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Welcome to the LocusRecommended Reading List…

We saw some fabulous books come out last year and are so pleased to let you know about them! Our recommendations are compiled annually by the Locus reviewers, editors, and columnists; outside reviewers; and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. This year we looked at over 1,000 titles between short and long fiction.

Note: we know there will be books …Read More

Locus is thrilled to announce two of the field's talented and award-winning authors, Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones, will be headlining the 2026 Locus Awards as Guests of Honor this May. Novelists Due (The Reformatory, a NYT Notable Book) and Jones (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, NYT Bestseller) will grace the stage in Berkeley, California, on May 30, 2026, as we celebrate the science fiction, fantasy, and horror …Read More

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the preliminary ballot for the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards.

Superior Achievement in a Novel

• Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker (Mira; Hodder & Stoughton as Bat Eater)
• Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Clay McLeod Chapman(Quirk)
• Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix(Berkley)
• King Sorrow, Joe Hill(William Morrow)
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
• Angel Down, …Read More

The American Library Association (ALA) announced the winners of the Youth Media Awards at a press conference held on January 26, 2026 in Chicago IL and virtually.

The Alex Awards for the ten best adult books that appeal to teen audiences went to multiple works and authors of genre interest, including:

• Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, Bob the Drag Queen (Gallery)
• The Favorites, Layne Fargo (Random House)
• The Whyte …Read More

John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has announced the winners of theBulletin's first short fiction contest, Write Before Midnight. Judge Kim Stanley Robinson declared a seven-way tie between:

• The Hard Problem , Beston Barnett
• Countdown , Alex Dabertin
• What the People Want , Patrick Hutson
• A Modest Briefing , Robert Levinson
• Good Boy , Kerri Brady Long
• On Behalf of …Read More

Vector 298 (Nov 2023) is now unsealed: bit.ly/Vector298

As the guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander write in their editorial:

The articles in this issue of Vector work in both directions, teasing out the ways archives and libraries can be informed by SFF works while also exploring the assumptions SFF works make about libraries and archives.

In “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data,” Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski ask the question of whether librarians exist in the future of Star Trek—certainly a topic of relevance to today’s “AI search” upheavals. In “The Queen a Librarian Dreams of,” Kathryn Yelinek examines the connection between information literacy and restorative justice in the fantasy world of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue. 

Next up are a pair of trips through fictional archives. In “Archives, Information, and Fandom,” Tom Ue and James Munday consider how the Halliday Journals from the world of Ready Player One present the impacts of (mis)direction and information surplus on researchers. Grace Catherine Greiner’s “Finding Nothing Can be Finding Something” explores the capital-A Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, with its interest in medievalisms, access, and “simultaneous bookishness and orality.”

Hopping back to libraries, Guangzhou Lyu’s “Library of Disassembled Past” takes a look at a floating library in China Mieville’s The Scar, exploring how libraries can serve as places of “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.” In “Magic and Critical Librarianship,” Ellie Campbell interrogates the ways libraries and other memory institutions can institutionalise racism, colonialism, misogyny, and homophobia, as shown in three fantasy short stories. And the last article in the issue, Monica Evans’s “You Are the Library,”considers how digital games can engage players in “library-like mechanics,” drawing on the long history of the value of information and exploration in game design.

Whether you’re a librarian thinking about installing a science fiction reading room, a fantasy novelist looking for worldbuilding nuggets for your next doorstopper about nautical librarians, a SFF academic who’s intrigued by archives concepts in games, or just someone who’s stopped by the information desk of this editorial to ask where the metaphorical toilets are, we hope you’ll enjoy your time with the insightful explorations of libraries, archives, and the future of information that make up this issue of Vector!

Cover by Kalina Winska. Original artwork title: The ethereal and eternal contest, with no winners and no losers, occasional bursts of anger, frustration, and perhaps…shame; waves of humility are often too weak to reach the edge of the world. (graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and ink on wood panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2020).

