psocoptera

Hi! This is a big post of what I've read and am reccing so far, combining stories that I read during the year and liked, stories I picked up from other people's rec lists/eligibility posts/etc, and stories I read from the Locus list. I have not yet read everything on the Locus list, nor have I gone through the TOCs of all my favorite magazines looking for stuff, so hopefully I'll have a few more posts. But I wanted to post these to get started. These are vaguely alphabetical by magazine, and I've divided out stuff that's on the Locus list and stuff that wasn't, so that people who have already gone through the Locus list can easily find the other ones. A few standouts or likely nominees in bold.

Short stories on the Locus list:

Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. I think this is my personal frontrunner; this is really good.

Missing Helen, Tia Tashiro, Clarkesworld. Divorce and clones.

The Year the Sheep God Shattered, Marissa Lingen, Diabolical Plots. A small fantasy about art and magic and growing up.

35/F/Lane's Creek, Oklahoma, Hans Ege Wegner, Escape Pod. Remote work and connection.

Toothpaste Feelings, Sharang Biswas, khōréō. Symbiont, adjustment.

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, B Pladek, Lightspeed. AI in the classroom. Sadly probably prescient.

Courtney Lovecraft's Book of the Dead, Sam J. Miller, Nightmare. A drag queen medium does a podcast.

Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush, Ruth Joffre, PodCastle. Extinction, birder grief.

Pandora's Formula, Hannah Yang, Strange Horizons. I don't think the world would last a day in this scenario but I thought the story was good.

Short stories not on the Locus list:

Autonomy, Meg Elison, Clarkesworld. Self-driving cars.

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt, Clarkesworld. Disability, community.

Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg, Diabolical Plots. The superhero union building isn't ADA compliant.

The Repairers of Reality, Shaenon K. Garrity, Drabblecast. Art and humanity and meaning.

Question 3, Cliff Jerrison. Democracy!

All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys, Reactor. Fungal symbiosis and human connection.

Murder in the Clavist Autonomous Zone, Rich Larson, Strange Horizons. This is about a small intentional community inside a techno-dystopia we only see secondhand; some nice worldbuilding and character work in a small space.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills, Uncanny. This one has a lot of buzz and I would have said was the frontrunner except for its surprising omission from the Locus list.

Novelettes on the Locus list:

A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Wilrich, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. NOVELETTE. Like fantasy Godel Escher Bach.

The Twenty-One Second God, Peter Watts, Lightspeed. NOVELETTE. Hive minds.

Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Reactor. NOVELETTE. This one is weird and I have mixed feelings but it's interesting to see what Rosenbaum is up to.

After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens, Rachel Swirsky, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Vignettes from various different perspectives.

Phantom View, John Wiswell, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Illness and care and ghosts.

Novelettes not on the Locus list:

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Sort of a Cyteen riff.

Stranger Things Season Four. Whoops, I've had this tab open for awhile, as I discovered when I went to post something else. The needle continues to swing between entertaining and annoying, and this season the balance may have tipped; too many plot threads I wasn't into. Kind of think they should have ended it last season. Although I like it more now that I've started reading it as itself an RPG - thinking about which characters are PCs vs NPCs, and thinking about the narrative from a standpoint of player engagement/satisfaction rather than single-author storytelling, makes so many choices make more sense. We'll probably still watch the last season eventually at some point?

Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Malinda Lo, 2021 YA historical. This one's been on my list since 2021 and I'm not sure what made me decide that now was the time. (Looking for some f/f to balance my m/m media consumption watching the gay hockey show, maybe.) Really well done - you can see why the cover is covered in awards - but also kind of wild to read at this moment in history when our fascist government is so desperate to take us back to this time of police raids on gay bars, criminalization of cross-dressing, and taking people's papers and threatening them with denaturalization and deportation. But I guess it's hopeful to think that Lily and Kath of the book are going to make it to Pride parades in their 30s and the 2004 San Francisco marriage licenses in their 60s, and maybe it won't even take us quite so long to work our way back this time. Anyways, Lo does an amazing job bringing a time and place to life, so much great detail here, highly recommended.

Realized the other day that rather than sitting around waiting for my intrepid graphic-novel-reading friend to tell me what 2025 graphic novels I should be reading, I could seek some out myself. Unfortunately I did not love either of these for Hugo purposes, and neither had the kind of breakout awesome that might be able to compete with inevitable frontrunners Prestige DC Cape Project, Adaptation of Classic Novel, and Latest Kieron Gillen, but it's still interesting to me to see a little bit of what's up in the adult SF graphic novel space.

