a whole new world to explore. Fifty million Elvis fans weren’t wrong—and Maas Nation doesn’t appear to be either.
Finally, though, the biggest surprise of this year comes from Apple TV’s comedy-mystery series, Bad Monkey. No, it’s not a surprise that the home of Severance, Silo, and Slow Horses cranked out another hit show; give Vince Vaughn five minutes, let alone a whole TV show, and you’ll be rolling on the floor laughing. It’s the weird vibes of the show that all comes together in a distinctive sense of humor. No, the surprise is a banging soundtrack—most impressive because it’s all Tom Petty covers, though it’s not apparently obvious. Much like Bad Monkey, itself an adaptation of a Carl Hiaasen novel I’m totally reading next year, each track provides a comment upon another artist’s work in its own unique voice.
Matt Hilliard
The first book I read this year ended up being one of the most memorable. Seth Dickinson’s Exordia is a wild science fiction novel that takes one of the key strengths of Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant fantasy series, the interest in complex friendships and conflicted loyalties, and then examines this theme in the context of an alien menace akin to Peter Watts’s Blindsight with a dash of Tom Clancy technofetishism thrown in for good measure. This is a dark and sometimes even scary novel, but the aggressively over-the-top style makes it unexpectedly fun to read.
The other book that stood out for me was written in a completely different register. Kelly Link’s The Book of Love is about teenagers in a small town trying to figure out who they are and what kind of lives they should live. I’d also call it a spiritual sequel to her amazing short story “Magic for Beginners” because these characters are increasingly entangled with fairy magic and its challenges and opportunities. Kelly Link is an incredible writer who has received much praise over the years for her unique authorial voice. Even in this longer work, her first novel, nearly every scene had a surprising thought, sentence, or turn of phrase that made this an immense pleasure to read.
Matt Holder
Some quick hits, off the bat: like many this year I found Percival Everett’s James a brilliant and accessible piece, a simultaneous interrogation of America’s great sin(s) and one of its greatest novels, though the work is far from Everett’s most biting; Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay I thought truly unsettling and strange, a love letter and warning to DIY filmmaking and the cult of obsession it breeds, a horror novel with pathos and teeth; Alan Moore’s The Great When impressed in many ways, and you can read my thoughts in greater detail here; and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu was everything I wanted and more.
But when I think of my favorite reads in 2024, I continue to return to the small press/self-pub world of sword and sorcery. In terms of single-author texts that I found particularly notable: Matthew John’s short story collection To Walk on Worlds, a delightful cycle of interconnecting tales as strikes a strong balance between pulp and contemporary sensibilities; Liam Q. D. Hall’s novella Dreamer, Awake!, a whirlwind tour of an otherworldly city and one woman’s revenge set in a Vancian world that mixes cyberpunk with sword and sorcery; and Graham Thomas Wilcox’s novella Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy, a truly bizarre, beautifully rich work that emerges in my recollective mind as one of the more unique reading experiences of my 2024, a tortured love story of war-bred knights in a fantastic, fatalist world all told in succulent, wonderfully baroque prose. On the magazine side, publications like Old Moon Quarterly and New Edge Sword and Sorcery continue to delight with their unique and idiosyncratic approaches to the genre, each offering a diverse array of stories and styles that work to challenge, to develop, and to honor that beloved genre of fantasy pulp storytelling. If you want something different from the staid fantasy tomes that clog the shelves, look no further.
Audrey R. Hollis
I began the year reading everything Mariana Enriquez had ever written (I very much recommend this as a New Year’s choice) and am ending it reading her recently translated collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, which examines all the ways the ghosts of our unforgotten violent pasts linger in the present. This quest also led me to Through the Night Like a Snake, an anthology of translated Latin American horror, whose last story, “The House of Compassion,” felt like sinking through ocean layers of weirdness in the best possible way.
I’m still not caught up on all the other amazing collections of 2024, but I enjoyed the darkly funny Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall. In addition, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima offers a surreal, addictive jaunt with a very charismatic devil—it’s funny, fascinating, and formally interesting. I also reviewed Mouth by Puloma Ghosh and recommend it for all your queer monster needs.
