Throughout this first week of 2026, our reviewers offer their highlights—new, old, SFFnal and otherwise—of 2025. As ever, what results is an instant snapshot of all that’s been going on, with several surprises and some recurring themes …
Eugen Bacon
This year has been startling in the amount of hate, intolerance and polarization that is now normalised all around the world—what with the book bans and the DEI garbage in the US, the atrocities in Gaza, the ongoing war of Russia against Ukraine … In Australia, we had the biggest mass shooting ever in the nation, perpetrated in Bondi Beach on the very first day of Hanukkah celebrations …
As writers and readers, we combat all this rage by finding something in text that speaks to us, personally, intimately, giving voice, helping us to empower, express, explore aspects of identity, the other and our place in the universe.
I discovered this in a startling way in Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World, a tiny but powerful work of nonfiction that reaches into the very essence of humanity and the urge now, more than ever, to pay attention to the existential crisis surrounding Black life in America and the rest of the the world. Doesn’t it feel like we are incessantly witness to a real-life Black Mirror as the globe cartwheels in dystopias of climate change, diseases, genocides and anti-Black racism? This crucial book embraces prolific differentiation and survivalist self-invention through Afrocentric speculative fiction in an apocalyptic era.
Cheryl S. Ntumy’s Black Friday: Short Stories from Africa is a disquieting collection of futuristic short stories that explore what it means to be connected and “unplugged.” They are stories that engage with difference, some cautionary about the perils of gatekeeping and how rapidly terrible things can escalate in an ominous near future, which is, wretchedly, already here.
I encourage writers and readers to uphold their ideals, to trust and believe in the power of text and storytelling to catalyze transformation and to choose those books and authors that help us never to forget our identity and truth.
Catherine Baker
More books of my year passed through educational institutions than I realised at the time. Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent rang true from the very first demon possessing the staff-room printer (so that’s why ours never works), and C. L. Clark’s The Sovereign, wrapping up Magic of the Lost, delivered outrageous sapphic swagger and anticolonial insight with equal intimacy in its palaces, military academies and rebel camps. John Pistelli’s comics-and-campus satire Major Arcana might have dissatisfied me as a reader but tested me as a critic enough to belong here. On the archetypal side of things, Dan Coxon’s Heartwood anthology opened Robert Holdstock’s mythopoetic wildwoods to other authors for the first time, and Seanan McGuire’s Seasonal Fears, to which I came late, entered John Crowley territory with its cyclical duels of summer and winter avatars about to be thrown off course by climate change. Autumn on this world belonged to Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings, start to finish, rereading trilogies I hadn’t touched for fifteen years and discovering the cycle’s end for the first time, following the whole span of a life through eyes that are themselves just entering middle age.
Redfern Jon Barrett
Despite myself, I love zombies. There’s just something about the ceaseless spread of mindlessness that connects with something deep inside me, an unthinking conformity that provokes a delicious sense of paralysing fear. But this is a rough time for lovers of zombie stories, as they tend to be as witless as the creatures themselves—The Walking Dead is remade again and again, with the same scenarios featuring the same bland cast of soon-to-be-victims.
But it’s a good job I haven’t given up completely, as my hopeful crusade for an interesting zombie tale led me to The Living Dead (2020), a novel that was started by the great George A. Romero and then finished by Daniel Kraus upon his death. I’m not sure how much of the writing is Romero and how much Kraus, but I suspect the latter had a significant influence because this novel really does feel refreshing, even for jaded fans of the genre.
First of all, we’re not presented with the usual mass-produced array of hetero nuclear families. The characters here are diverse, and there’s actually decent queer representation, not to mention neurodiverse people and the gender-nonconforming (as a big ol’ enby I really appreciate that last one). They’re also well-written, and their untimely deaths were both startling and heartbreaking.
What I loved the most, however, was the experimental and inventive turns the story takes in its final act. This is where the novel truly stands out, as reflections on psychology, group dynamics, and society itself all come to the fore. I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’ll just say as someone who’s relentlessly pushing the concept of “ambitopia,” I was very much satisfied.