Second Shift, Kit Anderson, 2025 graphic from Avery Hill, is about workers on a distant planet and the corporate AI that provides them with perception overlays and entertainments. I have to admit I do not love "but what is really real" plots even while I concede that this is an increasingly relevant theme in the age of bespoke AI slop. Also this book is oblique to the point of not really landing for me. I know from my own writing experience that sometimes I am thinking "surely I don't need to spell this out, that would be boring", but it's always more obvious inside your own head when you already know what you're trying to say, and I feel like this story could have used a little less trailing off and a little more actually saying things.

In the Land of Simplicity: A Novel, Mattie Lubchansky, 2025 graphic from Pantheon Books, is a near-future story about an anthropologist visiting a backwoods commune in post-United-States New York. An interesting contrast to Second Shift in that there is also some "what is real" stuff happening but it turns out to be clearer cut and more explained, and also a contrast in positing a possibility of resistance and escape from the corporation that Second Shift doesn't. And it was interesting to see how they both used the idea of the museum in different ways. Unfortunately, while it was at least clear in this book *what* was happening, I didn't really buy into it in a "this is a satisfying narrative" way. I hate to not love a queer book! I do like the way Lubchansky writes/draws about transness and bodies! And no blame to Lubchansky for not wanting to write a tragedy! But the improbability of the end, especially the bigger story we're asked to believe took place off the page, kind of undermined for me the personal character story the book is mostly about. But, I don't know. I guess it's a tonal fit. Maybe I'm too picky. Enh.

Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings, 2025 Australian Gothic novel. (I might have thought novella but I found an interview where she said it was a novel.) I was not super into this - at first I was like "what even is happening" and then as it became a little clearer I was like "but *why* is any of this happening". The most interesting bit was a minor character whose story I wished we were in instead. I would like to see all those birds, though.

Starstrike, Yoon Ha Lee, 2025 ya sf, second in a trilogy that started with Moonstorm. I liked Moonstorm a lot but unfortunately this one didn't work for me. Interesting things are still going on but the writing felt scattered and muddled and I rarely had any sense of anticipation or direction. I may still check out the eventual third book - I would still like to see how things turn out for the characters, and it seems quite possible that Lee will re-find his groove or the structure of the third book will flow better or whatever the problem was - but as of this one I can't really recommend the series. :(

A nice big finish for Disepiphany: yesterday I tested every pen in our annoying corner cabinet and pen and pencil rack and found a whole bag's worth of dried-up pens and broken-in-half pencils and such to get rid of (does Staples still have pen and marker recycling? we'll see) and then reorganized everything. We still have a ridiculous amount of everything - every year the kids have new marker and pen and pencil sets on their school supply lists, and then they come home in June with half of it barely touched - but fingers crossed that I can now get the things I actually use in and out of the cabinet without a bunch of other things diving out with them.

And then also, awhile ago J (big J) gave me a very exciting gift of exotic sausages (like some from game meat), not knowing that I have a pretty serious phobia of prion disease and don't eat game meat any more. I wrestled with it for awhile but finally acknowledged that even if I could make myself eat the sausages I couldn't make myself enjoy them, and while I felt bad Rejecting A Gift and Wasting Food, those are exactly the kind of rules you get to break in the Disadvent season. (I don't even believe the first one is a good rule but it was in my family growing up - like, oh, you hate that new clothing item? you'll be wearing it anyways - which I suppose was only supposed to apply when I was a kid, but my guilt did not get the message.) J, who is awesome, and kind about my anxiety, did not give me shit about it and is pleased to get the freezer space back.

And tomorrow I get the rest of the ornaments off the tree and the tree goes out to the yard to hang out until townwide tree collection. Happy Disepiphany!

Digital disepiphany: I got my inbox down to a new low (for the past ~7 years).

Surprising nobody I did not read Alecto the Ninth from last year's anticipated list, nor All Hail Chaos, nor Queen Demon yet, although that one did come out. Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, The Incandescent, and The River Has Roots were all good though.

This year I'm looking forward to Vernon's Daggerbound, a sequel to Swordheart; Moniquill Blackgoose's To Ride a Rising Storm, the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath; Platform Decay, Martha Wells' new Murderbot novel, and Radiant Star, Ann Leckie's new Radch novel. (And then from my tier 2 books I will also mention 2025 books Caskey Russell's The Door on the Sea, Rebecca Campbell's The Other Shore collection, and 2026 books Suzanne Palmer's Ode to the Half-Broken, Isabel J. Kim's novel-expansion Sublimation, and Shannon Chakraborty's second Amina El-Sirafi book The Tapestry of Fate.)

As generally happens the disadvent season petered out or was overtaken by the holiday season, the arrival of my parents, etc. I did finally get J to try on some old clothes of mine, many of which she thought she would keep, which doesn't get them out of my house but did get them out of my closet. Maybe we'll even manage another batch for disepiphany!