My Favorite Reads of 2024

My Top Ten Favorite Reads of 2024

So if you want to Listen or watch my homey Marc Rothenberg break our top reads of the year you can listen/watch at these links:

Video of our Top reads podcast

Audio of the 2024 favorite reads podcast
 

My thumbnail reviews podcast (I talk about all 107 books I read in the year) are all here

Video of Thumbnail reviews of everything I read in 2024

Audio of thumbnail reviews podcast


All books on this list have complete reviews here on the blog.

Retro reads:

Flux by Ron Goulart : Great 70s SF, political and funny from the Bay Area author that PKD wrote his formula letter too. Flux is a very funny SF novel, that is filled with radical ideas and some next-level humor. It is dated and I wondered if some of it felt like an old guy talking about a younger generation that was out of touch at the time. Hard for me to say.

Why Call Them Back From Heaven by Clifford D. Simak: Interesting philosophical SF novel about capitalism and immortality. Late career effort by Simak that I enjoyed.

Games Machine trilogy > The World Of Null- A by AE Van Vogt, Solar Lottery by PKD and The Gamesman by Barry N. Malzberg. Wrote an An article about this trilogy for Amazing stories you can find here: Article on Amazing Stories

Vintage Season by Catherine Lucille Moore Writing as Lawrence O'Donnell. Time travel masterpiece from the 1940s.

Boris Says the Words by Kyle Winkler BSW is a dystopia but if you're not careful you might miss the slow-developing apocalypse of radiated villages and dying Russian countryside. It is done subtly and taken matter-of-factly by the characters. There is so much great stuff going on in this book it is easy to miss some of these aspects, I often re-read pages because of gorgeous prose or weird WTF I just read.


The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold - the weird time travel masterwork, short and best read in one sitting if you can swing it. Blew my mind.

Non-Fiction

Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now David Sandner (Editor), Series Editors: Donald E. Palumbo, C.W. Sullivan III

Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder

CL Moore/ HP Lovecraft Letters by CL Moore and HP Lovecraft.

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms Edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Grace L. Dillon , and Isiah Lavender III



Honorable mentions

A Bright and Beautiful Eternal World by James Chambers

Fever House by Keith Rossen

Picard: Firewall by David Mack

Forgotten Sister by Cina Pelayo

American Rapture by CJ Leede

Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due




New Releases

10 Jumpnaughts by Hao Jingfang (Author of Vagabonds , the novella Folding Beijing)

Jumpnauts makes for an excellent addition to the First Contact genre, in much the same way her last novel was like an entry in the hard SF Mars novel sub-genre. It is the VERY culturally Chinese version of an ancient aliens-type story, and it continues the social science fiction feel while having a little more action than Jingfang’s last translated novel.

When considering if you want to read this novel, you must ask yourself why you read SF? Why do you read international SF? This novel is a great example of classic SF tropes written through the lens of another culture, in this case, a very Chinese narrative. There is no Western version of this story.



9 Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

The Third Rule of Time Travel is the most Matheson novel I have ever read that didn’t have his name on it. It is an emotionally driven drama built out of a fantasy concept that flirts with Science Fiction. An emotional story that can’t happen without the gee-whiz, but the fantasy is less of the point. It doesn’t waste any time on world-building or SF conventions and is 200% focused on the emotional heartbreak at the center. It will be tear-inducing for readers who allow it into their hearts.

8 A Better World by Sarah Langan

A Better World will be marketed as a thriller, a satire, or social commentary. It is all those things and that is one of the reasons it is great. Sarah Langan as an author is not one to run from the genres that many outsiders consider a ghetto. This novel is horror, it is Science Fiction. Because it has the strength and respect of literary circles doesn’t mean it is not science fiction. It is science fiction. Great science fiction indeed.

7 Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

‘Soul of Me’ was my favorite story of the collection. It has the wild fantasy feel of Jack Vance Dying Earth novels, and in a way has the far future pastoral feel of Clifford Simak. It is a short piece, but worth every penny I spent on the book. “In your final incarnation on this miserable, blood-soaked world, you are Rex. Spot, Fido, Roscoe, yellow, ramp, rusty, Rin Tin Tin, Buck, and the others, the ever-popular others, yes, those two. But always and forever Rex. The last of your kind and the kinds that came before.”

6 Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson

This time, Parenthood, bedtime stories, communication breakdowns, ecological collapse, perception, posthumanism, what it means to be human, or alive itself. Weird creepy moments and dark reflections of thoughts that feel inspired by talking to his young son. That is just a guess, but it seems fairly obvious that during the era when most of these stories were written, the author was tucking a young person in. I feel like many of these stories feel inspired by sitting at the end of a child’s bed and wondering what stories are hiding in the shadows of those moments.

Favorites in this collection were Imagine a Forest, and Mother



5 Make it Stop by Jim Ruland

The comp I came up with was a manic political thriller that crosses vibes somewhere between Fight Club and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

Make It Stop is a strange novel that doesn’t fit neatly into any specific genre. It is a political thriller, mildly a crime novel, and mainly a speculative fiction novel, but it could be called many things. I suspect the publisher is less comfortable with the SF label than Jim is. That said it is a near-future political thriller…you know Science Fiction.




4 Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

I love a haunted house novel, but like the genre in general it is hard to break new ground at this point. If you would like to know without spoilers if this novel works, in my opinion, it is one of the creepiest horror novels in some time. It will be a really intense experience for young parents who place themselves in the character's shoes. Using a unique prose point of view the novel becomes pretty much experimental. As I got a couple of chapters in I wondered how long Malerman could keep it up and the answer is to the fucking end. This novel is a bit of a miracle, I suspect it wont work for everyone, but if you fall under the spell you will be blown away.






3 The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

This novel is a powerful work of meta-fiction, we can compare it to PKD, which is a compliment around here but it is a pure product of Lavie Tihar's genius. His blend of imagination, genre history and ability to blend into thought experiments is what makes him one of my favorite modern writers. This novel is not for everyone but for the people in the crosshairs this is bullet straight the science fictional parts of the brain. I loved it.






2 Buffalo Hunter, Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

This masterpiece of historical horror is like nothing before it. A sweeping epic told in epistolary form. In the wrong hands this would never have worked. The Only Good Indian might have hit me more personally but this is the best novel in Stephen's long career and that is no tiny feat.






Skinship by James Reich

The role the generation ship novel plays in the genre is to create micro-cultures that are divorced from the clear destruction we are heading toward. There is almost never a happy ending or a perfect new planet we call home. James Reich is focused on the traumatic damage this dying world left on the people clinging to an island of biology in the vast lifelessness of space. This is highlighted in the 20th-century design of the interior of the ship.