This review is based on an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the editor in exchange for an honest review. Think Weirder was released on October 30, 2025.
I have to admit, I was won over by the cover of Think Weirder: The Year’s Best Science Fiction Ideas, edited by Joe Stech. Not because of the futuristic metropolis depicted in the art, but because of the names. Isabel J. Kim. Thomas Ha. Ray Nayler. Had I already read the biggest stories those authors published in 2024? Irrelevant. I’m in.
Think Weirder includes sixteen sci-fi stories published in 2024, hand-selected by an editor who gravitates toward the high-concept but whose self-admitted biggest guiding principle was finding stories that make you go “you’ve gotta see this!” The anthology is made up primarily of stories originally published in Clarkesworld, with a couple entries each from Asimov’s, Analog, and Reactor. I read Clarkesworld each month, and I regularly check in on both Asimov’s and Reactor, so the two Analog stories were the only ones that were new to me, but I gave everything a reread before writing the full anthology review.
The first thing I want from an anthology is a whole bunch of really good stories, and on that score, Think Weirder passes with flying colors. Six of the sixteen entries appeared on my own 2024 Recommended Reading List, and a seventh would’ve been there had I read it in time. If you’ve never tried reading through someone’s annual favorites list and seeing how many would make your own list, you may not understand that seven out of sixteen is extremely impressive overlap. I read a lot of short fiction reviews and favorites lists, and I invariably disagree with the editor on at least two-thirds of the selections. But if you flip to a page of Think Weirder at random, you’ve got a pretty good chance of landing on a real banger.
For me, it all starts with Thomas Ha’s The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video and Isabel J. Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole. Perhaps they’re not especially difficult choices, given that both garnered some well-deserved award nominations, but. . . well, award nominations don’t guarantee quality, and if you’re looking for stories where you immediately finish and then pester your book club friends to read them so you can sort through all the layers? It’s going to be very difficult to find two that better fit the bill. These are exceptional works.
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole?” is a bit of a thematic outlier, but “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” is one of several in the anthology dealing to some extent with familial relationships and the societal push toward perfection. The latter theme comes out perhaps most clearly in Grant Collier’s novelette The Best Version of Yourself, which features a mother and daughter set at odds in a world where the technology exists to make people deliriously happy forever, but at the cost of any sort of individuality. It reads a bit like a thought experiment one might see in a philosophy lecture on utilitarianism—with a few diversions into the difficulties of living with ADHD—only turned into a narrative that makes for a shockingly engaging read and certainly fits the bill in an anthology about conceptual sci-fi.
Questions about sacrificing individuality for greater goods also come up in David Goodman’s Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling, though there the conceptual debate serves mostly as background motivations in a story about sabotage in a tight-knit, asteroid-based community. Still, even if the big ideas are in the background, they are thought-provoking, and the main plot is thoroughly gripping—an excellent example of the hard sci-fi problem-solving sort of story that Analog favors and I usually don’t. I was too familiar with most of the stories in the anthology to have many pleasant surprises, but I found one here.
The drive for perfection comes through in several other places, taking center stage in particular in Eric Schwitzgebel’s How to Remember Perfectly, which includes both a happy-button akin to the sort offered in “The Best Version of Yourself” and a dive into memory editing with an eye toward optimizing perception of the past that feels very much in conversation with “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video.” Schwitzgebel leans into the uncertainty and emotional ambiguity of not knowing whether or not your memory is real, whereas Ha explores the theme from the perspective of a character trying to hold onto the imperfections of experience in a society dead-set on editing both perceptions and recordings. In many ways, they’re two sides of the same coin, ominous for different reasons, though the Ha novelette delivers an uncanny atmosphere that dovetails wonderfully with the theme and makes it truly one of my favorite stories of the year.
These themes of memory, memorialization, and family seen in the Ha and Schwitzgebel entries come up over and over through the course of the anthology. Sameem Siddiqui’s Driver and H.H. Pak’s Twenty-Four Hours take somewhat different approaches that nevertheless both deliver memorable character interactions and strong emotional cores while never once downplaying the big, conceptual elements. Both were on my list of favorites at the end of 2024, and both stand up wonderfully on reread.
Rich Larson’s Breathing Constellations is an ecological tale featuring humanity negotiating with an orca pod over plankton farming rights, but once again, it’s the lead’s struggles to process the loss of a mother that drives much of the narrative. Chris Willrich’s Nine Billion Turing Tests starts in a similar place, introducing a protagonist struggling to process the loss of a spouse before folding in several layers of automation. The novelette explores the various ways—both positive and perverse—that people employ humanoid AIs, but the major conflict turns on whether one particular AI can aid the lead in a time of grief.
