Ten for 2024 by Tim Pratt
Well, here we are, right down at the closing of the year (though you’ll read this near the beginning of the next one). 2024 was something of an annus horribilis, but as usual, I found comfort and refuge in fiction, and sometimes even inspiration to keep fighting for a chance at better tomorrows.
Still, since I’m in a dark turn of mind, I’ll start …Read More
As we are given carte blanche to write about books however we wish in these annual essays, I am going to indulge myself and share some thoughts on the titles I read in the past year that particularly impressed and/or made me happy. There were several surprises, including Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet by Molly Morris. This coming-of-age drama veers from the expected as soon as the reader realizes …Read More
After the slam dunk that was 2023, I had high hopes for 2024 – too high, as it turns out. 2023 was a rare vintage, the 1999 of films in book form (okay, maybe not that good). To expect that 2024 would scale those same heady heights was asking too much of the year, especially one already burdened by a world-shaping American election. Not that genre fiction schedules are influenced …Read More
2024 was bit of an irregular year for me, reading-wise. As per my notebooks, I read around 90 books (alas, less than my last year’s score of 110 on Goodreads) – the main course obviously being speculative fiction, with a small dessert sampling of literary fiction, romances, comics and non-fiction. The meal wasn’t entirely satisfying, as there were plenty of anticipated titles that I didn’t get to read, and plenty …Read More
2024: Descent (or Ascent) into Multiplicity
It’s a bit bracing to be reminded that I’ve been writing these yearly review columns for more than three decades, but it does put things in perspective. Some of the books mentioned in those first couple of columns, of course, are barely remembered now, but others still seem to be a significant part of the discussion – Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Neal Stephenson’s Snow …Read More
In my previous article on Japanese science fiction, published inLocusin 2016, I likened my experience of living in Japan to Urashima Taro’s rise from his present world (eighth century) to the world of the future, with its fast-forward jumble of pop-culture iconography. This sense of Japan and its current state in science fiction is even more relevant in the wake of COVID, as these changes have only accelerated. It’s …Read More
The 23rd Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies conference was held July 21, 2024. The highlights included a special guest lecture by renowned Romanian SF author George Dimitriu and scholarly presentations of papers on the theme ”Spotlight on the Works of Professor Jayant V. Narlikar.”
The conference began in the Indian traditional way, with the lighting of the lamp by the founding members of the association.
The event coincided …Read More
Let’s start with two obvious facts:
That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:
With that out of the way….
Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after …Read More
It takes true dreamers to make dreams happen. In the case of the Future Fiction Workshop held near Chongqing, China in June 2024, those were the intrepid Italian editor Francesco Verso and Fan Zhang, dean of the newly established Fishing Fortress Science Fiction College. Francesco, who has made World SF his life’s mission, has long worked in promoting science fiction into and out of China. Fan, who now supervises …Read More
The genre is experiencing a blooming period. Big names like George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Andrzej Sapkowski, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert Jordan sell hundreds of copies every week, thanks to television adaptations, but also, in recent years, fantastic fiction has been gaining ground over the other genres and is becoming, little by little, the main trend. For example, the most recent worldwide publishing phenomenon – although in …Read More
There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness …Read More
AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting inappropriate content in her private files. Renee never got back into her account and never found out what triggered the lockout. She wasn’t alone: as Madeline Ashby recounts in her excellent Wired story on the affair, many romance writers were permanently barred from their own …Read More
Outside of the vast English-speaking fandom lies a tapestry of diverse and weakly interlinked communities from the countries with small language bases. These languages, and the nations that speak them are often – because of inertia, rather than ill intent – perceived as minor. Indeed, they are minor in one critical aspect: as literary markets. This circumstance has a profound effect on their literature. Speculative fiction, with sales an …Read More
I fell in love with fantasy at age seven thanks to the Harry Potter series. I remember reading at school, in between the lessons, and at home. I even drew the lightning scars on my very willing classmates, so life could feel more the way I thought it should be: heroes – valiant; stakes – to save the whole world; evil – the most vicious you can imagine. What …Read More
No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ”enshittification” – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.
My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of …Read More
The 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) took place March 13-16, 2024 at the Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel Lakeside, with a theme of Whimsy. Academics, writers, publishers, editors, artists, students, independent scholars, and more participated, with 327 people attending (comparable to last year’s count, though still down significantly from 2019’s pre-COVID levels) with 239 presenters on the academic track and 89 invited creative guests. Guests …Read More
In the West, science fiction has been shaped by magazines like Astounding, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Locus, Galaxy, Amazing Stories, Analog, Lightning Speed, Destiny, Galileo, Asimov’s, F&SF, New Worlds, Vertex, and others. Editors like Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell took a keen interest in directing the respective authors to write stories as the days demanded. Unlike in the West, India has had no history of science fiction magazine in …Read More
Latin American SF in The New York Times
Emily Hart’s piece ”Science Fiction from Latin America, With Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon” was published in The New York Times on July 10, 2023, and claimed the attention of the Brazilian SF community. Hart writes out of Colombia, and deals in her piece with that country and with Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Brazil. Her starting …Read More
In conflict, we find clarity.
