Here’s to a happy reading in 2025! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. This was the third year running of record-breaking numbers of viewers and views in the 13-year history of my site. What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2024? Let me know in the comments.

Clifford D. Simak defined my 2024. Starting with a February review of his collection Worlds Without End (1964), I embarked on a fiction and non-fiction reading extravaganza that culminated in my article for Journey Planet, which I spent most of the summer writing, titled “‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’”’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” Despite his Grand Master status, there’s little scholarship on Simak’s work and so much more to be done. As expected, there was little response to the article outside of my website. I also wrote two Exploration Logs on six of his interviews and his 1971 Worldcon speech and contributed to a podcast on “The Huddling Place” (1944) (the second City story). Sometimes you find a little niche that you never expected to inhabit which you feel there’s so much more to explore and say. I hope my Simak focus continues into 2025.

Continuing a trend from years past due to job stress (which exponentially ramped up in the fall), I completed only a handful of novels in 2024. It’s simply easier for me to read short fiction and write in an in-depth manner about them. As a religious notetaker, the time commitment to reviewing a novel is massive. I will attempt to change that a bit this year.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels and short stories I read in 2024 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

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My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2024 

1. Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s And Still the Earth, (1981, trans. Ellen Watson, 1985), 5/5 (Masterpiece). Unfortunately, I’ve yet to review this one!

A brutal dystopia written during an era of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), And Still the Earth charts the strange movements of a man who wakes up with a painless hole in his hand. This is a Brazil intent on erasing the past. A Brazil that holds onto fragments of knowledge via a complex system of oral signifiers. A Brazil hurtling towards ecological, political, and social destruction. Not to be missed if you’re of the predisposition to enjoy a dense, intense, and surreal shuffle towards apocalypse.

2. John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

Brunner transposes the moves of a 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900) and Mikhail Chigorin (1850-1905) onto a near future landscape of political intrigue. Inspired by Brazil’s planned capital Brasília (founded in 1960), the action takes place in Ciudad de Vados, the capital city of the imaginary Latin American nation of Aguazul. The Englishman Boyd Daniel Hakluyt arrives Ciudad de Vados under the impression that his skills as a traffic analyst will quickly solve a routine design flaw in the brand new metropolis. He finds himself caught up in complex conspiracy with unknown players.

3. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

Alas, Babylon narrows in on the experiences of a diverse range of characters (White, Hispanic, and Black) in Fort Repose, an imaginary town in Northern Florida, after a nuclear attack that devastates all surrounding regions. Government calls for Civil Defense are not taken seriously. How will the community survive isolated from the rest of the nation? Who will emerge from the wreckage and guide the fractured community forward? What are the new values in the wasteland? Can they survive the effects of surrounding fallout?

4. Pat Murphy’s Shadow Hunter (1982), 3.75/5 (Good): Full review.

Pat Murphy’s first novel is an achingly beautiful tale of displacement. In the distant past, a young Neanderthal boy embarks on a hunt to claim his name and to learn the nature of the world. In the near future, a mogul named Roy Morgan wants to create a Pleistocene oasis (The Project) ensconced in a valley in an increasingly urban world. And Amanda, aiming to capture the bear, pulls the Neanderthal child, named Sam by his captors, into the subterranean bowels of The Project. He must learn the nature of the shadows that inhabit his new world: his own loneliness, the damaged souls that inhabit the streets and perpetuate Roy Morgan’s schemes, the men and women lost in the shadows of their parents, the fragments of his old world that still inhabit his new world, and the pattern that seems to tie everyone together across the eons.

5. Michael Swanwick’s In the Drift (1985), 3.25/5 (Above Average): Full review.

A fix-up novel comprised of two Nebula-nominated short works–“Mummer Kiss” (1981) and “Marrow Death” (1984), In the Drift maps a new way forward in an ecologically and genetically ravaged post-apocalyptic age. The entire concoction decays with a sense of grim unease and cavorts around piles of dead that would make a triumvir from the Late Roman Republic proud. The majority of the novel transpires within an alternate history version of Philadelphia and its surrounding environs. The jonbar point? If the Three Mile Island partial meltdown (1979) hadn’t been contained. In the power vacuum created by the disaster, the Mummers take over and run a mafia-style government based on extortion and public mutant hunts (two-headed children, etc.). It’s a violent, erotic, and disquieting experience that can’t entirely hide its flaws behind the decadent panache.

