Book Review: “The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024” by Hugh Howey (Guest Editor) and John Joseph Adams (Series Editor)

Simply the Best

Zachary Houle
4 min readNov 3, 2024
“The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024” Book Cover
“The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024” Book Cover

Back when I was writing my weird brand of science fiction, I regularly submitted my work to what I considered to be the big-name magazines that published such work: Asimov’s, Interzone, On Spec, etc. I got turned down at each magazine — though I once got a friendly rejection letter from Asimov’s. Even though I submitted to these places regularly, I wasn’t reading any of their short stories. (Which, of course, may say something about why I was getting turned down.) That makes The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 so important. If you’re hurried for time and can’t read through the usual SF and fantasy magazines, you get the best of the best, the cream of the crop here. Based on the book’s introduction, this volume takes the 20 best short stories published in the SF and fantasy fields in 2023. It splits them even between the genres: 10 science fiction stories and 10 fantasy stories. That makes for a very generous helping of fiction, and this should appeal to anyone who wants to keep dibs on what’s being published out there. Also of note is that this collection is relatively evenly split between more well-known or established writers (such as Sam J. Miller and Amal El-Mohtar) and names you probably haven’t heard of.

Of course, with a collection such as this one, a person’s favorites are probably based on subjectivity. What I might like could very well differ from what you might like. However, even if a story or two doesn’t resonate with you (I disliked the hard SF stories, for instance, though I could see the intelligence behind these stories and understood why they were included), there’s bound to be something that you’ll enjoy if you keep reading. My favorites from this collection were usually, and strangely, rooted more towards the horror end of the spectrum. There’s plenty here for those who like their gore: Grady Hendrix’s “Ankle Snatcher,” which is about the creatures that live under the bed, is delightfully scary, though it easily could have been cut in half and have more of a chilling effect. Then there’s Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye & Tooth,” a piece about a pair of monster hunters that is begging to be expanded. (Roanhorse, though relatively established, is an author worth watching as she has two pieces in this collection.) And then there’s P. Djèlí Clark’s “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub,” which turns the tables on Victorian British colonialism of subjects from India. These stories do something to subvert the usual horror tropes — and they’re a great deal of fun, too.

However, there are other standouts from this book as well. P. A. Cornell’s unusual time-travel story, “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” about a woman from the present day who falls in love with a serviceman from the American outbreak of World War II, is touching, bittersweet and sad, even if it has something of a happy ending. “John Hollowback and the Witch,” a story by fellow Ottawa, Canada, resident Amal El-Mohtar, is a beguiling tale of a man who has been cursed to have a hole in his back and the steps he entails to try and reverse the curse. Similarly, Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s “Bruised-Eye Dusk” is a rip-roaring fantasy tale set in a land not unlike the swamps of the southern U.S., where a man who can break spells tries to save a small village from a curse. As you can see, for me, the more vital tales in this collection hewed to the fantasy side of things. While there are standouts among the SF stuff in this book, including Roanhorse’s “Falling Bodies,” which has a shocking ending, it tended to be the weaker of the material for me — particularly as a lot of it was jargon-filled and written in a way for the reader to try and parse between the lines as to what is being said. The main offender is the lone Asimov’s story here: Christopher Rowe’s “The Four Last Things.” I had no idea what the piece was about, and, to me, it wasn’t entirely memorable — though your mileage may vary.

One of the things that delighted me about this collection was the number of stories that featured queer characters as protagonists in this. V. M. Ayala’s “Emotional Resonance” goes so far as to have gay robots as its main characters. So there’s a lot to dig into here, and, again, my favorite stories might not be your favorite stories, which is all the more reason to search this collection out and see for yourself. Of course, there are other standouts here, but I would be remiss to name them all. Ultimately, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 is a fantastic collection and a sign pointing to where the science fiction and fantasy genres are going. Reading this may stir your creative juices and get you to try writing fiction (again). However, if this collection proves anything important, if you try to write your own stories, you must also read others’ stories to see what’s being done with the genre. That was my fatal mistake; don’t let it be yours. Most of the stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 hit home runs, and you’ll have a whale (if not a Kraken) of a time reading this. This is excellent stuff.

Hugh Howey’s and John Joseph Adam’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 was published by Mariner Books on October 22, 2024.

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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com

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Zachary Houle
Zachary Houle

Written by Zachary Houle

Book critic by night, technical writer by day. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.

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