The Year in Review 2024 by Niall Harrison

During a recent trip to Singapore, I went book shopping. The science fic­tion and fantasy shelves of the Books Kinokuniya on Orchard Road predomi­nantly featured familiar titles, but there were also a good number of locally published books by writers unknown to me. The specific publisher that caught my eye was Penguin Random House SEA, perhaps because in the UK almost all the SF titles with a penguin on the spine are classics of one kind or another, whereas here the penguin marked a selection of original SF. I bought a few titles, including a 2024 title, For the People’s Glory, by two journalists, Lee Jeong-Ho and Elaine Chan, which turned out to be a hybrid of Orwellian dystopia and geopolitical satire. The novel’s pacing is perhaps a little uneven, and there is an occasional sense that the authors’ interest in their novel’s sociopolitics comes before their interest in it as a literary endeavour, but the overall effect is punchy, and the overall project works. By embedding an almost-too-familiar story (one man’s gradual radicalisation against an authoritarian surveillance state that promotes “UniTongue” and paradoxical slo­gans such as UNIFORMITY IS DIVERSITY) within a clear analogue of real-world regional politics (the state calls itself Utopia, but it fills a suspiciously China-shaped hole in the novel’s world, and the plot features industrial espio­nage by Utopia against South Korea), Jeong-Ho and Chan illuminate both. I turned the last page satisfied with my purchase, intending to keep an eye on Penguin SEA’s catalogue, and wondering what other books I’m blissfully unaware of due to a simple lack of discovery.

I risk sounding as though I am proud of hav­ing engaged in a kind of literary safari, and of having returned with a trophy or specimen for study. That is not my intent. Rather, here at the start of an assessment of the year in SF, I wanted to try to concretise the usual disclaimer that I haven’t and cannot possibly have read enough. The game in a piece like this is to tell a story, to try to extrapolate some general observations from a limited perspective, provide a frame against which a reader can test their own expe­rience, but For the People’s Glory is, beyond its individual qualities, a reminder of exactly how contingent my perspective is. I have read ap­proximately 60 SF novels published in English in 2024, by authors from 15 countries, and that is, given the sheer volume of the publishing that I am aware of, never mind that to which I am oblivious, a hopelessly thin model for the actual literary world, and a poor sample by which to distinguish trends from fluctuations. This is particularly true because the selection is pre-filtered by my tastes, and because 2024 seemed a little lacking in landmarks, books that everyone in my part of the community read and had an opinion about. The upside, perhaps, is that as long as your filters are working accord­ing to spec, the total tonnage of books available means that on an individual level, it’s hard to have a truly bad year of reading; and my filters seemed to work. So here’s my story about a good year of reading.

In the UK, a trio of excellent near-future novels landed like a state-of-the-nation trip­tych. If the England of M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) could have a future, it might feel something like Julia Armfield’s Private Rites: waterlogged, entropic, psychically exhausted. The textured, tangible portrayal of a drowned city is utterly absorbing, the familial relationships are pain­fully well observed, and while the savage and unreconcilable ending was written before the UK’s general election, it felt like a premonitory comment on a result that seemed to change everything and nothing. Ali Smith’s Gliff is the first work of science fiction (but not the first speculative work) in a long and storied career, and carries argu­ments about the oppressive nature of the UK’s current political settlement, especially its attitudes to children and to immigrants, into a dystopia made new by her modernist attentiveness to the ways in which the use of language is always a political act. Rarely has such a bleak story sparkled with such wit. Also nimble and funny is Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, in which the past really is another coun­try, and time travellers brought forward from earlier centuries are a kind of immigrant. The metaphor is expertly managed, and a charm­ing central romance carries much of the story forward, but for me the novel’s highlight is the satisfyingly thorny portrayal of a narrator fully aware of her complicity with state power. As is the case with insecure and dystopic futures in general, in these novels Armfield, Smith, and Bradley are all asking how much individual choices matter; as is the case with the most rewarding science fiction, they are parsimoni­ous with their consolations.

