It’s been a big reading month! I finished my favorite 2024-published novel, I had a big push of current-year short fiction before posting the first edition of my 2024 Recommended Reading List, and once I got it posted, I spent a little while dipping into backlist recommendations that had been languishing on my TBR. Let’s take a look!

Short Fiction

As always, I reviewed Clarkesworld and Giganotosaurus. By and large, I won’t recap that review, but you’re welcome to give it a look.

December Favorites

From my Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus review, I was very impressed with “Driver” by Sameem Siddiqui, and I also quite enjoyed “The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vázquez and “Dead reckoning in 6/8 time” by Sabrina Vourvoulias. But there were plenty of others worth mentioning:

• “And You and I” (2024 short story) by Jenna Hanchey. A possible futures story that presents a relationship through the lens of the lead’s flashes of knowledge of one way that relationship could go. Uses the speculative element to dig into the interpersonal.
• “The Lighthouse Keeper” (2024 short story) by Melinda Brasher. A deeply atmospheric story about a woman rejected by her own town taking one of the few jobs left available to her and working through the trauma of loss even while isolated among dangers she doesn’t comprehend.
• “Ol’ Big Head” (2024 novelette) by Melissa A. Watkins. A slow-developing ghost story with a genre-aware narrator and vernacular voice that keeps the momentum going even before the supernatural elements come clear.
• “Where Would You Be Now” (2018 novelette) by Carrie Vaughn. A post-apocalyptic story of survival and community-building. Perhaps more traditional post-apocalypse than a community-centric story like Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” but holding similar appeal.
• “Exhibit 57-B from the Trial of Alonzo Montalvo v. MoodFoods Incorporated” (2020 short story) by Douglas DiCiccio. A short epistolary piece styled as an AI summary of footage from an ill-fated commercial that does a wonderful job building to the eventual conflict.
• “Morrigan in the Sunglare” (2014 short story) by Seth Dickinson. A wartime space opera, with a pair of soldiers on a dying ship reminiscing about their relationship and the way they had come through to save each other–from both physical and psychological peril. Such an excellent story that I immediately checked to see which award shortlists it made and was unpleasantly surprised to find the answer was none.
• “Morrigan in Shadow” (2015 novelette) by Seth Dickinson. A sequel to “Morrigan in the Sunglare” that’s more than twice as long and uses that extra length for a mind-bending dive into the alien side of the conflict and a desperate gambit for the lead to save her world.

Strong Contenders

• “The Lord of Mice’s Arrows” (2024 short story) by Nadia Radovich. My second Radovich story hits a few of the same themes as the first–it’s a mythological retelling in a contemporary setting, with a feminist twist and a heavy emphasis on the ways in which translation changes stories. I’ve never been a huge retelling buff, but Radovich tells them well, and the language angle adds some extra dimensionality. If I had to recommend one, it’d be “Another Old Country,” but both that I’ve tried have been quite good.
• “Because Flora Had Existed. And I Had Loved Her” (2024 short story) by Anna Martino, translated by Anna Martino. An epistolary story that collects interviews by and about a popular writer, with his own fantastical experiences only slowly coming through as the snippets reveal more and more of the overall picture.
• “Auspicium” (2024 short story) by Diane Dima. An exploration of death through an avian metaphor that sometimes feels more poetry than narrative. Not especially plot-heavy, but beautiful.
• “On the Existence of Ghosts, As If” (2024 short story) by James Van Pelt. Another exploration of death (it’s almost as if The Deadlands has a theme) from the perspective of a man with heart issues finding that he can see ghosts, struggling to interact meaningfully with them.

Others I Enjoyed in December

• “Sins of the Children” (2024 short story) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A story that hits a few of Tchaikovsky’s favorite themes and is bound to appeal to his fans, as a group of workers on an alien planet try to protect themselves without regard for the ways in which it may affect the ecological balance of their environment.
• “On the Water Its Crystal Teeth” (2024 short story) by Marissa Lingen. A story both about adoption and about letting children go their own way, with more exploration of feelings than a true driving plot.
• “Yellow and the Perception of Reality” (2020 novelette) by Maureen McHugh. A story about caring for a brain-damaged sibling and also looking into the research that may have caused the damage in the first place. I found myself wanting to linger more in the interpersonal plot than the more science-fictional elements.
• “All the Colors You Thought Were Kings” (2016 short story) by Arkady Martine. Ultimately a straightforward story of an assassination plot by adolescents looking to save the life of a friend, with the quality of the worldbuilding and prose making up for a lack of twists and turns in the plot.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (2024 novella) by Anne de Marcken. A plotless, literary exploration of grief from the perspective of a sentient zombie, with some of the most striking individual scenes I read all year.
• The Other Valley (2024 novel) by Scott Alexander Howard. Another literary work, this one a philosophical, character-driven story about someone who glimpses time-travelers and must deal with the knowledge of impending tragedy but without the inability to prevent it. My favorite 2024 release to date.
• The Butcher of the Forest (2024 novella) by Premee Mohamed. An intensely atmospheric novella about an attempt to rescue a pair of children from an uncanny forest that rarely leaves survivors.
• The Ministry of Time (2024 novel) by Kaliane Bradley. A hit debut that tries to be a quirky, time travel romance, an immigrant story, and a thriller with heavy political commentary and doesn’t really manage more than one.

Other December Reads

• The Naming Song (2024 novel) by Jedediah Berry. A fascinating, dreamlike novel in a post-apocalyptic world with plenty of naming magic. Full review to come.
• The Justice of Kings (2022 novel) by Richard Swan. A remarkably well-paced opener to a fantasy trilogy, where a murder mystery opens up a world of political machinations that could shake an empire. Full review to come.
• Acceptance (2014 novel) by Jeff VanderMeer. The third book in the Southern Reach series spends a lot of time returning to the scenes of both of the first two books, while also adding a prequel element. Well-written as always, though I feel each aspect of the series has diminishing returns, with the atmosphere inversely proportional to the time spent on a given storyline.

Year in Review

I posted the first edition of my 2024 Recommended Reading List, focusing specifically on the best things I read this year that were published in 2024. There was a lot of good genre fiction out this year, y’all, check it out!

SPSFC

I’m a little behind on updates, but my Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC4) judging team has posted our first set of eliminations. Expect three more elimination posts in the first half of January before we officially unveil our quarterfinalists.