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The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow, 2025 fantasy novel. Certainly *felt* everlasting. Great concept, about national mythos and its uses, but I just didn't find it that enjoyable or fun to read. I mean, not terrible - Harrow did a good job of inventing a world that is not Britain and a legend that is not the Matter of Britain while also being about those things, and it is interesting to see when someone manages to come up with something new to do with all that - but it might have had more punch as a novella instead of drawing it out.

The Other Shore, Rebecca Campbell, 2025 collection. Is this something I'm supposed to be reading for the Hugos? No. Is it an ebook I've been in the queue for for months that has now inconveniently come available right at Packet Time? Also no. However, it is a paperback I've had checked out for Way Too Long, so, finally finishing it is something, at least.

Ten stories here, eight previous published, of which I am sure I had read two and it's possible I read a third. Definitely recommended if you like her work.

"The High Lonesome Frontier" - Tor.com, 2016. (This is the one I might have read.) A song, the folk process, and how even in the information age something like a song is both transient and specific to time and performance and people. (Campbell is very good at specificity, concreteness of detail.)

"A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World" - This one is a mix of "men taking academic credit for women's ideas in the background" and "what if the revival of ancient ritual magic worked" - it's set in 1976 and if someone had told me that Le Guin wrote it in 1976 I would have believed it. (Well maybe the 80s for Le Guin specifically.)

"Lares Familiares 1981" - Liminal Stories, 2017. I liked this one - a logging family and a fae.

"On Highway 18" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2017. Also good - about friends growing apart, and urban legends, and the difficulty of knowing what actually happened, what kind of predator or pattern got someone.

"The Other Shore" - Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirits of Place, 2016. I liked this one a lot. An archaeological dig that starts turning up wildly mixed-up artifacts.

"Thank You for Your Patience" - Reckoning Magazine, 2020. I recommended this in my 2020 short science fiction reading and considered nominating it in 2021 but did not; I had her novelette "An Important Failure" on my novelette nominees and might have wanted to diversify authors a little, or might have just decided I liked other stories better. Anyways, a great story about the inhumanity of call centers and worker exploitation in general.

"The Bletted Woman" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2021. I thought I had recently read a review of a book along a similar line - maybe added it to my to-read list? But I can't find it now. Anyways, a woman with terminal illness decides to join an experiment attempting to make translators between the natural world and the human world. A good zombie story.

"Such Thoughts are Unproductive" - Clarkesworld, 2019. I did nominate this in 2020; it's the story that made me a Campbell fan in the first place. The total-surveillance, totalitarian state. Only more chilling now that we're so much further into the AI era.

"Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea" - Another story about trying to bridge human and nature, this time as performance art. Campbell has such profound grief for what's being lost to the climate collapse, the Pacific Northwest ecosystems specifically because that's where she is (and that's where many of these stories are set). I really appreciate her as a voice for that. Interesting stuff about sacrifice and suffering for art and whether that's a good choice.

"Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita" - Shimmer Magazine, 2018. This one didn't really work for me.

Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman, 2026 novel. I did not think much of the other of Fellman's books I've read, the 2022 novella The Two Doctors Gorski, but I'd seen this one recommended highly by people whose opinions I respect, so figured it was worth a try. And I'm glad I did: I didn't completely love it, but I definitely liked it more than Two Doctors. It is a very slow book and low on plot; mostly a lot of very detailed character study. Closest comparison maybe something like Malafrena, a nineteenth-century Romantic novel being written in the modern day, in this case set in the medium-far future and principally concerned with (what seemed to me like) a very now-specific experience of transness, and secondarily alcoholism and/or being an artist.

Me being me I was most interested in the speculative elements, and since my ebook expires at midnight let me put a bunch of quotes behind the cut and talk a little about some worldbuilding choices.

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Short stories:

Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld.

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, B Pladek, Lightspeed.

The Repairers of Reality, Shaenon K. Garrity, Drabblecast.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills, Uncanny.

Six People to Revise You, J.R. Dawson, Uncanny.

Novelettes:

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed, Reactor.

Phantom View, John Wiswell, Reactor.

The Twenty-One Second God, Peter Watts, Lightspeed.

Barnacle, Kate Elliott, Reactor.

Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei, 2025 science fiction novel. Two sisters in a post-collapse near future sail in search of the third. By description this sounded like something I would be into but I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been reading it for a book club; I just never wanted to know that much what was going to happen next. There was one cool vivid scene on the boat with unexpected music and an aurora and phosphorescent whales, I liked that. And I guess I'm interested in different takes on this kind of world and this was one.

A Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.

Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.

Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.

And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)

ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.

A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/

I still hope for another round of Annual Take Advantage Of My Best Friend's Comic Purchasing Day, but in my first pass at sitting in her living room and reading her books, I enjoyed:

The Other Jay & Eve, Emma Jayne, 2025 graphic. What if you and your roommate got duplicated for money and then you met up with your duplicates and then you found out they were *engaged*. An obviously instantly compelling premise with good execution, although I initially felt like it didn't reach a satisfying conclusion, but on further reflection I think it worked, and definitely worthwhile overall.

Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith, 2025 graphic. A murder mystery at a convention for mythological creatures, which one newbie hotel worker has been left by her coworkers to staff. Fun premise and a bunch of the joke made me laugh.

Testament, J. Marshall Smith, 2025 graphic. A nun and a caretaker robot, the last survivors of a one-way mission of planetary exploration, contemplate their situation. This is exactly the sort of thing I like - space nuns, quiet sad thinky stuff about how space exploration might really work and who would do it and what it would be like, beautifully illustrated alien biology. Recommended to fans of To Be Taught If Fortunate, Scavengers Reign, and maybe anyone who remembers whatever that Robert L. Forward novel with the one-way mission was.

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 here. 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.

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. :(