Each 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 for a variety of reasons.
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 2024-- I personally reviewed quite a few of them.
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]
Third, especially in the collections, anthology, and all of the shorter fiction categories, pay attention to the authors producing these stories. Many will become the novelists whose books you will be clamoring to get soon. I know this because...
Fourth, they make this list every single year, so there is a great 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 newer voices in the genres, 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 the new 2024 list and going backward. It's a link that is RA and Collection Development gold. And it remains one of my favorite resources. One I eagerly anticipate every single February. Bookmark it and use it for guaranteed crowd pleasing suggestions for your speculative fiction fans all year long.
Below is the intro to the 2024 list by the editors of Locus Magazine.
Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List…
We saw some fabulous books come out last year and are so pleased to let you know about them!
This list is compiled by the Locus editors and columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. This year we looked at 678 titles between short fiction and long fiction. Note: any one of our voting critics would have a different exact list – the list we end up with is our combined sum of opinions, assessed with a great affection and care for the field. We did not see everything that came out last year (though we tried!) and there will always be books that didn’t make it. It is especially hard for us to assess international books or books published in December that we didn’t see in time, or that none of us read, though as a group we read very widely. We do extend eligibility to the next year for some first-US editions, and allow for small-press and international constraints. No one in the group is allowed to vote for any titles they worked on or acquired.
The Locus recommending group this year included editor in chief Liza Groen Trombi; reviews editor Jonathan Strahan; Locus reviewers Liz Bourke, Jake Casella Brookins, Alex Brown, Paul Di Filippo, Sean Dowie, Paula Guran, Niall Harrison, Rich Horton, Gabino Iglesias, Paul Kincaid, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Archita Mittra, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Charles Payseur, Alexandra Pierce, Wole Talabi, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; staffers Bob Blough and Tim Pratt; anthologist and editor Ellen Datlow, and outside critics James Bradley, Cheryl Morgan, and Graham Sleight. Input for the non-fiction section also came from John Clute, Mark Kelly, and Farah Mendlesohn. The art book section had counsel from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and Locus senior editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommendations added in anthologists and reviewers John Joseph Adams, Maria Haskins, Allan Kaster, Nisi Shawl, Bogi Takács, and A.C. Wise.
You can let us know what your favorites were by voting in the 2024 Poll & Survey. The Poll decides the winners of the Locus Awards, planned for June 2025, and is open to all to vote on. The Survey helps us be a better magazine. Thank you for participating!
Click here to see the entire list. And consider voting in the Poll & Survey as linked in the paragraph above this one. Promote the link to your readers so they can participate as well. They will love to have the chance to advocate for their own favorites and they will remember that you were the one that brought them that joy.
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