RICHARD K. MORGANwas born September 24, 1965 in Norfolk, England. He graduated Queens’ College, University of Cambridge and taught English as a second language, living and working in Madrid, Istanbul, Ankara, and Glasgow, and has traveled extensively. He lives in Norfolk with his wife Virginia and son Daniel.
Morgan’s debut novel was Altered Carbon (2002), a cyberpunk noir that won a Philip K. Dick Award and spurred follow-ups Broken …Read More
Rachel Harrison and Robert P. Ottone read at the KGB Bar in New York NY on January 14, 2026 as part of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Reading series, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. …Read More
MAKANA YAMAMOTO was born on Maui and grew up in Hawai’i and the mainland US. Their debut novel Hammajang Luck was a 2025 Locus Award finalist. Standalone sequel The Obake Code came out in February 2026. A writer from childhood, fiction became the perfect medium for them to explore their interests as well as reconnect with their culture, coalescing into a passion for diverse sci-fi. They love writing multicultural …Read More
Norms change. That’s a foundation of stfnal thinking: all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. It’s not unusual for the bedrock ethos of your childhood to be overturned by your dotage.
As Douglas Adams put it:
Year in Review
2025 was a very good year for SF in translation. I’d like to think that this jump from around 50 titles per year in the past to 81 this year is due to an explosion of interest in SFT. However, if I’m wearing my realist hat, I’d have to say that it’s probably because I was privy to several people’s lists of the SFT they knew …Read More
2025 in Review
Let me start with a tale of two American dreams. One of the most conventional, normative novels I read in 2025 was Dream State by Eric Puchner, a big book that excels at what it sets out to achieve, and thus moved me, even while knowing that what it achieves is fundamentally sentimental. It is, essentially, the story of a middle-class love triangle and its fallout, set …Read More
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 Year in Review 2025
It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of another year, or at the beginning of a new one by the time this is published. Whatever else is going on in the world, reading continues to be a source of joy, and there was so much incredible speculative fiction published in 2025. It was a particularly strong year for short fiction collections, so that’s …Read More
Whether writers’ playground, experimental sandbox, record of the community and the field, or trove of criticism or enthusiasm or scholarship… the magazines of science fiction, fantasy, and horror bring a wealth of reading (and listening) to their audiences, despite the systemic challenges. It wasn’t an easy year for most. A number of outlets called it quits; some simply ran their course, but many couldn’t make the financial piece of the …Read More
2025 Year-End: Mirth, Reconsidered
While I have not, like Hamlet, of late lost all my mirth, I have forgone much custom of reading fiction and the reviewing that would have resulted therefrom. Which does not mean that I don’t have books to recommend. And, as usual, those recommendations do not offer an account of the state of our genres or the marketplace or a map of anything beyond those …Read More
Maria’s Year-End Roundup
I tried to come up with a neat and tidy list-structure for this year-end roundup, but the best I can do is a rambling, somewhat haphazard and certainly nonexhaustive journey through some of my favorite short stories, novelettes, and novellas from 2025.
Short stories
This year, it seemed to me that my taste in short fiction leaned even more heavily than before into the strange and beautiful, …Read More
Afrocentered Futurisms Celebrated This Year
We might have thought the pandemic was the worst of it, the most dystopian things could get. But our world is, increasingly, in a bad place right now. There’s Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan…. Even the most peaceful country in the world, Tanzania, excavated its own apocalypse, as the government lashed at Gen Zs who took to the streets to cry freedom. Then, just …Read More
Year in Review 2025
Allow me to list for you some of my very favourite 2025 books by women and nonbinary folks, and offer some entirely subjective thoughts about why they were so very excellent. (Presented alphabetically by author.)
Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy: Originally published in 2023 by Epigram and republished by Harper Perennial in 2025, this delightful series of adventures introduces the titular Miss Cassidy, who can …Read More
Year in Review
2025 was, to be blunt, a shit-ass year. The state of the world, the political cruelty, the worsening infestation of generative AI, the continuing collapse of creative industries, the crumbling of our academic institutions, all of it made me feel like I spent the year just trying to stay afloat. Fiction, in the form of books, movies, and television, provided some of the little joys that powered …Read More
Year End 2025
To begin my look back at the year with a cliché: It was a land of contrasts. Although isolating in many ways, I also found myself connecting with more fans and writers than usual – and meeting old online acquaintances in the flesh at conferences and conventions was a definite high point. In my reading and discussions in genre, the fragmentary or polyvocal nature of the …Read More
The Year in Review 2025
2025 has been another tumultuous, terrible year for a lot of people in this country. Hate and prejudice seem to drive the decisions and actions of individuals in power, reflecting the negativity of many of this country’s citizens. The good news: Some great books came out, titles which are needed now more than ever!