Eleanna Castroianni’s The Lark Ascending and Ray Nayler’s A Gray Magic continue handling similar themes, but like “Nine Billion Turing Tests,” both add artificial intelligence to the mix. The former features an AI trying to preserve the teaching of a beloved father after his death, whereas the latter spotlights a dying lead whose relationship with her mother is decidedly frosty. Here, rather than trying to preserve parental wisdom and values, the lead’s artificial interlocutor is tasked with helping her to see joy and beauty in a world that had previously not shown her much of either. Again, they’re an excellent pair of stories that were both among my favorites of the year.
If there’s a second major theme here beyond memory and perception, it’s AI, with the dominant portrayals being complicated. There are no straightforwardly evil AIs out to overthrow humanity, but neither is it an anthology stuffed with large language models out to fix your life. “The Lark Ascending” and “A Gray Magic” probably feature two of the most positive depictions, along with Resa Nelson’s take on the classic adversarial-AI-but-for-your-own-good in LuvHome™.
Beyond that, the depictions stay remarkably grounded and fairly ambiguous. The lead has a deep skepticism toward the police AI her colleagues insist can do anything in Greg Egan’s sci-fi mystery novella Death and the Gorgon, a story that only gets better upon reread. Caroline M. Yoachim’s Our Chatbots Said “I Love You,” Shall We Meet? sketches a world where many social media interactions are carried out by bot representations of real people, presented in a way that feels plausible but doesn’t come with a moral judgment baked-in. There are some aspects that seem distressing, but perhaps others could be good? It’s a story that prompts reflection but doesn’t come with confident answers.
Automation slides more into the background of Chi Hui’s Stars Don’t Dream, translated by John Chu, set in a world where most humans live in virtual reality kept running by bots and a handful of people still spending their lives in the physical world. This is the only piece in the anthology that never really grabbed me, as it’s a slow build that focuses less on the interpersonal and more on the nuts and bolts of engineering a major project with eyes on the extremely far future. The final piece, Money, Wealth, and Soil, also leaves the automation in the background, with the primary conflict coming in the lead’s investigation into a group that appears to have found a way to fool the algorithm that rewards environmentally friendly development. The vision of a future that could reward good stewardship of the land is the eye-catching concept in a story that otherwise provides a lightweight bit of catharsis to close the anthology.
On the whole, it’s a really excellent group of stories. Of course I have others that I’d have preferred to see, but I had a good time with all but one of the sixteen selections and a great time with nearly half of them. It’s hard to ask for much more than that.
On the organizational side, I’m not sure that conceptual sci-fi feels like a unifying theme so much as it does a best approximation to capture the feel of the majority of the stories. In some cases, the concepts are front-and-center, whereas in others, they fade almost entirely into the background. Themes of remembrance and artificial intelligence are so dominant that it almost feels strange when there’s a story that doesn’t touch on one of the two—this may be my personal bias talking, but if the editor had wanted a more unified theme, Think Weirder is about halfway to being an absolutely tremendous anthology of stories about memory and perception. R.P. Sand’s “Eternity is Moments” would pair wonderfully with “Twenty-Four Hours” and Katherine Ewell’s “Afflictions of the New Age” and Natasha King’s “The Aquarium for Lost Souls” introduce a perceptual unreliability that would fit right in with “How to Remember Perfectly” and “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video.” And there are plenty of others.
Is the lack of thematic unity a complaint, or just an observation? I’m not entirely sure. If it is a complaint, it’s a small one. That said, I was a bit disappointed by the anthology’s reliance on Clarkesworld. Don’t get me wrong, I get it—Clarkesworld is my favorite sci-fi magazine by a fair margin right now. But that doesn’t mean they have the market cornered on conceptual sci-fi. Anthologies provide the perfect opportunity to share works from a wide variety of original sources, and it’s a bit disappointing to see one styling itself as a Year’s Best while featuring stories from only four publications. We’re all limited by our own reading time, and my own favorites list will invariably be one-third Clarkesworld (on account of my reading being one-third Clarkesworld), but nevertheless, the narrow sampling feels like a missed opportunity here.
No one is ever going to publish a Year’s Best anthology without having a bunch of genre readers complain that their favorites were left out. So while there are some stories I’m disappointed not to see, that doesn’t mean Think Weirder isn’t an excellent read. Its biggest flaw is a narrow set of sources, but it’s hard to argue too much with the stories selected. It’s an excellent batch of sci-fi that absolutely makes for a five-star reading experience.
Recommended if you like: sci-fi short fiction.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Five Short Stories and is also Published in 2025.
Overall rating: 17 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.