Catching up on short story collections I missed from previous years, Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a collection of surreal and horrifying short stories about African women’s struggles. “Home Became a Thing with Thorns” is particularly haunting; the tale of a naturalization ceremony which costs you what you love most remained on my mind throughout my spouse’s naturalization process this year. Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nabka is a brilliant anthology of speculative fiction about Palestine in 2048. Each story is a world, ranging from the dark humor of “Application 39” to the frenetic and unforgettable energy of “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid.” I sat down to read this anthology for a few minutes on a bright summer day and looked up a hundred pages and several hours later to find the sun setting, which is to say, I highly recommend it.
Paul Kincaid
It feels strange, not to say counterintuitive, to name a Booker Prize winner in a list like this, particularly when there are plenty of people who will argue vociferously that Orbital by Samantha Harvey is not science fiction. But frankly, to my mind any argument about whether the novel is or is not SF is simply nonsensical. It is a book that SF readers will appreciate, and that’s all that matters. We have all read countless stories about people on spaceships; it has gone beyond being a cliché and become rather boring. Except here, because I don’t remember any other book that so vividly and potently takes me inside the psychological effects of being on board the space station for an extended period of time. It is a novel about disorientation, disconnection, about how we remain human when disengaged from everything that makes us human, from family, from place, from fresh air and gravity and all the things we don’t notice about daily life.
To be honest, I don’t really expect to see Orbital turning up on SF award shortlists, though such an omission will say far more about the shortcomings of the awards than it does about the strengths or otherwise of this novel. But if Harvey’s brief and beautifully written work misses out, can we at least hope to see Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One getting some of the recognition it deserves? This is an exquisitely crafted fable in which our protagonist embarks on a coming-of-age journey through a land at once strange and familiar.
What else? The two nonfiction works that stood out for me were Abigail Nussbaum’s first and eagerly awaited selection of reviews, Track Changes, and Paul March-Russell’s brief but revealing study of J. G. Ballard’s Crash. Meanwhile, the most anticipated book of the year comes with a cover that proclaims it The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison; it is neither.
Duncan Lawie
I don’t know how A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys found its way onto my TBR list in 2023. Nor did I have any idea of what I was reading when I did get started. It was a joy of unexpectedness from beginning to end—a first contact novel embedded in a late twenty-first century that has started to work out how to live with the climate emergency. The aliens assume humanity is friendly because the primary protagonist brings an infant along. The humans are divided, primarily between the corporations, legacy national governments, and networks of local groups trying to live within their means and recover the nature around them. Gender complexity abounds—and the science fiction reader navigates this in the same way as learning the society of the aliens.
Gender is also key to The Mars House, though in this case it is the removal of visible gender from the society of Martian Naturals. They are also much taller and weaker than the new arrivals from Earth. Nevertheless the primary plot is a romance of impossible yearning where an Earthstrong refugee’s ongoing social incompetence provides both a mechanism for explaining the world he has arrived in and obscuring critical detail which he simply can’t see. This is Mars colonisation and terraforming as comedy of manners. Glorious. I am sure I enjoyed The Mars House all the more because the wuxia high-fantasy swirling robes were clear in my mind’s eye from watching Alchemy of Souls, a South Korean fantasy romance drama generously sprinkled with humour. With thirty episodes of seventy minutes, there was room to build tiny motifs into broad themes and for the show to undermine and remake itself from sweet to bitter to bittersweet. The characters were a joy to spend time with and the visuals richly rewarding.
By contrast, High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden was the pleasure of the almost completely familiar. Inspector Fleet and journalist Clara Entwhistle have solved a series of bonkers crimes across several series of the full-cast audio drama podcast Victoriocity. They operate in the intense steampunk environment of Even Greater London, a setting that provides opportunity for clever wordplay, rich commentary on past and present and humour that does not undercut the essential detective plot. The novel continues in just this vein—and I suspect I read it almost at audio pace with all the voices present and correct.
David Lewis
Some great short story collections were published last year. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima is definitely the most unique. Mixing short stories and flash memoir, it explores politics, immigration, relationships, and the art of writing. Any new book by Brian Evenson is reason for celebration, and the genre-merging collection Good Night, Sleep Tight, is no exception. I was particularly excited to see The Bone Picker by Devon Mihesuah: the book of Choctaw lore and legends that I’ve wanted to read since I was a kid. And finally, Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror edited by Sofia Ajram is so full of fantastic writers that I can’t, and won’t, pick favorites.