Tristan Beiter
Given everything happening in the USA, all my best reads this year have been shaped by a critical eye and strong sense of imaginative potential. Outside of SFF, I especially loved Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delany, a moving memoir/ethnography/essay on the necessity of inter-class contact from the late 1990s, and Feminism Against Cisness edited by Emma Heaney, which uses its radical imaginations to construct a trans-centered “Feminism for the Living,” per the afterword by Durba Mitra. Both works of scholarship are speculative in their ambitions if not their aesthetics, and they were both really salutary reads in the darkness of the year.
My favorite new SFF releases are equally engaged in projects of critical imagination. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar is a dreamy and lush sapphic take on “The Two Sisters” that explores gendered violence, family loyalty, and the affects of diaspora (drawing on El-Mohtar’s own relationship to Lebanon). Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten is haunted and haunting, playing at the edges of nightmare in a collection of politically astute stories about growing up, folk culture—especially children’s/teens’ culture—queerness, gender, and immigrant experience. Particularly excellent and harrowing are “The Curing” (about outcast immigrant kids desperate to fit in and coating your hand with glue in study hall), “The Advocate” (about the tribulations of American healthcare), and “Mel for Melissa” (about teen body image and sports culture). Finally, Eden Royce’s Psychopomp and Circumstance, which I reviewed here, addresses choice and self-determination through subtle, rich prose and a movingly rendered alternate Reconstruction-era South. All of these stories, centered as they are on the vital lives of people at the margins, deploy beautiful and finely crafted language to dream their way towards the otherwise while keeping clear insight trained on what is.
Jake Casella Brookins
This was a bit of an odd reading year for me, frequently interrupted with personal and global tragedy; early in the year I found Caroline Hagood’s Death and Other Speculative Fictions and Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots good companions for thinking about loss and what, if anything, our stories can say about it.
Still, lots of good books. I particularly enjoyed returning to some older works for A Meal of Thorns—C. J. Cherryh’s 40,000 in Gehenna and Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist were especially rewarding revisits. Among new reads this year, my personal favorites include Ethan Rutherford’s mystic and majestic North Sun, or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther; Eva Meijer’s absolutely marvellous Sea Now (tr. Anne Thompson Melo), funny and thoughtful and poetic; and of course Isaac Fellman’s infuriatingly amazing Notes from a Regicide, every line an arrow destined for some part of you.
2025 was a banner year for collections. Among the handful I got to, André Alexis’s charming and contemplative Other Worlds really stands out, as does Leyna Krow’s wonderfully funny and occasionally devastating Sinkhole, and Other Inescapable Voids—I particularly enjoyed Sinkhole’s semi-connected nature, with satirical and surreal family stories throwing their weight behind climate worries and vice versa. Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis was easily the most fun I had reading a collection this year: it’s terribly clever in a sly, conversational way, and also packed with haunting imagery—worth the price of admission for the title story alone. Kristina Ten’s Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is another great genre-bender, and without leaning too heavily on horror I think encapsulates why horror, as a way to approach stories, is having such a fruitful moment. Finally, there’s Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, an instant classic and a name to watch.
Paul Chuks
Amidst the rigmarole of life, the existential crisis that comes with mapping out a bright future for myself, I was able to read books that dulled the pain and deepened my love for literature. I was able to read the Harry Potter series and the Game of Thrones series, wrote a yet-to-be published comparative critique of both series, and stayed up wondering which world I’d choose to live in if I had to choose.
However, I read lots of amazing books this year: Angel T. Dionne’s poetry collection, Bird Ornaments; and Salma Ibrahim’s Salutation Road.
Bird Ornaments is a surrealist masterpiece in its exploration of the human genome. It establishes the ordinariness of the human life by focusing on how susceptible we all are to illnesses. Surrealism, automatism to be precise, was very evident in the book. It made the book tick and taught readers the essence of literature anew.
Salutation Road was a slow burner. An immigrant story that depicts the realities of immigrants in Britain using an alternate universe in which each character has a double. Sirad is invited to a tech school in London, and obliges, but finds herself in Mogadishu, experiencing the life she would have lived had her parents not migrated to the UK. The book juxtaposes the life of a migrant and a non-migrant side by side, showing readers what is and what could have been.
Happy new year, too, and I hope 2026 brings you glory.
