Monthly Round-Up

January 2025 Round-up and Short Fiction Miscellany

I’ve gotten started up with 2025 reading while scrambling to catch up on 2024, and it’s led to one of my biggest reading months. . . ever? Admittedly, a lot of the books were short, but I read a lot of things, including some tremendous work–2025 is shaping up to be an astounding year for novelettes. Let’s take a look!

Short Fiction

I’ve already posted a review of Clarkesworld and Giganotosaurus and dips into Mysterion, Metaphorosis, FIYAH, and Kaleidotrope. I’m also working through an ARC of The Map of Lost Places. I won’t talk about any of that here. Let’s take a look at the rest.

January Favorites

While I won’t dwell on the reviews I already posted, I’ll note that there are favorites in both linked reviews, and “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak is particularly exceptional.

  • Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh” (2025 novelette) by Marie Croke. Shockingly, I’ve already found a novelette that’s right up there with “Never Eaten Vegetables.” “Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh” beautifully layers the worldbuilding into a difficult story of a family and society trying to reckon with the site of their ancestral death rites being overrun by giant, deadly fauna. You could easily read it as a metaphor for colonialism or climate change, but there are no pat answers here, just a complex and heart-wrenching tale of four generations with very different responses to the incursion.
  • Chị Tấm is Tired of Being Dead” (2024 short story) by Natasha King. A fabulist tale that’s remarkably funny for how many gruesome deaths occur, subverting the traditional focus in favor of an eye toward sibling rivalry.
  • “My Biggest Fan” (2025 novelette) by Faith Merino. An atmospheric sci-fi horror that reads like a slow-moving disaster–even when you can see where it’s going, it’s impossible to look away. With plenty of tension and not a lot of answers, the story takes on almost a nightmarish quality. But it works.

Strong Contenders

  • The Beloved Sisters of the Sun-Bleached Hills” (2024 short story) by Shoshanna Groom. An epistolary tale featuring a pair of sisters living in separate lands, both trying to process their leaders’ unending pattern of wedding and subsequently executing tall, dark-haired women. This is not a story about logistics or ultimate answers, but rather about people’s capacity for maintaining faith in their leaders against all reason.
  • Bravado” (2025 short story) by Carrie Vaughn. An origin story for Graff, who appears in a few other of Vaughn’s tales, including one I’d read and loved a couple years back, “Time Marked and Mended.” This one is a fun read, but it relies on existing familiarity with the characters for its emotional impact. Don’t start here.
  • High Performer” (2024 short story) by Jason Pangilinan. A driven Filipina with an obsession for finding the right ways to label herself happens upon a being with seemingly no core identity at all, changing with the whims of its surroundings. Interesting thematic work and a very entertaining narrative voice.