Shingai Njeri Kagunda and I put out three issues of Fantasy …Read More
C.S.E. Cooney, Georgia Day, Keith R.A. DeCandido, and David Gerrold read at the Barrow’s Intense Tasting Room in Industry City, Brooklyn NY on December 16, 2025 as part of the Brooklyn Books & Booze Reading series, hosted by Amy Goldschlager. …Read More
Ten for 2025
2025 was a year of horror for me. (For all of us, really, but I mean specifically in terms of the books that I read.) What’s the allure of dark fiction in dark times? Is it See, things could be even worse ? A way to grapple with difficult feelings in a situation where the stakes are lower than they are in real life? Just a …Read More
Year-End Review
The challenge every year when I sit down to write this essay on recommendations is how to not leave anything out. But every year when it’s published, I am reminded of a title I neglected. This year, I want to begin with a book from 2024 that has stayed with me: Cinderwich by Cherie Priest. The author also had a book come out last year, It Was Her …Read More
The Year in Review 2025
2025 was the year of long novels. Not Clarissa by Samuel Richardson long, but not far off. Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) clocks in at just under 700,000 words, took Young more than 20 years to write, and took me more than six months to read. It’s a reading experience like nothing I’ve encountered – hallucinatory, hypnotic, and discombobulating. The longest-ever novel about …Read More
Locus 2025 Year in Review
2025 wasn’t a great year for me – both reading-wise and life-wise. I didn’t reach my Goodreads goal, complete any reading challenges, or check out as many new authors as I usually do. Much of my time was spent, instead, in the silent, sterilized waiting rooms of hospitals, frantically praying for good news, or adjusting to a new routine of caregiving at home. Naturally, …Read More
NNEDI OKORAFOR was born April 8, 1974 in Cincinnati OH to Nigerian/Igbo immigrant parents. She received a master’s degree in journalism at Michigan State University and a PhD in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and later worked as an associate professor at Chicago State University and the State University of New York. She attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2001 and, in 2024, she was inducted into …Read More
SFF in 2025: Some Reasons Not to Just Go Back to Bed
I suspect that, like many others, I achieved my annual quota of dystopias and horror stories simply by making the unfortunate choice of being awake during much of 2025. Fortunately or not, little such fiction came my way in terms of reviewing – I did get a lot of publishers’ promo letters urging me to escape the bad …Read More
KAMILAH COLE was born in Jamaica and raised in America. She graduated New York University and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her first novel, So Let Them Burn (2024), was shortlisted for a Dragon Award, a Lambda Award, and a Lodestar Award, and a sequel, This Ends in Embers, was published in 2025. Her speculative short fiction was included in the anthology The Secret Romantic’s Book of Magic …Read More
TOM HOLT was born in London, England in 1961. He was first published at age 12 with a book of poems (and was briefly a media sensation). He studied at Oxford University as well as The College of Law in London, and he worked for several years as a solicitor before shifting to writing full-time, often under the pseudonym K.J. Parker.
Holt’s first novel, Expecting Someone Taller, was published …Read More
Crises precipitate change. Before Russia’s despicable invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s transition to zero carbon energy lagged a decade behind schedule. Three years later, Europe has surged well over a decade ahead of schedule in their solar transition, and the process is only accelerating. It turns out that all the intractable obstacles to rapid, total technological transition just melt away when you’re shivering in the dark thanks to the aggression of …Read More
Matthew Kressel, C.W. Rose, Paula Bomer, and Crissa-Jean Chappell read at the Barrow’s Intense Tasting Room in Industry City, Brooklyn NY on October 21, 2025 as part of the Brooklyn Books & Booze Reading series, hosted by Amy Goldschlager.
Photographer: Amy Goldschlager …Read More
BETHANY JACOBSwas born August 31, 1982 in Redlands CA and grew up in San Jose. She went on to earn a PhD in American Literature from the University of Oregon in 2014, where she taught writing and science fiction. She left academia in 2019 to work in educational technology to have more time to write. Her debut novel, These Burning Stars (2023), became a 2024 Philip K. Dick Award …Read More
DAVE HUTCHINSON was born in 1960 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in England. He attended the University of Nottingham and went on to write for The Dundee Courier and The Weekly News as a journalist for many years.
Hutchinson’s earliest published fiction was his collection Thumbprints (1979), and he has written more than fifty short fiction pieces since, some published in collections such as Torn Air (1980), As the Crow …Read More
EDEN ROYCE was born August 5, 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up in Charleston SC. She currently lives in Southeast England with her husband and cat.
Royce has published over 50 short stories, starting with 9 Mystery Rose (2010). She received a Diverse Worlds Grant in 2016. Root Magic (2021), her middle-grade debut, won an Ignyte Award, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and a Walter Award Honor, and was a …Read More
JOSEPH HILLSTRÖM KINGwas born June 4, 1972 in Bangor, Maine, son of writers Stephen & Tabitha King. He attended Vassar College, earning a degree in English in 1995. He married Leanora Legrand in 1998 (divorced 2010), and they have three children. In 2015, he married editor Gillian Redfearn, and they have twins.
He chose to write under the pen name Joe Hill to obscure the connection to his famous …Read More
Who are we to blame for enshittification? That is, who is at fault for the pandemic of platform decay, in which the platforms we depend on, where we congregate, trade, perform, sell, buy, connect, love, argue, and mobilize are all turning into piles of shit, all at once?
50 years of neoliberal canon says that we have to blame consumers. You, me, and everyone we know cast ballots in an …Read More