Another thing these three novels have in common is that none was published by a tradi­tional genre imprint. (Of course these days, this does not mean their authors are unacquainted with genre materials.) For whatever reason, the year’s genre crop seemed in general less incisive about the next few decades, particu­larly in Britain, and most vivid when exploring further-away vistas. But the effects of borders and boundaries seemed to crop up across the spectrum, whether in the form of geographic and political divides in the novels above, or scientific or metaphysical thresholds in others. Case in point: Anne de Marcken’s fine (and Le Guin Award-winning) existential zombie novella, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. The undead are inherently threshold-troubling creatures, and in de Marcken’s hands, zombie­ism is both literal and metaphoric, a death and a condition to be processed. Or consider Adam Roberts’s Lake of Darkness, third in a thematic series of SF novels engaged with specific philo­sophical works, is a horror story set in utopia that seemed to me centrally concerned with the negotiation of and permeability of and fluidity of boundaries. The consequences of crossing the event horizon of a black hole, of transgressing the social constraints of polite society, of leaving utopia: These and other questions are woven into the fabric of an exhilarating novel filled with intellectual and linguistic joie-de-vivre. Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the Light Horizon, the concluding volume of perhaps his best trilogy, ranged widely and inventively across a canvas featur­ing aliens, AI, and espionage, but also, albeit less overtly than Roberts, drew on the thinking of a philosopher to ask questions about how humanity reacts when confronted with limits. As perspicacious and sly as MacLeod has ever been, the trilogy’s ending can be read in several ways, but for me it seemed to suggest the answer to that question is “perhaps not as ma­turely as we should.” The touchstone in Lake of Darkness is Deleuze, in Beyond the Light Horizon it is Spinoza; both novels function as implicit arguments for the science-fictional value of phi­losophy, and perhaps vice versa.

Turning to another kind of bound­ary, a bumper crop of biological SF novels tested the limits of the human, and found them to be malleable. Probably the most widely read of these, and certainly the most neatly choreographed, is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s politically savvy Alien Clay, in which humans encounter an ecosystem where every macro-organisam is a temporary col­laboration between numerous and varied sub-species, but I personally would give the edge to Greg Egan’s less kinetic but typically rigorous Morphotropic, which opens in a world where a similar principle already defines human biol­ogy, and takes off in exploratory fashion from there. That leaves the fantasy-horror satire of The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre by Cho Yeeun (translated by Yewon Jung) as only the third best novel I read in 2024 to feature bodies dissolving into goo; but the competition was surprisingly strong. In the other direction – enhancing base humans rather than breaking them down into component parts – was Hannu Rajaniemi’s Darkome, an extremely readable thriller about biohacking that also has, by the standards of the contemporary genre, an unusual amount of faith in the Silicon Valley future. That is to say, alongside its suggestion that extraordinary human capabilities could be unlocked by biotechnology, it is unabashed to depict a world in which generative AI brings benefits as well as harms, a viewpoint echoed in Richard Powers’s Playground. I think that aspect of the latter novel has been under-discussed, likely in part because Playground was marketed primarily as doing for the ocean what his earlier The Overstory did for trees, and it does do that, or come close. But I wonder whether Powers’s admirable desire to challenge our sense of “human nature” and how special we may or may not be has led him astray in this instance.

Longer-view examination of whether human nature has an enduring unique essence could be found in two of the most haunting novels I read, both mosaics that create far-future ep­ics in under 300 pages. Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (trans­lated by Asa Yoneda) was a revelation to me, as someone who only knew her contemporary-set novels. It describes the societies that emerge when, after a catastrophe, different groups of hu­mans are isolated and selectively bred for thousands of years to accelerate the development of variant species. God­game selective breeding cropped up in a couple of other books as well – it’s in the MacLeod trilogy, where aliens relocate parts of earth’s biosphere to other planets, and it’s in the background of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s ambi­tious drowned-Lagos novella Lost Ark Dream­ing – but Kawakami’s novel stood out to me for its range, at times eerie and austere, at times humane and piercingly insightful. I think it hasn’t had nearly the attention that it deserves. Meanwhile Anton Hur – probably best known as a translator, in particular of Bora Chung’s sharp, strange stories, as in this year’s strong collection Your Utopia – also dealt with radical posthumanity in his first novel, Toward Eternity. In the near future, a few test subjects have their physical body transformed by nanites as a last-ditch can­cer therapy; in gracefully told exponentiating episodes, the technology transforms the destiny of humanity. It is unashamedly emotive, a love letter to the intersections of art and science, and an argument for human consciousness as a story that can endure no matter what form it inhabits. If Kawakami’s is in large part a deeply rewarding novel for the head, Hur’s tilts with painful success for the heart.