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My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2024 (click titles for my full review)

1. Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” (1973), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Bishop’s magisterial Urban Nucleus sequence (1970-1979) charts the future history of an entombed/reborn Atlanta, Georgia from a diverse array of viewpoints–geriatric polyamorous couples, African American teenagers, etc. “The Windows in Dante’s Hell,” the second-published short story in the sequence, poignantly renders an old woman’s life-long attempt to survive within the dark subterranean reaches of an urban dystopia that alternatively serves as a metacommentary on the power of science fiction stories.

2. Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s “Vintage Season” (1946), 5/5 (Masterpiece) reads as a fascinating glimpse into the immediate post-WWII America, and the underlying fear of cataclysmic conflict to come. Oliver Wilson rents rooms in his house to a group of strange foreigners–Omerie, Kleph, and Klia–who seem to embody perfection. However, their strange behavior, interactions, and fascinations fascinate him. But a horror awaits when he peers into Kleph’s three-dimensional screen that swirls with sound and motion.

3. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Diary of the Rose” (1976), 5/5 (Masterpiece): As an unabashed fan of the epistolary SF story, “The Diary of the Rose” hits on all levels. It tells the story of Dr. Rosa Sobel, who keeps a diary of her scopist readings of psychiatric patients. A scopist “reads” on multiple levels, a visual representation of the thoughts of the patient. One of her patients, Flores Sorde, supposedly admitted for violent psychopathic behavior, slowly changes Sobel’s perception of her role and the nature of the world.

4. Damon Knight’s “The Country of the Kind” (1956), 5/5 (Masterpiece): This is a smart and complex story. On one level it reads as a critique of 50s conformity. The jarring interactions between the psychopath and society of course call into question the psychological nature of of both the “normal” and aberrant.

5. A. K. Jorgensson’s “Coming-of-Age Day” (1965), 5/5 (Masterpiece) is an absolutely brilliant (and disquieting) analysis of a potential future backlash to loosening societal strictures on sex and sexuality that characterized the Swinging London of the 60s. The story, told retrospectively by a convertee to the new prudishness, recounts his youthful days attempting to learn about the nature of sex. This is a spectacular exercise in visceral unease all wrapped up in the childhood yearning to know and understand a world whose particulars and behaviors seem just out of reach.

6. Clifford D. Simak’s “Founding Father” (1957), 4.75/5 (Near Masterpiece) operates on the premise that space travel will be psychologically damaging to humans without technological assistance that can, in turn, generate its own trauma. Humanity’s drive to act, exploit, and expand proves psychologically damaging for the workers tasked with bringing it all about. They are the discarded chaff of humanity’s omnipresent desire to expand no matter the cost.

7. Clifford D. Simak’s “Conditions of Employment” (1960), 4.75/5 (Near Masterpiece) also operates on the premise that space travel places inhuman stress on the worker: intense work hours, sleep deprivation, the terror that a slight mistake would spell death, tension and psychical discomfort, and the existential “dead, black fear of space itself.” The average passenger or colonists receives a tranquilizer. But a spacer can’t have their senses obscured. Radical steps must be taken to convince a spacer to return to space.

8. Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” (1976), 4.5/5 (Very Good). At some point in the future after the “Highway wars,” Native American groups within North-Eastern Texas are on the ascent. They raid the few white settlements, stealing cars, guns, and bulldozers. At the annual Sun Dance and Big Tractor Pull, the Fossil Creek people gather for masculine demonstrations of honor and strength. But something seems different this year.

9. Robert Abernathy’s “Single Combat” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless man, in a nameless city, plants a bomb in a basement. The city, cloaked with a heady dystopian gloom of racial violence and pollution, attempts to prevent his desperate escape. It’s a labyrinthine gestalt in which all its component parts–denizens, machines, symbology, and physical decay–become agents of its primal desire to survive.

