2025 In Review
Me
I hope 2025 has treated you alright, whether you are a reader, writer, gymnast or life guard. If you are none of the above, then I expect it was tolerable, but really, if you weren’t reading/writing/jumping off a big mat/guarding actual lives, then I can’t help you.
As I said in my awards eligibility post, 2025 has been a good year — a big year — for my writing. I had five stories released, and if you are reading for awards purposes, I would remain very flattered if you considered them. I like them all but people have been especially kind to Four People and to Numismatic Archetypes. Both were highlighted by Tarvolon in his (excellent as ever) review of the year, which feels pretty unreal.
Probably my favourite thing about 2025 has been building connections with the wider spec fic community. I live in Scotland and previously I had felt a bit cut off from the wider speculative scene. This year I met with an editor in person, made friends with a whole heap of writers online, and made this site. I’m so grateful to the people who got in touch via the contact form, or social media — each instance has absolutely made my day. I never really imagined anyone would read my stories. The fact that people do is shocking and delightful, and I’m fairly sure some sort of prank.
Thar prank seems to be getting more and more elaborate, though. This year I saw (amazing) fan art for Fishing the Intergalactic Stream, the same story was included in the Hugo packet for Neil Clarke as ‘Editor: Short Form’, and a kind reader got in touch to recommend Numismatic Archetypes for an award at the World Fair of Money — an award which it later won. Sentences like that would have sounded absurd on December 31 2024, and in honesty they still sound absurd now.
Oh, and also for Christmas I received tiny handbound copies of my Clarkesworld stories to hang on the Christmas tree, which will forever be the best present I ever get (ever).
Other People
There have been so many great stories released this year. I didn’t read as broadly as I would like, but a few highlights (all from Clarkesworld) that I would absolutely recommend to anyone playing catch-up as award season begins:
Celestial Migrations by Claire Jia-Wen. The prose and imagery of this story have lingered with me for nearly a full year now. The interlocking voices, the lack of easy answers…it’s a jewel.
Outlier by R.L. Meza. A brilliantly horrible story, efficient and knife-sharp. I can still feel that stomach-dropping dread when I remember it.
The Stone Played at Tengen by R.H. Wesley. I love cosmic mystery, and this story uses a simple and beautiful premise to tell a character story shot through with unknowability and strangeness.
I’ll give a single novel recommendation too: There is No Antimemetrics Division by Qntm, which was just so absurdly My Thing. It reminded me of reading The Raw Shark Texts for the first time, the dizzying, accelerating opening of a world you had never even conceptualised before.
Finally I’d also like say a sad farewell to Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, who took one of my first stories, The Cow in My Mind. Andromeda was the first publication I ever set myself as goal, after seeing it listed as first publication in the copyright notices of a book of Robert Shearman stories. It’s a hard time to be a short fiction magazine, and we need to show our support while we still can.
Up Next
In the next few days I should have a dark mirror of this post — my 2026 look-ahead. Look out for sabre-tooth cats, lonely fridges, and a winged fossil in a city full of sand.