Bill Capossere
Most of my top genre reads are already widely hailed: Robert Jackson Bennet’s The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Written on the Dark, Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar, and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. The one exception is Sylvia Park’s Luminous, which, despite having some typical first-novel issues, was gorgeously, poignantly written. So I’m going to spotlight non-genre favorites as they might be less familiar.
The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, by Peter Brannen, is one of the best popular science books I’ve read over the past decade or more: utterly engaging, fascinating, mesmerizing, and stimulating as it deeply explores how its subject connects to, well, everything.
Turning to history, in Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It, Emily Hauser uses female characters from the Iliad or the Odyssey as a springboard to explore the lives of women of the time via research involving grave artifacts, ancient art and literature, DNA findings, goods pulled up from shipwrecks, and even tree rings. A wonderful example of cross-disciplinary work and utterly compelling in how it overturns “conventional wisdom.”
In fiction, Dusk, by Robbie Arnott, is a beautifully immersive slow burn of a story set in Tasmania following a pair of twins hoping to win bounty money by hunting perhaps the last puma in the land.
In visual media, I want to enthusiastically proselytize for the absolutely brilliant Thai film A Useful Ghost, which is funny, warm, and incredibly powerful as it shifts from one kind of movie to another. A true must-see. Other top movies were Dust Bunny and It Ends. As for TV, yeah, Andor doesn’t need me to trumpet it, but in the world we live in, not pointing to its important messaging seems irresponsible.
Hanna Carolina
I started 2025 reviewing S. M. Hallow’s debut novella, How to Survive This Fairytale. The story explores the idea of reshaping narratives on two levels: personal, following the main character’s journey from disempowerment to a happy ending, and social, by being a queer retelling of (multiple) classic fairy tales. This was a brilliant highlight that seemed to set a trend for a reading year full of re-imaginings and re-shapings of traditional stories.
In preparation for my latest (and forthcoming at Strange Horizons!) review, Ben Alderson’s gothic queer love story The Haunting of William Thorn, I read eight of his books, including the Darkmourn Universe series, which comprises multiple queer fairy tale retellings. The Prince of Endless Tides is a re-interpretation of The Little Mermaid that sees a prince fall in love with an immortal merman, and Alpha of Mortal Flesh reimagines Little Red Riding Hood as a heartbroken witch who fights to reunite with his true love, a stoic werewolf. My intention to criticise the fast-fashion, writing-to-trend style of publishing that Alderson epitomises was hindered by me finding these books fun, intense, and full of unhinged anything-can-happen twists and turns. Although the experience was more akin to beta-reading a draft than enjoying a finished project, the entertainment value was undeniable and I found myself balancing between astonishment and disappointment, yet continually won over, perhaps most of all by the Court of Broken Bonds series.
I also attended Angus Book Fest in Montrose, a fantastic initiative run by Sarah Archibald. Sarah offers support to the local writers, helping them to showcase and promote their books, and welcomes everyone regardless of genre. This meant that Scotland’s usual focus on crime drama was offset with underrepresented genres and included some new, speculative writers: R. M. Brown reimagines Scottish independence in a fantasy setting, and shows her character, Cait, undergoing a transformation from an insecure unionist to a passionate pro-independence fighter in Song of the Stag. Closing this year with a final fairy tale retelling, Storm Lomax uses Beauty and the Beast as an inspiration for her romantic fantasy full of magic and feminine rage, Wrath of the Never Queen. If anything unified 2025 for me, it was the persistence of using fantasy worlds, both new and familiar, to test and challenge established structures of power, creating a space where other heroes, narratives, and endings become imaginable.
Rachel Cordasco
In the past few years, I’ve catalogued between 40-50 works of speculative fiction in translation (SFT), but this year, the number jumped to 81! It’s been fascinating reading all of these diverse stories from around the world, and seeing that, both this year and last, Korean SFT has topped the charts. I’ve read five such books this year: You-Jeong Jeong’s Perfect Happiness, Sung-il Kim’s Blood of the Old Kings and Blood for the Undying Throne, Bae Myung-hoon’s The Proposal, and J. M. Lee’s Artificial Truth. My favorite of this group is Artificial Truth, since it not only depicts a world in which human ingenuity beats an AI at its own game, but also plays with the reader in interesting ways, switching perspectives and leading us down one path when, all along, the story is headed down another.