While we’re on the topic of queer SFF, the alternately beautiful and stomach-churning surrealism of K-Ming Chang’s novella Cecilia makes it one to read (though maybe not during lunch). Alternately, Lyndsie Manusos’ modern reimagining of mythological figures, From These Dark Abodes, is a bacchanalian danse macabre that pairs well with a Dionysian feast (or a tumbler of brandy).
But let’s not forget the novels of 2024. The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo is part historical fiction, part genderqueer horror story set in early twentieth-century Appalachia. Em Reed’s debut novel, More Bugs, is a psychologically rich love story with subcutaneous insectoids who are all at once unsettling and touchingly romantic. Finally, Hum by Helen Philips gives a kind of hope to anyone worried about minor things like climate collapse and the imminent control of society by evolving AI robots. That hope blossoms out of a soil of crippling anxiety and it doesn’t promise to bear fruit. But it’s still beautiful to see.
Will McMahon
This year was, for me, the year of New Directions. I found myself drifting towards several of that venerable independent publisher’s titles, beginning with Argentine absurdist César Aira’s novella double feature, Festival & Game of the Worlds (translated by Katherine Silver). In one, a schlocky science fiction B-movie director drags his agitated mother through a comedy of errors at an arthouse film festival, while in the other, a father contemplates the theological implications of his children’s far-future genocidal games.
I was in the middle of reading It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken when it won the Le Guin Prize, which will hopefully garner it more attention in the genre world. A profound confrontation with grief via the “literary zombie novel,” it’s deeply worthwhile.
Another ND book in which a narrator contemplates her own monstrosity came with On the Calculation of Volume, Books I & II from Danish author Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), the first entries in what will be a seven-part novel about a woman living November 18 over and over again. Fans of Groundhog Day might perk up, but there’s a twist—while the world does not change, she does, and what she consumes is gone forever.
Looking elsewhere, another excellent work in translation was The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini (translated by Jordan Landsman for Transit Books), a 1972 Argentine collection of surreal and fantastical stories now brought to English.
And of course, Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera came as a stunning novel of resistance and rebirth, told in fractal iterations—truly one for the sickos. Also worth revisiting is Vajra’s Nebula acceptance speech for The Saint of Bright Doors, which unfortunately remains relevant amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and SFWA’s continued inability to say the word “Palestinian.”
Archita Mittra
2024 was the year I discovered the marvellous short fiction of Mariana Enriquez, and promptly devoured three of her collections (that have been translated into English) including her latest, A Sunny Place for Shady People, in the span of three days. Her macabre tales can be located in the tradition of Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado, but Enriquez veers deeper into the shadows of horror, straddling Argentinean sociopolitics and female rage with a simmering confidence. In that vein, I’d also recommend Layla Martinez’s debut Woodworm, an eerie little book about a grandmother and granddaughter, trapped together in a tiny Spanish village, whose lives are rendered thin and spectral by the travails of patriarchy and poverty, even as the promise of revenge animates their existence.
The Booker winner, Orbital, which I only got to a few days ago, quickly became an all-time favorite, transmuting the sublime beauty of space into lyrical prose. There was that time in my childhood when I briefly wanted to become an astronaut, and Orbital, set aboard the International Space Station and minutely shadowing the daily lives of six astronauts, fulfilled that long-forgotten dream while unveiling all that we hold beautiful or deem miraculous in less than one hundred and fifty pages. Then there was also Jared Pechaček’s whimsical, weird debut, The West Passage, which unfolded like a Boschian tapestry: a love letter to the inventive potentialities of the fantasy genre—surreal, wry, and glorious.
On the cinema front, I’m proud to say that I’m finally caught up with all the Alien films. The latest entry, Alien: Romulus probably fits somewhere in the middle, though watching it on the big screen was certainly an immersive experience. Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron was also finally released in my hometown; it’s definitely one of Miyazaki’s best works, a testament to the enduring power of portal fantasies, and the escapist function of art to provide solace, wisdom and the strength to return to the real world. I also stumbled upon a copy of another Japanese animated movie—Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985). It’s a strange and melancholy cosmic dream of a film about two gay cats boarding a mythical train that travels to the edge of the universe and beyond, wistful, heartbreaking and mesmerizing. I also adored the second season of Interview with the Vampire, a phenomenal follow-up to the first season that reinvents the source material while remaining true to the spirit of the Anne Rice novels, and loved the environmental storytelling of Scavengers Reign—it’s a crime that it hasn’t been renewed for a second season yet.