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the finalists for the 2025 NBCC awards for books published in English (including translations) in the United States. Authors and titles of genre interest include:

Criticism

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
• Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Tawada, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

Fiction

• On the Calculation of Volume (Book …Read More

Tor Publishing Group has announced a new imprint, Wildthorn Books. The imprint will focus on commercial stories that are irresistible, genre-blending and genre-bending. Categories and genres published under the imprint will include commercial and upmarket women's fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative non-fiction, and historical fantasy.

Wildthorn Books launches globally with Tor UK. Devi Pillai will be the president and publisher; Monique Patterson, who joined in 2023 with …Read More

Nominees have been announced for the 2026 Splatterpunk Awards, honoring superior achievement in the literary sub-genres of Splatterpunk and Extreme Horror fiction in 2025.

Best Novel

• Janitors vs. The Living Dead, Michelle Garza & Melissa Lason (Death's Head)
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
• At Dark, I Become Loathsome, Eric LaRocca (Blackstone)
• The Home, Judith Sonnet (Madness Heart)
• Music to Sacrifice Virgins To, Kristopher Triana (Bad Dream)
…Read More

Winners for the 2024 Analog Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Award and the 2024 Asimov's Readers' Awards have been announced.

The Analog AnLab Awards winners are:

Best Novella

• WINNER: Uncle Roy's Computer Repairs and Robot Parts , Martin L. Shoemaker (5-6/24)
• 2nd Place: Minnie and Earl Have a Kitten , Adam-Troy Castro (9-10/24)
• 3rd Place: Ganny Goes to War , David Gerrold (3-4/24)
• 4th Place: The Last Days of Good People …Read More

MILESTONES

KIT MAYQUIST is now represented by Arley Sorg of kt literary.

FIONA ERSKINE is now represented by John Jarrold Literary Agency.

TERRI TE TAU has been appointed as a Creative New Zealand Emerging Māori Writer in Residence for 2026 at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML).

 

BOOKS SOLD

R.R. SCHAEFFER's A Fable for Hollow Creatures, first in a dark fantasy series about a monster hunter who partners …Read More

Must Read Magazines has announced in a press release that it has revised the boilerplate language in writers' contracts for Analog,Asimov's, andF&SF. They say that the new changes target concerns raised by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).

In July 2025, SFWA announced that the organization had suggested several contract language changes to Must Read, following concerns about Analog's contract terms and its delisting from website The Submission …Read More

Former literary agent Patrick Delahunt, 72, died December 23, 2025.

Patrick Flanagan Delahunt was born March 23, 1953 in Milwaukee WI. He entered publishing and was the original agent for multiple SF and fantasy authors, including Karen Joy Fowler and Kim Stanley Robinson. He is survived by his siblings, cousins, and other family and friends. …Read More

The A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature is open to applications through January 31, 2026. The grant provides $1,500 to a South Asian or Desi diaspora writer developing speculative fiction , with preference given to work that is accessible to older children and teens.

The grant is co-sponsored by the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) and DesiLit. Winners will be selected by a jury on the basis of …Read More

The 2026 Philip K. Dick Award nominees have been announced:

• Sunward, William Alexander (Saga)
• Outlaw Planet, M.R. Carey (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• Casual, Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous)
• The Immeasurable Heaven, Caspar Geon (Solaris UK)
• Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Thomas Ha (Undertow)
• Scales, Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot UK)
• City of All Seasons, Oliver K. Langmead & Aliya Whiteley (Titan)

The award is presented annually to a distinguished work …Read More

By Chisom Umeh

My first direct encounter with the Sauútiverse was in 2022 when, at the Ake Books and Arts Festival in Lagos, panellists Wole Talabi, Dare Segun Falowo, Stephen Embleton, and Cheryl Ntumy, members of the Sauúti Collective, introduced the shared world project. I sat there in the audience, watching as the lights dimmed and a video of the Sauúti creation myth was played to us. Over the animated visuals was an echoing voice apparently merged from the real voices of the Sauúti founding members. This voice, supposedly that of the Mother, the chief deity of Sauúti lore, told the story of the universe’s birth from a single Word.

