The Year in Review 2025 by Graham Sleight

Year in Review, 2025

It would of course be an understatement to claim that 2025 was an eventful year in world politics. But, given the lead times in writing and publishing books, it’d be unrealistic to expect the specifics of that tumult to be reflected in the year’s fantastic fiction. That said, it’s not just been an unsettled year: It’s been an unsettled decade. Perhaps understandably, then, one theme …Read More

The Rose Field by Philip Pullman: Review by Graham Sleight

The Rose Field, Philip Pullman (Knopf 978-0-59330-663-5, $29.99, 672pp, hc) October 2025. Cover by Chris Wormell.

It’s been a long road to get here. Philip Pullman’s original His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) followed the adolescent girl Lyra, beginning in an alternate-world Oxford where each human is twinned with a dæmon in animal form that is somehow emblematic of who they are. The journey of His Dark Materials to our own …Read More

The Year in Review 2024 by Graham Sleight

Some years, it feels like there’s a central book in SF and fantasy, one around which the conversation orbits. A few obvious examples: Neuromancer in 1984, Ancillary Justice in 2013, This Is How You Lose the Time War in 2019. In my reading, 2024 was not such a year. There were plenty of good books – see below – but as a year it felt curiously decentered, as if the …Read More

The Year in Review 2023 by Graham Sleight

I’m always reluctant to pick out trends when summarising a year’s books for Locus. There are too many contingencies at play in what gets published when, and so much is dependent on which fraction of the torrent of SFF books I’ve managed to read. But this year, I do feel confident in one judgment: It was a really fine time to be reading books of the fantastic. The works I’m …Read More

The Year in Review 2022 by Graham Sleight

My usual comment on publishing and novels applies even more strongly this year. 2022 was an extraordinary year in global events and (I think) an exceptional one in the SF and fantasy it saw published. However, there’s so much lag between an event occurring, an author choosing to write a book about it, and the book making its way through the publishing process that it’d be a genuine shock if …Read More

The Year in Review 2021 by Graham Sleight

As Locus‘s statistics keep revealing, there’s so much SF and fantasy being published these days that any one person can’t keep track of everything. What I happen to have read in a given year is an emergent property of many things: whether I’ve enjoyed the author’s previous work, whether I’ve had a book recommended to me or seen it reviewed positively, what I happened to notice on a bookshop shelf …Read More

2020 Year in Review by Graham Sleight

Publishing lead-times being what they are, the extraordinary events of 2020 largely weren’t reflected in the books that came out in the year – or at least, not intentionally. I managed to read a good deal of thought-provoking SF and fantasy this year, but some books seemed even more relevant than expected because of the pandemic-shuttered world they emerged into. How posterity will view them – let alone how it’ll …Read More

Year in Review, 2019 by Graham Sleight

Over the past few years, I’ve been talking here about a couple of recurring ideas on the shape of the SF and fantasy world. For instance, the notion that these fields are increasingly a pluralism and that there’s no default way that one should expect an SF/F novel to be written; that interplay between genre and mainstream writers of the fantastic is increasing, fruitfully; and that science fiction and fantasy …Read More

When It Was 2017, It Was a Very Good Year, by Graham Sleight

I’ve been writing these year-end summations for over a decade now, and I find it hard to think of a year when there’s been more really good science fiction and fantasy to record. (Of course, I’ve also read a few duds – omitted below – but then that’s always the case.) I’m not sure why 2017 has seen so many strong books. There aren’t many unifying themes across the works …Read More

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Hal Clement by Graham Sleight

The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter, Hal Clement (NESFA 1-886788-06-X, , $25.00, 518pp, hc) 1999. Cover by George Richard.
The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 2: Music of Many Spheres, Hal Clement (NESFA 1-886788-07 -8, $25.00, 506pp, hc) 2000. Cover by George Richard.
The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 3: Variations on a Theme by Sir Isaac Newton, Hal Clement (NESFA 1-886778-08-6, $25.00, 465pp, …Read More

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: A.E. van Vogt by Graham Sleight

The Voyage of the Space Beagle, A.E. van Vogt (Simon and Schuster, 241pp, hc) 1950.
The World of A, A.E. van Vogt (Simon & Schuster, 247pp, hc) 1948.
Slan, A.E. van Vogt (Arkham House, 216pp, hc) 1946.
Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt, A.E. van Vogt (NESFA 1-886778-34-5, $29.00, 573pp, hc) 2002.

Every time I write this column I try to answer, for a series of authors …Read More