We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.
It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows …Read More
2023 was certainly… a year for short speculative fiction. Another amazing year in terms of the quality and quantity of stories published, but also a challenging year as many venues have faced increased financial pressures and decreasing returns from social media, as well as personal losses and national and international tragedies. While the year might seem like it went out like a lamb, it’s possible that the full impact from …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
Long Games, Nightmares, and Retrospectives by Russell Letson
I look into the tea leaves – well, the coffee grounds – at the bottom of the year’s cup and find no wisdom or insight into either the state of the field or even my own reading patterns. As usual. Nevertheless, I am more than content with where my nose-following and stumbling around in the dark have taken me in 2023, across …Read More
Every once in a while, in defiance of all the cacophony of the actual world, the federated genres of the fantastic can still produce a work whose single novum speaks with a clarity that demands attention. Such a work is Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald’s Prophet, a highly readable technothriller-romance with two screenplay-ready protagonists, elevated by their investigation into the titular substance. Prophet causes people to experience an irresistible supernormal …Read More
2023 wound up being a strange reading year for me. I started the year with a big move: from Chicago back to beautiful Buffalo, NY. While it’s wonderful to be back east and closer to the mountains, being so far from Chicago’s amazing literary scene has been hard. I’ve particularly missed the wonderful speculative book clubs I was part of there – Think Galactic and the Chicago Nerd Social Club …Read More
Once upon a time, bad things happened and eventually, things got better. While this might be true for certain stories, real life, plagued by ongoing pandemics and genocides, rarely offers such neat conclusions. Perhaps that is why we repeatedly turn to art – not only to find escape and solace, but also, wisdom, empathy, and more urgently so, the will to resist and survive, despite the odds. And as the …Read More
2023 was a bummer: We published our final issue of Fantasy Magazine in October. All the same, it was a wonderful issue, and a strong way to go out. But there was no shortage of excellent short fiction to be found elsewhere. Besides the many intriguing magazines regularly putting out stories, there was a wealth of books that folks who love short fiction should consider picking up.
My caveat: These …Read More
2023 by Alexandra Pierce
2023 was a really good year for books! I’m going to focus on the books I loved that were written by women and nonbinary folk.
SEQUELS
It was a pretty good year for sequels. I would be a paid-up member of the Murderbot fanclub if one existed (let me know if I’ve missed that memo), so Martha Wells’s System Collapse was a welcome end-of-year addition to …Read More
Looking Back on 2023 by Liz Bourke
If there’s a theme that unites the books I enjoyed reading most this year, it’s power, violence, and survival. The damage that violence inflicts on those who suffer it, and those who wield it, and the ambiguities and challenges inherent in the ethical uses of power.
Of course, some of them were also just plain fun.
Three books stand out most. One is …Read More
Ten for 2023 by Tim Pratt
I wasn’t on any award juries in 2023, so I’m even less of a completist than usual when it comes to SF and fantasy in 2023. (When reading purely for my own enjoyment I tend to mix a lot of crime, comics, romances, and old stuff I missed the first time around with my shiny new speculative fiction.) Looking over the list of new …Read More
2023 by Alex Brown
In an unintentional yet perfect synchronicity of events, I’m writing this 2023 speculative fiction wrap-up on the last day of the year with a glass of Martinelli’s while waiting for the ball to drop. It was a strange, contradictory year, one with several professional wins and several more personal hardships. Going through my reading log, I got through more books this year than I thought I …Read More
The Year in Review 2023 by A.C. Wise
It’s been an odd year for me, reading-wise. I served as a World Fantasy Award judge, which was a wonderful experience, but meant a large portion of my year was devoted to works originally published in 2022. As a result, I feel – even more than I normally do – like I missed out on tons of fantastic work published in 2023, …Read More
2023 in Review: Best. (Reading). Year. Ever.
I’ve remarked on the book-lag I experienced since the COVID lockdown, which saw my reading drop off a steep cliff. In 2023, I’ve felt more like my book-loving self, reading close to 90 books (compared to 60 last year). It helps that this has been an extraordinary year for fiction, the best I’ve experienced since penning reviews for Locus. I’m aware recency bias …Read More