My story so far – with these two novels, with my British triptych, with For the People’s Glory, with the philosophy of Roberts and MacLeod, the biology of Tchaikovsky and Egan – is of a year in in which many writers investigated the line between the specific and the systemic, between individual humans and the greater forces shaping them. Emet North’s In Universes is perhaps the book I read that is most invested, even more than Toward Eternity, in the resilience of an identity; together they strike me as two of the more important queer novels of the year. A mosaic of character, rather than story, In Uni­verses relentlessly investigates who its protagonist is, and how their identity relates to their situation and to their body, as the eye of the novel skates across a varied and fantastical multiverse. Some of the chapters remain among my favourite short stories, and favourite worlds, of the year (including some human-animal transformations that would fit with the bio-SF discussed earlier). Looking for works where the balance tilts the other way, I might pick as friendly contrast a novel like Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence. A provocative and intricate investigation of class struggle, and law as the bridge between the human and the historical, Bhatia’s novel builds to a crux moment of character, idea, and circumstance with an inexorability that reminded me of an unfolding psychohistorical crisis, the indi­vidual subordinate to their context. And for further exploration of the role of the individual in history, paired with more deliberate investigation of the boundar­ies between different narrative modes, it’s worth seeking out Minsoo Kang’s The Melancholy of Untold History and Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One. The former is an elegant, clever novel, part fable of gods and kings, part literary tale of adultery and midlife crisis; the latter an intricate clockwork puzzle, presenting a fantastical quest as an exemplary twenty-first century text that is being interpreted for us, via footnotes, by a future academic. Both are fun­damentally about how narratives become im­bued with meaning; they can be read, I think, as taking opposing sides of that old debate, with the former insisting the author gets a say, the latter that it can only be the reader. Read them both and read them together.

I’ll end with another triptych, more inter­national than the first, of novels that think about how stories cross the boundaries of culture. In the beautiful, ruminative We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, third-culture Scot­tish writer Lorraine Wilson imagines the life of an photojournalist-turned-herbalist with Indian heritage in near-future Estonia, after the internet has crashed and suffused the world with electronic ghosts. The story that results is suffused with loss, but salved by the ability of humans to connect, reforming networks and recreating communities across lines of dif­ference. Swedish writer Johannes Anyuru has spoken about how he has felt – been made to feel – the presence of lines of difference in his own life, growing up as the child of a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother; his compelling second novel, Ixelles (trans. Nichola Smalley), is not directly biographical but delineates fault lines in an Antwerp district home to many first- and second-generation immigrants with insight and skill. It’s a novel I would label as slipstream, if anyone still believed in that term; it made me think of Blue Ant-era Gibson (one char­acter’s job is to create a kind of artisanal astroturf “interventions,” inventing people with detailed backstories who can be played by actors at in-person community meetings), and Nina Allan’s existential crime novels (another char­acter seems to speak from beyond the grave on a series of gold CDs of unclear provenance), and it left me feeling very strange, the way living in the third decade of the 21st century makes me feel. Chillier than Wilson’s novel, and I think more pessimistic, Ixelles shares with We Are All Ghosts in the Forest a conviction that stories matter, that who tells them matters; and there is no more powerful demonstration of that principle than the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s magiste­rial Praiseworthy, follow up to her impressive dystopian The Swan Book (2013). It is, among many other things, the story of one man against the world, a larger-than-life figure embarking on a scheme to save his people and push back a toxic haze that is itself a larger-than-life literali­sation of the colonialist capitalist world-system in the Anthropocene. The novel takes place in a heightened reality, conjured with an astonish­ingly dextrous voice that is by turns passionate, acerbic, casual, erudite, smooth, awkward, prolix, pithy, funny, serious, and every other human quality you can name. Praiseworthy is a novel that revels in specificity but effortlessly encompasses systems, which is to say a novel that somehow makes the current world feel graspable after all. I’m going to hold on to that feeling for as long as I can.

This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.