All the wide world.

I'll be doing my usual recommendations for short stuff other people have read at the end of December, when I've had a chance to read the things that are still coming out in December, but I think I've seen the last of my new publications for the year, so here's what I've been up to!

...a year turns out to be a long time. One of the reasons I think it's good to do these year-in-review posts is that the sense of "oh wait, was that this same year???" is strong. I feel like my tendency to put things I've accomplished in the rearview and focus on the next thing is generally really useful to me, but it does tend to lead to a "what have you done lately" mindset. When it turns out that what I have done lately is a pile of stories. There were more SF than fantasy stories, which surprised me, it didn't feel that way...more on why I think that is in a minute. In any case, here's the 2025 story list:

The Year the Sheep God Shattered (Diabolical Plots)

Her Tune, In Truth (Sunday Morning Transport)

If the Weather Holds (Analog)

Disconnections (Nature Futures)

The Things You Know, The Things You Trust (If There's Anyone Left)

All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (Lightspeed)

Things I Miss About Civilization (Nature Futures)

A Shaky Bridge (Clarkesworld)

What a Big Heart You Have (Kaleidotrope)

And Every Galatea Shaped Anew (Analog)

The Crow's Second Tale (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (The Vertigo Project)

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (The Vertigo Project)

The Torn Map (The Vertigo Project)

So yeah! Stories galore! And with a very satisfying variety of publishers, with the exception that The Vertigo Project was a focus of a lot of my attention this year. Which makes sense! It's a pretty big deal. All the poetry I had published this year was with The Vertigo Project as well, although I have a couple of poems ready to come out in 2026 from other places. Here's the list of poems:

Club Planet Vertigo (The Vertigo Project)

Greetings From Innerspace (The Vertigo Project)

On the Way Down (The Vertigo Project)

Preparation (The Vertigo Project)

The Nature of Nemesis (The Vertigo Project)

I only had one piece of nonfiction out this year, The Stranger Next Door: The Domestic Fantastic in Classic Nordic Children's Literature (Uncanny). But it's a topic that's very close to my heart, and I'm glad I had the chance to wallow in it. Er, I mean, share it with you.

I suppose the other thing that could be considered nonfiction is that I wrote journaling prompts to help people with vertigo process their vertigo experience through creative writing. I also wrote a group workshop format for the same general ideas, and I ran the first of those workshops in November. It was lovely and seemed to be very meaningful to the people involved--and that's one of the things that's nice about the facilitator (that is, me) being someone with vertigo, it meant that I was talking about our experiences rather than their experiences. The Vertigo Project has been the gift that keeps on giving all year, and there will be more of it yet in 2026. What a great thing to get to be involved with. I'm so pleased to have done this work with these people.

I was also a finalist for the Washington Science Fiction Association's Small Press Award, for one of 2024's stories, A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places. I got to go to Capclave and hang out with a bunch of friends and enjoy being a finalist.

I think the main reason that I felt like I was doing equal parts fantasy and SF this year is that I wrote approximately half each of two novels, one fantasy and one SF. Both are still going strong. We'll see where they take me. I'm also working on some more short work in both categories. While I published a lot more short SF, my biggest news in recent months is that I sold a fantasy novella to Horned Lark Press. A Dubious Clamor features harpies, politics, operettas, pastries, and complicated friendships, and it's forthcoming in 2026. A lot done this year, a lot to look forward to!

Sam Bloch, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. Interesting natural and social history--and present assessment--of the uses and needs of shade in sunny climates. Very much the sort of environmental study we need more of. Yay for this weird little book.

Meihan Boey, The Formidable Miss Cassidy. Structurally slightly odd but extremely good. "Some weirdos make friends; hijinks ensue" is one of my favorite shapes of plot, all the more so when there's more than one culture and a bunch of magic stuff going on. More from this author please.

Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence. This is a good introductory book if you haven't already read a lot of stuff about the lead-up to the American Revolution. It's not actually one of the ones I'd put very high on my list if you have, but not everyone has.

Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows. I feel like these were longer and less punchy than his previous poems, but that could be genuine or could be a result of my own mood, hard to guess without more intense study. "Not my favorite Espada collection" is still a pretty good thing to be.

Margaret Frazer, The Stone Worker's Tale. Kindle. This is another of the mystery short stories in the same continuity as her novel series, slight but entertaining as most of them are. Sometimes you can watch mystery authors try to figure out some twist that will entertain them to write, and I think this was one of those times.

Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. This is a good place to go deeper on recent Ghanan history but also a good place to start if you don't feel like you know very much about 20th century West Africa. A very interesting read.