Others I Enjoyed in January

  • Crook’s Landing, by Scaffold” (2018 short story) by G.V. Anderson. About remembering loved ones and holding onto family, even in the afterlife.
  • Do Houses Dream of Scraping the Sky” (2024 short story) by Jana Bianchi. Another grief story, this one about a house struggling to cope with the death of its inhabitant.
  • Six People to Revise You” (2025 short story) by J.R. Dawson. A story about preparing for a procedure to excise detrimental aspects of one’s personality that stretches the suspension of disbelief but makes up for it with a heartwarming–albeit fairly obvious–ending.
  • A Slightly Different Sunrise from Mercury, Nevada” (2024 short story) by Íde Hennessy. A small-scale story about a worker in a nuclear test site turned time travel tourist trap, with small rebellions and the shadow of a messy relationship in the background.
  • We Who Will Not Die” (2024 novelette) by Shingai Kagunda. A non-linear anti-colonial story that’s deserves plaudits for the storytelling style and the way the speculative element shapes the plot.
  • “Heartshock” (2024 novelette) by Nick Wolven. A story about trying to lay the foundation for peace after defeating a brutal people who will never truly surrender.
  • Dead Ringer” (2024 short story) by Ali Householder. A doppelgänger story with a lead forced to chose between being true to herself and being there for her family, with neither option feeling especially comfortable. I expect fans of this would love “Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self,” which uses a similar concept to great effect.
  • Waystations Lost” (2024 short story) by Andrew Kozma. A compelling vibes-over-plot story about inspecting waystations, many of whose operators have been lost in the face of a mysterious encroachment.
  • Flannelfeet” (2024 short story) by Ursula Whitcher. A portal fantasy with a nice blend of science and the strange.
  • The Wait” (2019 short story) by Andrea Chapela, translated by Emma Törzs. A tense, not especially plotty story that’s both about rampant disappearances in Mexico and empowering a surveillance state in the name of safety.
  • Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse” (2025 short story) by Max Franciscovich. An entertaining nonhuman narrative voice breathes life in a story about a reclusive miracle-worker who may have more past than they’d like to admit.
  • “A Year (Not Quite) Alone in an Alien Wilderness” (2024 short story) by Gigi Ganguly. A short piece complete with vibrant description of weird ecology alien world.
  • “Head in the Clouds” (2024 short story) by Gigi Ganguly. A story about aging and death with more than a few things to say about the exploitation of natural resources.
  • The Institute of Harmony” (2024 short story) by J.C. Snow. A magic school story about being trained in service of the empire that overwhelmed your homeland, complete with a significant romantic subplot.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

  • The Thief (2024 novel) by G.S. Jennsen. A fast-paced, accessible space opera without too much ambition but that offers an entertaining read.
  • Norylska Groans (2021 novel) by Michael R. Fletcher and Clayton W. Snyder. An extremely dark story set in an early industrial Siberian analogue, with strong character work and lots of memory magic.
  • ChloroPhilia (2025 novella) by Cristina Jurado, translated by Sue Burke. A short, post-apocalyptic tale featuring experimental, part-human hybrids, but one that never really clicked for me.
  • Grievers (2020 novel) by adrienne maree brown. A plot-light, meditative story about grief and survival in a strange pandemic.
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967 novel) by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. A stone-cold classic, but with slow pacing and not much plot that could make it hard to immerse. One fabulous subplot opened my eyes to some of the brilliance, though reading a half-century later in a different culture might’ve made some of the satire opaque.
  • The Naming Song (2024 novel) by Jedediah Berry. A dreamlike and beautiful post-apocalyptic novel with a train setting and lots about the power of language.
  • The Justice of King(2022 novel) by Richard Swan. An immersive and readable opening to an epic fantasy trilogy, with the investigation into a murder setting off the plot that’s bound to span the full series.
  • A Swift and Sudden Exit (2024 novel) by Nico Vincenty. A sapphic time travel romance that shows plenty of care to the romantic buildup and a little bit less to the time travel thriller aspect.

Others I Read in January

  • The Annual Migration of Clouds (2021 novella) by Premee Mohamed. A post-apocalyptic novella about choosing to leave a tight-knit community to pursue education in an elite enclave. Full review to come.
  • The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (2024 novel) by Shubnum Khan. An outstanding, lightly speculative period piece interlaced with a contemporary Gothic tale in a South African setting. Full review to come.
  • Metal From Heaven (2024 novel) by August Clarke. An extremely visceral (and extremely horny) story with some strong anti-capitalist themes but struggles with pacing and a few too many demands on the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Full review to come.
  • On the Calculation of Volume (2024 novel) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland. A slow-paced and meditative litfic Groundhog Day story. Full review to come.
  • Mechanize My Hands to War (2024 novel) by Erin K. Wagner. A character-driven exploration of near-future Appalachia, after automation has taken away many jobs and the jobless have risen in arms against androids. Full review to come.
  • We Speak Through the Mountain (2024 novella) by Premee Mohamed. The sequel to The Annual Migration of Clouds, with lots of commentary on insular communities hoarding wealth, and another storyline about leaving. Full review to come.

SPSFC

After four batches of cuts, my team announced our quarterfinalists.

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