The two-minute clip entranced me, and, long after the lights had been turned back on and the applause had faded, I was still transfixed by its power. There, on stage, the panellists introduced several aspects of this vast, sprawling secondary world featuring a two-star system, five planets, and three moons. Since then, the Sauútiverse has exploded, birthing two anthologies, three novellas, numerous short stories and poems, a novel, and additional works in the pipeline, all set in and exploring the diverse cultures, science, belief systems, and history of this intricately built shared world inspired by Africa. It has also been picked up and nominated for various awards, including the Nommos and the BSFA.

In this latest anthology, we’re shown a dark and terrible aspect of this world, not as a mere scare tactic, but to remind us that a universe this wide and sprawling wouldn’t be remotely realistic if it didn’t possess a horrific underbelly. Stories here do not shy away from the unsettling, the bone-chilling, the hair-raising, and the blood-curdling. The writers are super inventive in the ways they describe horror and fright. Across 18 short stories and poems, they boldly unleash all manner of terror. The writers commit strongly to Sauúti lore, which includes new words and Sauúti-specific terminologies. This, of course, can be a bit difficult for a new reader to grasp. But if they endure and get beyond that, they’d see that it adds to the overall uniqueness and beauty of the Sauútiverse. 

The anthology opens with a poem from Linda D. Addison that has haunting implications for the planet Órino-Rin, then follows immediately with an absolute screamer of a story by T.L. Huchu. I know this anthology explores the darkness and terror that lurks in the crevices of the Sauútiverse, and I was indeed horrified by many elements in The Temple of the Weeping Drum, yet, the more this opening story unfolded, the more I found myself yielding to another emotion: awe. Huchu’s writing has a certain vividness to it that lends realism to whatever world he creates. The story, which is about a fearsome cult of men that steals and sacrifices girls to gain power, speaks to the horrors of subjugation and the evil that can emerge when people who hold the most twisted beliefs about the world are left to their own devices for long enough.

In “The Rawness of You,” Eugen Bacon tells a dreamlike tale that almost seduces you with its lyricism, only for it (like the unnamed protagonist in the story discovers) to reveal that its true shape is jagged and hungry and ready to swallow you whole.

Cheryl Ntumy’s Where Daylight Meets Darkness, is calm and speaks to a different kind of unsettlement, one that emerges when you realize all the things you’ve ever believed and trusted are lies.  It asks how you can carry on amidst the fear that plagues you when you know you’re living with a fundamental falsehood that grants you undue privilege. Would you tell the truth and doom your people? Or keep the lie and doom your soul?

In the poem The Exorcism of Mofoyefomo, Ishola Abdulwasiu Ayodele thrusts us into a frightening ritual that attempts to free a woman of her demons, and it reads like those chilling stories we were told as children that still have a grip on us even as adults.

What might be perhaps the most terrifying of the stories for me is ironically one of the shortest. Wole Talabi’s flash fiction piece The Final Flight of the Ungu-ugnu has the ingredients of a proper space horror/mystery, and it held my attention from start to finish. It’s a report of a spaceship, Ungu-ugnu, that unknowingly ventures into a Bermuda Triangle-like area of space and has gone missing. No one is sure of what happened to it, but the descriptions of the final moments of its crew are bone-chilling. It leaves you with that adventurous taste of a mystery left unsolved, but, being well acquainted with Sauútiverse lore, I think I have an idea what happened. But I’ll be keeping that to myself.