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World and Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. I got interested in the first of these when I saw it in a bookstore, and it did not disappoint: it's a history of the US and Latin America, rather than focusing on the US's relationship with Europe as most such histories do. It was good enough that I requested the second one based on enjoying his work, and I'm not sure that "enjoy" is the right word for a whole book about Kissinger, but then I'm not sure it should be. Grandin's view of Kissinger is relentless, and I don't think he should have relented. And at least it's not terribly long, it doesn't make you spend more time with Kissinger than necessary to study his sociopolitical effects.

Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. Hochschild is generally good, and I like to see closer-focus histories. Rose Pastor Stokes definitely is interesting enough for a whole book. I do feel like he wanted to be doing some things with her marriage as emblematic of things that didn't quite get there, but it's still worth the time.

Marina Lostetter, The Teeth of Dawn. The last in its series, and I finished it from momentum rather than enthusiasm for where the series went. I really liked the earlier ones, it's just this two-timeline narrative felt labored at points. I generally enjoy her ideas and writing and will be glad to see what else she does next.

Premee Mohamed, The First Thousand Trees. Another third volume. This one was a bit more genre-standard than its two predecessors, but well-executed on that, fitting it into the established worldbuilding and characters.

Trung Le Nguyen, Angelica and the Bear Prince. A sweet YA love story in graphic novel form. Cute to look at as well as cute storyline, won't take long.

Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times. This is a time loop novel that's also a murder mystery, and I really liked that the looping character was attempting to prevent the murder in the process of solving it: how can I make this better. The twist in the ending was not entirely satisfying to me, and there was enough problematic alcohol use that even I, who don't usually flag that, feel like it's worth noting for people who really dislike that as an element in fiction.

Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, eds., A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Retellings of Asian mythologies by Asian diaspora authors, somewhat varied but generally quite satisfying. I read this for book club, and it gave us a lot of happy fodder for discussion rather than the more annoyed kind we sometimes have.

Hache Pueyo, Cabaret in Flames. Discussed elsewhere.

Jonathan Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China. There's a lot about field work with Amur tigers in this. A lot. If you like that kind of nitty gritty about how the science gets done, good news, this is a book for you. I do like that sort of thing, so I was very pleased. My one complaint is that there is almost nothing about China and very little about the cross-cultural relationship work here. For having it in the subtitle, it's...really a Russian book. And that's okay! Just some clarity there.

Seamus Sullivan, Daedalus Is Dead. I thought this was going to be a completely different shape of thing, which is my fault and entirely on me. The cover and title made me think that Daedalus was going to be a metaphor. Nope! No metaphors here! Very literal retelling of Daedalus's experiences in life and afterlife! For some reason Sullivan decided that what he most wanted to do here was Daedalus as unreliable narrator in ways that have nothing at all to do with him as a technologist; there's stuff to be done with complicity in science/technology work, but very little of it was done here, most of Daedalus's flaws were...generic unpleasant dude flaws, I would say. It's written quite well, but I ultimately did not want to spend even a novella's worth of time with this character.

Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer, eds., Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Some very familiar, oft-reprinted stuff in here, plus some stuff I've never seen before. A very mixed bag, the full spectrum of my responses as well as the full spectrum of types of feminist SF.

Ellen Wayland-Smith, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self. Wayland-Smith leans very heavily on similes in this essay collection, which often didn't work amazingly for me because the similes felt...fine? rather than genuinely illuminating. I feel like a cad saying that her best work was about her own mortality, but, well. Better than her worst work, I suppose? Still. This was fine enough but not a favorite.

I've mentioned here before that one of my big projects this year is my involvement with The Vertigo Project, which now has a webpage so the rest of you can see what we've been doing. Earlier today I facilitated the first creative therapy-style writing workshop through that group, and it was really lovely--and is just the tip of the iceberg on what this group is doing.

Specifically, you can now read all the new work they've commissioned from me! Friends, it's a lot. It's journaling prompts for people who would like to use writing to process some of their own vertigo experiences. But also it's the following stories and poems:

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (story), safe conduct through strange new worlds

Club Planet Vertigo (poem), this is not the dance I wanted to do

Greetings from Innerspace (poem), my orbits are eccentric

The Nature of Nemesis (poem), me and Clark Kent know what's what

On the Way Down (poem), falling hard

Preparation (poem), sometimes we're just literal, okay

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (story), when the waves hit you even on dry land, it's good to have someone who's willing to swim against the current for you

The Torn Map (story), rewriting the pieces of the former world into something new

The main page also has links to some of the other aspects of the project, which includes a nonfiction book, dance, puppetry, a podcast with a physical therapist, and more. Please feel welcome to explore it all.