While I still read a whole lot of new release sci-fi and fantasy in 2025, even a moderate scaling back enabled me to drastically increase my backlist reading compared to last year. And stories that are still getting recommended years after their publication date are disproportionately great. So I’d like to share some of my favorites.
So, in honor of the rating scale which exists mostly to trick my own brain, I am pleased to introduce Tar Vol’s 20 from the Backlist! Of the 37 genre novels, 11 novellas, 21 novelettes, and 98 short stories that came out prior to 2025, these were my favorites!
As with my new release Recommended Reading List, it won’t just be a list of titles, and I hope that my mini-reviews will help other readers determine whether my favorites may be theirs as well. My backlist reading still slants heavily towards the last decade, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few strong recommendations from before I was born. I have excluded any 2024 fiction that I read in January and February, as I updated my 2024 Recommended Reading List at the end of February. Which basically just means that You Will Be You Again won’t get a second entry. I have also excluded short fiction rereads, because I don’t track them on my spreadsheet.
Unlike my new release lists, this one is short enough that I won’t be separating by length category or alphabetizing the list. Instead, these are presented roughly in order of how much I liked them, with the caveats that (1) I loved them all, and (2) it’s very likely that rereads would precipitate moderate reshuffling. As always, links in the titles go to my full reviews (in the case of longer works) or online copies of the stories in question (where applicable).
1. Fourth Mansions (1969 novel) by R.A. Lafferty
An impossible book to encapsulate in just a few sentences, it’s a political conspiracy novel that’s also the tale of four supernatural monsters vying for the soul of humanity. An absolute riot of a read, full of casual impossibilities that feel straight out of tall tales, yet with themes for days and mystical symbolism that one could spend years analyzing.
2. 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (2008 short story) by Kij Johnson
Like Fourth Mansions, this is here both for the storytelling and the themes. It’s a weird, yet utterly immersive little bit of magical realism about a performance that defies explanation. But it’s also a story about a middle-aged woman going through personal upheaval, trying to find something concrete to hold onto at a time where it’s increasingly difficult to understand the world and her place in it.
3. Jeffty is Five (1977 novelette) by Harlan Ellison
A slow-building story spotlighting childhood nostalgia, told from the perspective of a lead whose childhood friend somehow never ages, this starts out as a compelling curiosity and grows into something more and more uncanny as the tale progresses. It’s unapologetic in its love for 1940s pop culture, but it’s also open-eyed about the costs of stagnation, delivering a story that draws the reader in early and builds to a gut-punch of a finish.
4. Bloodchild (1984 novelette) by Octavia E. Butler
Butler loves to explore imbalanced power dynamics in a visceral way that’s impossible to minimize, and “Bloodchild” is no exception. It introduces a fantastically weird race of parasitic aliens, powerful enough to keep humans as breeding stock but with a significant sect advocating for human rights. It’s written from the perspective of a young man destined to carry alien children, reckoning for the first time with the grotesque reality and how it fits in both the contexts of brotherly affection and inter-species love.
5. Station Eleven (2014 novel) by Emily St. John Mandel
Both a pandemic novel and a post-apocalyptic tale, this features no true central figure but delivers a remarkable number of compelling character portraits, all intertwined in a way that makes it feel like a single story and not a series of linked anecdotes.
6. 17776 (2017. . . multimedia? novella?) by Jon Bois
Ostensibly a football tale, this is a story about dealing with immortality written from the perspective of sentient space probes. Jon Bois’ unique humor style makes for a surreal and often laugh-out-loud read that’s a shockingly poignant piece about crafting meaning and finding stories even in the unlikeliest of places.
7. Remembery Day (2015 short story) by Sarah Pinsker
An aftermath of war story that plays with memory and trauma, told from the perspective of the daughter of a soldier on the only day in which her mother can remember her past. It’s a short but enthralling tale that digs into the effects of remembrance both on the individual and societal levels.