Kofi Nyameye’s magisterial piece, The Unspoken, is reality-shattering and my favorite of all the stories. As in Wole’s story, something mysterious has happened and a doctor has been called in to help untangle the knot, but what they find in this dark tale is something that stretches back to the very creation of the universe itself, setting the stage for an ageless, all-encompassing horror to emerge. This is one of those stories that echoes in your mind long after you’ve read the final word. Mother have mercy!

Dare Segun Falowo doesn’t drop the ball, suffusing the air Kofi ignited with a dreadful poem, The Whirring of Anu’tu, about a boy who kills his sibling and the frightening consequences that ensue.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda swoops in just after with a complex and moving story of grief and the horrors of trauma when it becomes a tangible thing wrapping itself around your neck. Mma’riama in The Wound Asks for Air experiences memories of people who have lived before her as if they are her own. Their pains and grief torment her as though she caused them, and she must learn to learn from this and live with it. A summary can hardly do this story any sort of justice. Its many layers need to be experienced to be grasped, much like the foreign memories of Mma’rioma herself.

In Moustapha Mbacké Diop’s story, Naguu-Àll, Echoed in Moonlight, the danger is two-pronged. The main character, a girl with the ability to see into the spirit world, faces imminent harm both from the ancestral beast she’s searching for and the ruthless hunters also seeking it out. While she wants to find it in hopes of learning deep secrets about herself from it, the hunters have more sinister motivations, and one must give way to the other.

Stephen Embleton’s Separation is nightmarish. The monster that lurks within the story is imposing yet very silent, slowly eating at the psyche of the protagonist, who’s trapped mid-air in a cave on one of the harshest planets in the Sauútiverse, Órino-Rin. There’s also an undercurrent of grief that adds to the dire situation the main character is in, as he longs to be rejoined once again with his wife and child who may or may no longer be alive.

As you may have already noticed, I had a good time journeying through this anthology (and glad to know that there will be book two). Each story was self-contained and packed with enough intrigue to carry me onto the next. The writers all brought their ‘A’ game, approaching the subject matter with varying and unique perspectives, some of which speak to the present, real-life issues we face in our world. Demagogues with twisted beliefs about how the world works have actually taken over power and are dictating who should live or die, so we might as well be living in The Temple of the Weeping Drum. The horrors don’t just live on the page, but hit pretty close to home because, like in Cheryl’s story, we have to keep choosing where our loyalties lie, either to the truth or the lies our countries have told the world to get to where it is today. 

BIO: Chisom Umeh is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured in Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, Scifi Shorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestor’s Gift”, won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

Ark Press editor-in-chief Tony Daniel has announced the $10,000 inaugural Ark Press Prize winner is Ghostlands by Andrew Fox. Honorable mentions included Shrine by Graham Bradley, Centennial by Robert E. Hampson, and Independence '76 by Matt Harlow.

The theme of the first year of the prize, which asked authors to submit novel-length manuscripts, was America 2076 . Fox is awarded a publishing contract and a $10,000 advance. Ghostlands is planned …Read More

The Must Read Books Team has shared that Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's, has been hospitalized after suffering a brain aneurysm. Asimov's senior managing editor Emily Hockaday will act as interim editor as Williams recovers.

In their statement, Must Read Books shared words from several close friends and authors, and they encourage friends and fans to send notes or positive stories for Williams and her family via a Google Form. …Read More

Longtime SFF editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden retired from Tor on January 5, 2026. In his tenure at Tor he had served as VP, associate publisher, and editor-in-chief before shifting to editor-at-large in 2024. His influence and impact on the field is immeasurable and includes launching the careers of many celebrated authors, as well as being instrumental in the development of Tor.com (now Reactor) and the Tor Essentials line. His involvement …Read More

The Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) has announced the finalists for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for Best Classic Fiction.

• The Star Dwellers, James Blish (Avon / Faber & Faber)
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Chatto & Windus)
• That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis (Scribner)
• Salt, Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
• Singularity Sky, Charles Stross (Ace)

Four other works were also considered: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said,byPhilip K. Dick; The …Read More