I’ll conclude with two indie video game/visual novel recs. Goodbye Volcano High is a heartfelt title that follows a friend group of anthropomorphic dinosaurs navigating the ups and downs of high school, juxtaposing the end-of-school angst with the quiet unstated horror of the end of the world—the imminent threat of the asteroid doubling as an allegory for climate change, if you choose to read things too deeply. On the more optimistic front, Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood takes New Age aesthetics and spins an enthralling story around witchy covens, allowing the players to design their own Tarot decks, take control of their destinies and rebuild society as per their cherished principles—if you get your choices right. It’s oddly comforting to affirm that even when things spiral out of control, there’s a modicum of selfhood that you can still hold onto, and it’s with that spirit I’ll welcome in 2025, hoping it will be filled with surprises of the pleasant kind.
James K. Moran
My SFF tastes veered toward the darkly weird and beautiful this year, as usual.
Will Ludwigsen’s utterly readable 177-page weird fiction novel, A Scout Is Brave (Lethe Press), stood out. An earnest Boy Scout, thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo, moves to Innsmouth with his troubled family in 1963, bringing plenty of we-can-do-the-right-thing pluckiness. There’s some great, creepy building dread and a good-at-heart kid’s perspective on the Lovecraftian mythos in this wee book.
In comics, Ti Sheridan and Cian Tormey’s pitch-perfect Alan Scott: Green Lantern does well at framing the gay hero’s dichotomy with spurned antagonist and lover, Red Lantern, and his contest with the blackmailing J. Edgar Hoover, both writing-wise and with slick art style.
Mariko Tamaki and Javier Rodriguez’s Zatanna: Bring Down the House marks another phantasmagoric and notably saucy trip for Rodriguez. Tamaki’s clever script fleshes out Zatanna’s backstory and ever-canonical daddy issues.
Punchily prolific Toronto Marvel writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Daniel Acuna delivered Avengers: Twilight, an only somewhat grim dystopia. Most of the flagship heroes are gone. An aged Steve Rogers picks up the shield again, à la Frank Miller’s aged Batman donning the cowl in The Dark Knight Returns. The apocalyptic arc is a close cousin of DC Comics’ Kingdom Come (penned by Mark Waid and drawn by Alex Ross), pitting the older generation of heroes against younger upstarts, with gorgeous photo-realistic art.
Mark Waid and Dan Mora continue their undeniably entertaining monthly comic, World’s Finest: Batman/Superman. Ward remains a masterful neo-classical character writer. Mora’s detailed, gorgeous what’s-old-is-new art unites the whole heady symphony.
Simon Spurrier and artist Aaron Campbell reunited for more adventures with everyone’s favourite shifty bi street mage, John Constantine. In Hellblazer: Dead in America, the wily warlock crosses America searching for a bag of Sandman’s potent grains of sand, traveling by double-decker bus with a female Scottish enforcer, a vase infused with a soul, and a Black twentysomething who might be his son. Campbell’s painted art is gobsmackingly beautiful. Spurrier takes aim at the myth of the American Dream, Divine Providence, and as many folk tales that he could stuff into dense, often cerebral issues. Cameos include fan favourite the Demon Etrigan, Swamp Thing and the new Morpheus of Sandman: Universe lore.
Amritesh Mukherjee
More than ever, we need stories to explain our world, and few genres can do it as effectively (and depressingly, perhaps) as SFF. While I began the year with Hachette’s excellent compilation of Indian detective fiction (expanding to include South Asian stories at large), I end it with Appupen’s genius graphic series on the mythical world of the Halahala that lies at the intersection of climate change, dystopia, the superhero genre and a bunch of other things.
There was also Haroon Khalid’s prose-form From Waris to Heer, a retelling (of-sorts) of the legend of Heer-Ranjha and the story of their creator, Waris Shah—with gods, men who think of themselves as gods, stories, and most importantly, love. I’ve increasingly grown obsessed with Malayalam cinema, and Brahmayugam, a fever dream of a period folk horror movie shot in monochrome with themes of caste and power, was by far the best SFF movie I watched this year.
Here’s to a lot more speculation, and many more stories, in a world that needs them desperately in 2025!