8. The Thing About Ghost Stories (2018 novelette) by Naomi Kritzer
This is a very Kritzer story that’s wonderfully executed, told from the perspective of an academic researching the common threads in the ghost stories of ordinary people. But the lead is all the while grieving the death of her own mother, and some of her interview subjects are convinced that she has her own familiar ghost. It’s a heartfelt tale with a beautiful layering of lore, grief, and family love.
9. Where You Left Me (2021 short story) by Thomas Ha
An ignorant terraformer story worthy of Adrian Tchaikovsky turned by Thomas Ha into a much more personal tale of addiction and the social roots that see it recreate itself generation after generation. Ultimately a poignant parenthood story, with a flawed father trying to do the best by his family even in circumstances where the available options are scant.
10. The Sign of the Dragon (2020 novel) by Mary Soon Lee
An epic novel in verse, telling the story of a reluctant king whose kindness and uncompromising morality make him a figure worthy of myth. It’s a beautiful tale that details the big and small moments, the happy and sad moments spread over the course of decades.
11. Exile’s End (2020 novelette) by Carolyn Ives Gilman
The story of a representative of a people thought lost approaching a museum and asking for the return of a cultural artifact that has become a beloved symbol crucial to the self-conception of the ascendent culture of the day. This is fascinating from start to finish and remarkable for the way it casts sympathetic characters on both sides of the dispute, without ever presenting the minority perspective in a way that’s entirely comprehensible to majority culture.
12. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (2024 novella) by Sofia Samatar
A beautiful and heavily symbolic tale of the way in which academia perpetuates oppression and injustice, featuring archetypical characters that nevertheless feel very much like real people trying to navigate an institution that has given them everything they have but constantly threatens to take it away.
13. Clay’s Ark (1984 novel) by Octavia E. Butler
Another story of trying to cling to tiny scraps of humanity while in the thrall of a powerful alien makes Butler the only author that appears twice on this list. It’s a bleak tale with rape and murder aplenty that’s deeply compelling for the way in which the leads struggle to maintain the smallest remnants of their moral commitments in a world where they cannot control even their own minds.
14. Tuyo (2020 novel) by Rachel Neumeier
Much less bleak and something of a breath of fresh air, Tuyo is the story of building relationships in spite of linguistic and cultural barriers, dealing with both power imbalances and the necessity of drastically different peoples coming together for the good of both, featuring an honor-driven society that uses its cultural forms not to impede progress but in good faith to push for the people’s good.
15. Charon’s Final Passenger (2024 novelette) by Ray Nayler
An alternate history story in a world with alien technology that allows a small number of adepts to plumb the minds of the dead, this delivers compelling interpersonal messiness against the backdrop of a large-scale conflict in which no side has their hands clean.
16. A Seder in Siberia (2024 short story) by Louis Evans
This interweaves the titular ritual with the slow peeling back of layers of family drama and family sins. It’s compelling on an interpersonal level and is only made better by the way the historical remembrance echoes and reinforces the sobering contemporary tale.
17. Now You See Me (2021 novelette) by Justin C. Key
The completely unexplained speculative element calls to mind an episode of The Twilight Zone in this sharp exploration of both the invisibility and hypervisibility of Black people in contemporary American society. The premise allows for a thematic exploration that’s immersive and claustrophobic but never preachy.
18. Suddenwall (2017 short story) by Sara Saab
Another aftermath of war story, featuring old soldiers exiled to a magical city that can strike out against them if they again engage in any of the horrific actions demanded of them during the war. This digs into the relationship between two such soldiers who had long since lost touch, while simultaneously exploring the psychological ramifications of a conflict in which even the most innocent are seen as an existential threat.
19. Such Thoughts Are Unproductive (2019 short story) by Rebecca Campbell
A gripping tale of resistance in a surveillance state in which even one’s own eyes cannot be trusted and the most well-meaning of people can be suborned as tools of oppression.
20. Ella Enchanted (1997 novel) by Gail Carson Levine
So many of my favorites have leaned darker, so let’s finish with a lighter piece. This is a middle-grade classic with a fantastically clever speculative premise and a lead with a remarkable depth of characterization given the younger audience and fairy-tale backdrop. This requires a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual for adult readers, but it’s a true gem that’s plenty of fun for all ages.