10. Fred Saberhagen”s “Birthdays” (1976), 4.25/5 (Very Good). Bart, fourteen years old, awakes alone on a colony ship. The nature of the Ship isn’t entirely clear as Bart’s memories have been carefully edited. He walks down the hall and emerges in the Ship’s nursery, filled with twenty four squalling children, replete with robotic assistants and projected images of maternal figures. His task? Serve as the sole human parent. The catch? The Ship will only revive Bart from cold sleep one day a year.

11. Lisa Tuttle’s “Stone Circle” (1976), 4.25/5 (Very Good): As the forces of a fascism transform a new-future America, a nameless female narrator attempts to find meaning in the ashes. This is a world in which N must use her body to acquire the necessities for survival. She imagines herself a stone statue as protection against the trauma she experiences at the hands of the men who attempt to control her life. Her love of Kit momentarily gives life to the stone. Little’s nightmare reflects, in harrowing strokes, the late-70s viewpoint of a frustrated radical in the era of conservative backlash. 

12. Clifford D. Simak’s “City” (1944), 4.25/5 (Very Good):  Cheap transportation technology gives humanity the opportunity to flee the cities for acred estates in the countryside. John Webster works for the city government despite knowing the “the city as a human institution is dead” (147). Deeply bothered by the plight of the homeless farmers, John attempts to combat the mayor’s plan to burn down the city’s abandoned buildings. Soon a showdown between the homeless farmers and the remaining urban city dwellers looms. Effectively establishes the rest of the memorable series compiled as the fix-up novel City in 1952.

13. Clifford D. Simak’s “New Folks’ Home” (1963), 4.25/5 (Good) ruminates on age and memory and the possibility of a new path as death approaches. Frederick Gray, a retired professor, heads off on a fishing trip he used to take with his good friend Ben Lovell. Lovell lays in a hospital bed with little chances of heading home. Frederick knows the trip might be his last as well. He encounters a brand new building nearby where he held fond memories of his friendship. What is inside? And more importantly, why here?

14. Alice Eleanor Jones’ “Recruiting Officer” (1955), 4/5 (Good) follows a shape-shifting entity on her recruit-collecting rounds. She takes the appearance of a grandmotherly woman named Mrs. Quimby. In her convertible, she preys on young men between sixteen and twenty. On one of her productive tours of duty, she encounters her eighteenth victim — the beautiful Johnny, stranded with his mother at a car mechanic. She offers to drive him back to his school. “Recruiting Officer” effectively subverts the male gaze present in so many fictions of era. Mrs. Quimby’s gaze is far from that of a passive collector, she lusts after what she sees. Her species finds allure in any and all male forms.

15. Felix C. Gotschalk’s “The Day of the Big Test” (1976), 4/5 (Good) is told through the eyes of “seven tier old” (77) kid named Bradley about to be tested by pysgnomomist named Dr. LeGrand. This intelligence test gives an encyclopedic glimpse into a world linked to ours but utterly transformed. Physically, the world experienced seismic rupture and nuclear event in which the layers of the past have been melted together. Similarly, the story takes the reader on a whirlwind jarring and jumbling jaunt of the mindscape of the future via inundating linguistic displays, strange technology implanted technology, and subvocal communication. Of course, the human material and social desires remain frightening similar to our own.

16. Clifford D. Simak’s “You’ll Never Go Home Again!” (variant title: “Beachhead”) (1951), 4/5 (Good): This bleak nightmare follows a seemingly routine expedition of the Human Planetary Survey Party to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet. Like a horrifying formulation of Taylorism, the robotic workers erect a defense against an often “extremely violent” reaction to human arrival and manage the systematic documentation of information on the alien to be “inserted in the galactic files” while their human overseers sip highballs waiting for the go ahead to descend to the surface. Of course, human brutality and arrogance will come crashing down…

17. Clifford D. Simak’s “Full Cycle” (1955), 4/5 (Good) is his most sustained take on future versions of trade unionism. The union provides security from stuffies (business leaders) and gives shape to a new post-union form of social organization that will allow humanity to move beyond capitalism. Due to fears of nuclear war, industry moved into the countryside. Workers join moveable trailer camps that can strike at will. A new society emerges in the countryside.

