After finishing up my reading for both the Hugos and SPSFC, I felt strangely on top of things, so I decided to dig into some backlist short fiction. As it turns out, short stories that people are still recommending five (or more) years after their initial publication are disproportionately excellent. I’ve got quite a list of fantastic recommendations, many of which may be familiar to experienced genre readers. I also read a novel I quite enjoyed, wrote up Hugo ballots, and finished reviewing the SPSFC finalists. Let’s take a look:

Short Fiction

As always, I won’t repeat my Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus review or my Magazine Minis post. They both include a story I liked quite a bit. Nor will I repeat my review of Thomas Ha’s debut collection Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, but I found it to be absolutely tremendous. Check it out!

July Favorites

• Remembery Day (2015 short story) by Sarah Pinsker. A very short but absolutely enthralling piece about the aftermath of war and the complicated effects of remembrance on an individual and on a society.
• 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (2008 short story) by Kij Johnson. One of the most common 2000s recommendations I see (outside of Ted Chiang at least), this is a weird little magical realism piece that’s simultaneously a compelling dive into the mind of a middle-aged lead whose life has been upended and is just trying to make sense of the world and her place in it. I hope this is still getting recommended in twenty more years. It is stunning.
• Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves (2017 short story) by Claire Humphrey. I’ve had this on my TBR since reading Humphrey’s excellent “The State Street Robot Factory,” but I’d shied away because the title sounded a bit horrifying. Turns out, it’s a Beneath Ceaseless Skies piece, and the title refers to ordinary things in the life of a memory wizard. And yet, the story is a bit horrifying, just in an interpersonal way instead of sheer grotesquery.
• Alive, Alive Oh (2013 short story) by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. A wistful and heartwrenching tale of a mother on what was meant to be a short-term mission outside the solar system as she comes to grips with the news that the promised return home is never coming.
• Second Person, Present Tense (2005 novelette) by Daryl Gregory. A story about the weight of social expectations and the pressure to be someone you are not, told from the perspective of the person wearing the body of a teenager lost from overdose. A compelling story that humanizes even the ones creating that pressure.
• Such Thoughts Are Unproductive (2019 short story) by Rebecca Campbell. A disorienting tale of resistance in a surveillance state with sufficiently advanced technology such that one can no longer trust the observations of their senses. Tense and unsettling.

Others I Enjoyed in July

• My Gallery Granddaughter (2025 short story) by Gretchen Tessmer. A heartwarming story of sentient paintings trying to take care of each other when the curator threatens to move one of them into storage. It isn’t especially hard to see where this one is going, but it’s fun getting there.
• Haunting Beauty (2025 short story) by T.K. Rex. An almost slice-of-life ghost story, featuring both the struggles of life and its favorite memories.
• Harrison Bergeron (1961 short story) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Probably hits harder for people who read this in school (or when it came out). It’s a well-written satire that’s often hilarious, but the over-the-top lampooning of total equality in society has been so thoroughly incorporated in the discourse that the ideas don’t really hit the way they likely would’ve at publication time.
• KAOSU, The Last Moving Country in the World (2023 short story) by Angela Liu. Liu is an excellent writer who keeps up the atmosphere of mystery and danger in this journey within a strange land with closely guarded secrets, but some character motivations are kept sufficiently shadowed to somewhat tamp down the emotional impact.
• Presque Vue (2021 short story) by Tochi Onyebuchi. A short piece about various stripes of family and a woman’s mysterious inner voice guiding her through life.
• Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (2025 novelette) by Martha Wells. This is tie-in that’s only worth reading for Murderbot fans. It stars ART’s crew on a dangerous mission, but the mission itself gets increasingly pushed to the margins in favor of ART processing that first meeting with Murderbot. For people who know and love the characters, it will put a smile on your face. For others? Come back after you’ve read Artificial Condition at minimum.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• What Feasts at Night (2024 novella) by T. Kingfisher. A horror novella and sequel to What Moves the Dead, featuring the same cast but a new story. Does what it says on the tin, but doesn’t deliver much atmosphere.
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020 novel) by V.E. Schwab. A two-timeline Faustian bargain story has one plot thread that’s predictable but well-executed and another that’s ambitious but sometimes tests suspension of disbelief.
• The Memory Hunters (2025 novel) by Mia Tsai. A tense series-opener about uncovering lies at the root of society, with a sapphic subplot and a lot to say about ownership of cultural artifacts.

Other July Reads

• Calypso (2024 poetry) by Oliver K. Langmead. A borderline novel/novella in verse, with a few gorgeous passages but more that make it difficult for the reader to grasp exactly what’s happening. Can strain credulity at times and doesn’t tie up the plot threads in an especially satisfying way. I’m pretty new to poetry and won’t be writing a full review here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
• Gardens of the Moon (1999 novel) by Steven Erikson. The opener to a famously sprawling epic fantasy series, it frontloads too many perspective characters but comes together for a satisfying convergence. Full review to come.
• The Phoenix Pencil Company (2025 novel) by Allison King. An intergenerational story about family, connection, memory, and preservation. Full review to come.

SPSFC

My team posted full scores and reviews for the last three finalists we had to evaluate: Saint Elspeth, Whiskey and Warfare, and Yours Celestially. As a team, our top score went to Saint Elspeth, which also received the top score from Space Girls and was rated in the top half of the finals by every single judging team. This was enough to take the overall title. Congratulations to author Wick Welker for winning SPSFC4!

Hugos

The Hugo Awards winners have not yet been announced, but I read and ranked the finalists for Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story. This is my fifth year reading those four categories, and this year featured a couple of my favorite shortlists and a couple of my least favorite, but there was at least one thing in each category that I’d strongly recommend.