While Artificial Truth was entertaining and well-done, I also enjoyed a variety of other SFT that came out this year: Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s metafictional dark fantasy School of Shards (the last in the Vita Nostra trilogy); K. A. Teryna’s collection Black Hole Heart, with its tantalizing tales ranging from science fiction to dark fantasy; and Tomas Downey’s surrealistic collection Diving Board.
The books that are at the very top of my list this year, however, are Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Books 1-3). Balle’s story of a woman trapped in (or fallen out of?) time is a masterful exploration of how we humans relate to our world and one another based on our expectation of the future and interpretation of the past. How would we react to living in a world where time loops back on itself every day for everyone else but not us? What does it mean when an old coin or an antique cup find their way into our time? What connects us to those objects and why does it matter? I’m really looking forward to the next four books in the series.
Matthew Eatough
I spent a good chunk of my year working my way through Scandinavian literature in translation, most of it from women authors. Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (trans. Martin Aiken)—inspired by the seventeenth-century witch trials in Northern Jutland, and narrated by the wax doll of an unmarried noblewoman accused of witchcraft—was a good reminder that Ravn is one of the absolute best at writing literary speculative fiction. The third volume of Solvej Balle’s philosophical time-loop septology, On the Calculation of Volume (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell), continued Balle’s beautiful meditations on time, ecology, and human impermanence. I also caught up on work from the past few years, including Ida Marie Hede’s delightfully odd Adorable (trans. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). (If you haven’t read any Scandinavian speculative fiction lately, you should. Danish literature in particular is having a moment.)
Other highlights in the field of speculative fiction in translation included Mariette Navarro’s poetic ghost story at sea, Ultramarine (trans. Eve Hill-Angus), Mario Bellatin’s absurdist Perpetual Law (trans. Stephen Beachy), and the latest instalment in Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic cycle, The Inner Harbour (trans. Gina M. Stamm). Alex Pheby’s Gormenghastian Waterblack ended his Cities of the Weft trilogy in the same way as it began: weirdly. (And I mean that as a high compliment!) Michael Cisco’s Black Brane continued his interest in the intersections between theoretical physics and the occult (an idea he also explores in his monumental Animal Money). And Sarah Maria Griffin’s Eat the Ones You Love used the conceit of a human-plant ménage à trois to reflect on the post-COVID decline of brick-and-mortar retail shopping.
The most unexpected surprise in my reading was the discovery of Julia Gfrörer’s comics. I hadn’t been lucky enough to run across Gfrörer’s work in zine form or in anthologies, and most of her graphic novels are sadly out of print. Kudos to Fantagraphics for republishing many of Gfrörer’s harder-to-find shorts and novellas this year in the collection World Within the World, which provides an excellent introduction to Gfrörer’s work.
Shannon Fay
This year I stumbled upon Alien Stage, an animated Korean webshow set in a dystopian future where humans compete in a singing competition for the entertainment of their alien overlords—each “episode” is a song from the competition. It’s like Interstella 5555, if Interstella 5555 was an indictment of K-pop industry. The show is all up on YouTube, and is a great example of what a small team can do if they have vision and creativity.
As far as books go, I really enjoyed Diavola by Jennifer Thorne, a novel which manages to make old haunted house tropes seem not only fresh, but simultaneously funny and terrifying. I also really enjoyed Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel. Michel playfully pokes fun at writers, writer groups, the publishing industry, and fandom. It’s not really a sci-fi novel, but because of its throwback cover and the writer’s previous works, my library slapped a “SCIENCE FICTION” label on it, which I think would delight Michel.
As far as nonfiction goes, I really liked Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling. The book breaks down different plot structures as seen in Asian media, and is a must-read if that kind of plot deconstruction interests you.
2025 felt like a bit of an indulgent year, as I gorged myself on sequels that weren’t really needed: Squid Game season 3, Alice in Borderland season 3, Hades II. Don’t get me wrong, Hades II is a lot of fun, but at times it just felt like more Hades. I’m really hoping in 2026 to have less “more,” and more “new.” I’m also excited to play some board games I recently picked up, such as Nyctophobia and Molly House. I also plan to spend less money on board games.