18. Gene Wolfe’s “The Eyeflash Miracles” (1976), 4/5 (Good) follows the adventures of the blind and precocious Little Tib as he journeys across a barely hinted dystopian, and automated, future. Interspersed are memories of his past before the deliberate destruction of his retinas and dream-like visions that entirely consume him. This is a fascinating conjuration of the archetypal religious journey, the unusual events and their interpreters and accompanying miracles, through the lens of childhood nostalgia made strangely manifest.

19.   Hugo Correa’s “Alter Ego” (1967), 4/5 (Good).  Antonio acquires an alter ego, a perfect android recreation of his own body. It does not have a mind of its own. Instead, via an “introjection helmet”, Antonio can animate the android. He can smell through the android. He can speak through the mouth of his duplicate self. An unusual displacement occurs as he hears himself speaking from afar. He can suddenly lay bare his own past, and its failures.

20. Leigh Kennedy’s “Detailed Silence” (1980), 3.75/5 (Good) is my favorite of Kennedy’s first four published short stories. It takes place on one of the few landmasses of Beta Hydri, an alien aquatic planet. On this outcropping surrounded by a vast still ocean, live an alien species called Rainbows by humans. The story follows Casey, the Director General of the mining community, who struggles with his own traumas and dark shadows. There’s a reason he was sent to a small outpost. 

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Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Clifford D. Simak’s “Conditions of Employment” (1960)
2. Clifford D. Simak’s “Full Cycle” (1955)
3. Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)
4. Philip McCutchan’s The Day of the Coastwatch (1968)
5. Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By Job” (1963)
6. Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” (1957)
7. John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” (1959)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Alice Eleanor Jones (1916-1981)
2. Leigh Kennedy (1951-)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Kōbō Abe’s “The Flood” (1950, trans. 1989)
2.  Vladimir Colin’s “The Contact” (1966, trans. 1970)
3. Hugo Correa’s “Alter Ego” (1967)
4. Hugo Correa’s “Meccano” (1968)
5. Kathinka Lannoy’s “Drugs’ll Do You” (1978, trans. 1981)

Urban Landscapes of the Future (started in 2024)

1. Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” (1973)
2. Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971)
3. John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965)
4. A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius” (1950)
5. Robert Abernathy’s “Single Combat” (1955)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Clifford D. Simak’s “Founding Father” (1957)
2. Clifford D. Simak’s “Conditions of Employment” (1960)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971)
2. Fred Saberhagen”s “Birthdays” (1976)
3. Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 4: Six Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
2. Exploration Log 5: “We Must Start Over Again and Fine Some Other Way of Life”: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak
3. Exploration Log 6: Clifford D. Simak’s 1971 Guest of Honor Speech

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My Top 4 History Reads of 2024

Last year I read primarily histories of science fiction. This year I decided to expand my knowledge about the political and social environment of the 1950s-70s with an eye towards my Simak project on organized labor and my general interest in the post-War left. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, everything I’ve featured here tends to be on the more approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Daniel Horowitz’s The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2004): As an unabashed fan of science fictional social critique, Horowitz’s monograph explores how American thinkers–from Ernest Dichter to Rachel Carson–responded to growing affluence in the post-War moment. Indispensable.

2. Kevin Mattson’s Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002): As someone interested in larger issues of the left in science fiction, Mattson’s monograph is not to be missed. He charts the evolution and influence of thinkers from C. Wright Mills to Paul Goodman after World World II.

3. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002): Read specifically for my Clifford D. Simak project, Coker examines the evolving views of leftist thinkers on the role of organized labor after WWII. We tend to think in a monolithic sense that the left supports unions and the right is against them. The reality is far more complex. Few leftists maintained a positive take on unions due to their view that they were part and parcel with the larger capitalist status quo. This does not mean that they did not see value in unions assisting the common worker.

4. Jacqueline Foertsch’s Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America (2014): One of a handful of histories of science fiction that I read this year, Foertsch explores the intersection of race and nuclear war. Her focus on African American newspapers that contained moments of science fictional speculation enriched and complicated in ingenious ways her analysis of white SF authors like Philip Wylie and Pat Frank who integrated race into their nuclear war stories. Her chapter on Samuel R. Delany sparked my desire to read more of his work for the site.

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Goals for 2025

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

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For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX