Guest Contributor: 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

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

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

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

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

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

As ever, the exercise of trying to infer grand themes from a year’s books (or, more exactly, a year’s reading) is a bit of a lottery. If nothing else, writing and publishing lead-times mean that very few books were a direct verdict on the year in which they were published. But I’d note two themes that struck me. Firstly, it felt like a year when there were more than the …Read More

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