Every February, Locus Magazine comes out with their Recommended Reading List. It is an exhaustive list of all the best Speculative Fiction of the last year. Literally it is one stop shopping for your Speculative Fiction readers...all of them.
This is an excellent resource to help readers and develop your collections. First, take the list itself, and check your collections. Do you own these books? You should. These are some of the best titles in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror from 2021. Second, use it to help readers who want books in these genres, but also, to help readers who want to give these genres a try-- especially the stories and novellas. These are proven winners, titles you can suggest with ease as they were vetted by a group of experts. [see below for a list of those experts]
And they make this list every single year, so BACKLIST! You know I love the backlist. Seriously though, you need to assess your collection, you want a suggestion that is on the shelf, you want to discover a new voice in the genres [check the story, debut, and novella categories for that], you want to make a display? For all of these things and more, you need to look back more than just one year. Don't worry. I made it easy on you.
Click here to pull up a list of each year's list beginning with 2021 and going backward. It's a link that is RA and Collection Development gold.
There are many books on this year's list that I have read and reviewed too.
This is one of my favorite resources every year. It is a treasure trove of CD and RA gold. Bookmark it and use it for guaranteed crowd pleasing suggestions for all of your speculative fiction fans.
Below is the intro to the 2021 list by the editors of Locus Magazine.
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| Click here to go to the list |
Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!
Published in Locus magazine’s February 2022 issue, this list is assembled by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. This year we considered over 900 titles between short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations, combined and trimmed to a somewhat reasonable-length list, are our best recommendations for your consideration. We know there will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. Any one of our recommending group would have put forward a different exact list, but this is the combined sum of opinions, assessed with great affection and care for the field.
The Locus recommending group this year included editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi; reviews editor Jonathan Strahan; Locus reviewers Liz Bourke, Alex Brown, Karen Burnham, Carolyn Cushman, Paul Di Filippo, Amy Goldschlager, Paula Guran, Rich Horton, Gabino Iglesias, Maya James, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Tim Pratt, Arley Sorg, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; assistant editor Bob Blough; and UK critics Cheryl Morgan and Graham Sleight. The YA group brought in past Locus YA reviewer and writer Gwenda Bond and librarian and writer Angie Manfredi. Input for the non-fiction section also came in from Niall Harrison and Farah Mendlesohn. The art books section had help from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and Locus senior editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommendations came from editors and reviewers John Joseph Adams, Rachel Cordasco, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Vanessa Fogg, Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur, Nisi Shawl, T.G. Shenoy, Sheree Renée Thomas, and A.C. Wise, plus our own reviewers. Some of the reviewers also wrote year-end wrap-ups, which will include their thoughts, plus some books that didn’t make the final list — look for those in the coming weeks or in the February issue of the magazine, available in print and digital editions. Locus thanks all involved for their time and their expertise.
You can let us know what your favorites were by voting in the 2021 Poll & Survey. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, presented in June 2022, and is open to all to vote on. The Survey helps us be a better magazine. Thank you for participating!
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