My Hugo Awards reading is in full swing–which mostly has meant short fiction rereads, as I’d already read most of the shortlist–I’ve been working through the SPSFC4 semifinalists, and I have a pile of ARCs to review for this summer. There’s been a lot of reading this month, and as always, I have something to recommend.

Short Fiction

May Favorites

As always, I won’t repeat my two previous short fiction reviews, but they both have some excellent stories, and “The Tin Man’s Ghost” in particular is exceptional. What else?

• Landline (2025 short story) by Kelly Robson. I am vocal about my struggles with the plot structure of horror, but I do occasionally enjoy pieces heavy on the tension and light on the blood and guts, and “Landline” delivers a quick hook with a mysterious disappearance and an atmosphere that truly never lets up. This one kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
• The Thing About Ghost Stories (2018 novelette) by Naomi Kritzer. This is Kritzer playing into a lot of her strengths, with a heartfelt, interpersonal story that feels remarkably down-to-earth. This particular one stars an academic studying ghost stories while grieving the death of her mother. The layering of the lore and the personal elements are tremendous.
• Highway 1, Past Hope (2025 short story) by Maria Haskins. At its heart, this is a revenge story, and those aren’t my favorite by and large, but it establishes the tension wonderfully and brings a pair of plots together in a way that’s powerful, even if it’s not surprising.

Strong Contenders

• Tool-Using Mimics (2018 short story) by Kij Johnson. A structurally daring piece that’s fascinating, even without a driving central narrative. It opens with the image of what appears to be a girl with tentacles for legs, then proposes several explanations for the origin of the picture. Even without much plot, it’s engrossing, with a surprisingly powerful closing line.

Others I Enjoyed in May

• Five Things You Can See (2025 short story) by Nadia Radovich. A fascinating premise and compelling start in this time travel story about fraught relationships and impending apocalypse, this is a good read but left me wanting a bit more at the end.
• Rock-a-bye in Godspace (2025 short story) by E J Delany. A murder investigation in a dangerous setting notorious for removing inhibitions. No big surprises, but a solid read.
• The Shape of Stones (2025 short story) by Hildur Knútsdóttir. An epistolary tale about research into the stones that were the site of ancient human sacrifice. Well told, but it’s not hard to see where it’s going.
• When the Fall is All That’s Left (2015 short story) by Arkady Martine. A solid friendship story with the added twist of one of the friends being a spaceship, though a little too short to build up the emotional heft that makes it stick with me long-term.
• Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters (2010 short story) by Alice Sola Kim. A wildly jumping story about a time travel experiment that finds the title character jumping time nearly every day (and every couple paragraphs of page time), with just enough of a thread running through it all to give it some cohesion.
• The Storyteller’s Wife (2005 short story) by Eugie Foster. A story about a marriage with one party suffering a terminal illness in which the interpersonal elements can sometimes take a backseat to the Fae elements of the story but come back in for a quality finish.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• Metal From Heaven (2024 novel) by August Clarke. An ambitious novel that lands some of its intersectional themes but doesn’t do enough to shape the various subplots into a cohesive story.
• The Annual Migration of Clouds and We Speak Through the Mountain (2021 and 2024 novellas) by Premee Mohamed. A pair of post-apocalyptic novels with some slice-of-life elements, a focus on leaving places–both good ones and bad ones–and a lot of commentary on hoarding wealth.
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (2024 novella) by Sofia Samatar. A theme-heavy, deeply symbolic novel about academia upholding oppressive systems, with remarkable characterization and tons of depth–the best novella I’ve read all year.
• The Incandescent (2025 novel) by Emily Tesh. A magic school novel from the perspective of the teacheres that has real comfort read potential–lots of fun, not too many big surprises.
• A Song of Legends Lost (2025 novel) by M.H. Ayinde. Okay, I posted this review in June, but I read it in May–it’s a compelling start to an epic fantasy trilogy in a setting that feels both pre-colonial and post-apocalyptic.

Others I Read in May

• Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024 novel) by John Wiswell. Hits a bunch of themes that Wiswell has handled with aplomb in short fiction, but they never quite cohere in the novel form. Full review to come.
• A Rebel’s History of Mars (2025 novel) by Nadia Afifi. An engaging two-timeline dystopian sci-fi about discovering suppressed history. Full review to come.
• Shroud (2025 novel) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A survival sci-fi/horror that turns into excellent first contact on a hostile world full of strange life. Full review to come.

DNFs

• The Unmapping (2025 novel) by Denise S. Robbins. A story about living through an impossible, speculative disaster in New York City with a chatty, staccato narrative voice that never smoothed out for me and characters that simply never drew me in. DNF at 39%.

SPSFC

My Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC4) judging team has released reviews and scores for the four semifinalists we were assigned to read in this round: Proliferation, On Impulse, Bisection, and Accidental Intelligence. The latter three were announced as finalists this week, being joined by three more from the other semifinal grouping in our list of six finalists:

• Bisection by Sheila Jenné
• Yours Celestially by Al Hess
• Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill
• Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin
• On Impulse by Heather Texle
• Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

My team will be reading the three new-to-us books over the next couple months, so keep an eye out for our personal reviews! Expect the team scores in late July and early August.

Bingo

The 2024 Bingo year finished at the end of March, but I just got around to posting my second card this month, complete with suggested squares for the 2025 version of the challenge.