Speculiction's Awards - Best Fiction Published in 2025

And the years go by.

2025 has ended. Time to look back at the books published and consumed this year, here in the bustling offices of Speculiction. But first some comments on the meta.

In parallel with broader social phenomenon, the female influence on speculative fiction is huge, if not the majority. Female authors are performing extremely well on the market. Female authors are performing extremely well in awards and recognition. And women in general have a strong foothold on the largest media platforms associated with the genre: content creators, YouTube, awards committees, Locus, etc. Compared to speculative fiction of the 20th century, the gender pendulum has swung to the other side. We're living in a time women hold clear power in the field.

In keeping, neoliberal (neomarxist?) politics continue to heavily influence speculative fiction. While I think we've seen the peak, and are moving past the peak, there is no shortage of token homosexuals, ethnicity tagging, or females wielding indomitable power in spec fic. There is no shortage of weight being thrown behind books which agree with the neoliberal agenda, from the authors themselves to the content of their work. And yes, the number of girls holding swords on book covers has not abated. Finding recommended books which do not go out of their way to highlight the left's virtues is difficult.

I normally also like to remark on the right, to say something like ”With the dominance of the left, the right has been pushed to the background.” But this is not entirely true for the simple reason there are relatively few writers who overtly put ”right” politics into their fiction. It's mostly writers who state their right-leaning politics on social media who are pushed to the background, and by default writers whose politics are moderate (i.e. uncommitted to the left). Polarizing times, indeed.

Likewise, we continue to live in ubiquity. Thousands of genre novels and short stories were published in 2025. Readers are spoiled rotten when it comes to options for speculative fiction. Genre boundaries blown apart years ago, everything bleeds into everything else, meaning the reader can find a niche to call their own and few others will have heard of it. If there is a cultural bubble, it did not pop this year.

On to the fiction.

In total, Speculiction read twelve works of speculative fiction published in 2025, several of which are recommendable. In fact, we struggled to narrow down the list of honorable mentions. There is a solid handful which are worth reading (regardless the prestige and luminous glory of Speculiction awards, natch). We will highlight four honorable mentions.

First is Daryl Gregory's When We Were Real. Removing the red-pill option from a human digitial simulation, Gregory tells the stories of a bus full of tourists going to visit glitches in ”the matrix”. Each person confronts the reality of their simulated life differently, and the novel ends on an interestingly realist perspective despite the setting. Second is Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption. A perfect beach read, you'd better hope you have another book ready to read when you finish this Weird murder mystery in just a couple days. Smell, chemicals, memory, logic—all combine in this Holmes-and-Watson-esque secondary-world whodunnit. Bennett has slowly honed his writing over the years to better focus on critical pieces, something this novel displays in spades. Thirdly is Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel. It's a paean to nerd culture with a warm, beating, hilarious human heart. Another way of putting this is, Michel captures a quasi-psychopath in sympathetic terms while paying wink-wink homage to pop culture. Overall, a highly entertaining novel that never lets its nerdom escape reality. And last honorable mention is Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket. Despite being in his 80s, Pynchon is still Pynchon. His command and deployment of the English language is still second to none. His ability to lay sleepers of theme beneath the railroad tracks of story is still as subtle and effective as it ever was. And his knack for perpetually zigging and zagging a story through the waters of unpredictability is uncanny. He's a master at work, and Shadow Ticket's usage of a 1930s gangster Milwaukee to parallel contemporary socio-political concerns is among the best fiction we read in 2025.

Drum roll, please. The best novel Speculiction encountered in the wilds of 2025's fiction is Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Originally published in Poland in 2007, it took almost two decades to get a translation of a novel many Poles would consider untranslateable. Lengthy—ahem, let me try that again. Insanely long (1,200 pages), Ice is not for the faint of heart. Dukaj does give the reader plenty of reason to push through the pages, however. There is a Tolstoy-an outlook to scope, a Lem-ish perspective on imagination, and a central idea that glues the entire enterprise together into a solid chunk of fiction. It's set in an alternate early 20th century in which World War I never took place. Poland is still ruled by the Russians, and a Polish student student finds himself forced to go to Siberia to investigate the disappearance of his father, a man many think is subversive at best, revolutionary at worst. Political adventure ensues, with no shortage of weird and wild things happening with the gleiss ice that moves semi-sentiently across the land. HUGE, but worth it.

Here is a full breakdown of the twelve books, broken down by stars.

5.0

N/A

4.5

N/A

4.0

Ice by Jacek Dukaj – Part Leo Tolstoy, part Stanislaw Lem, and all icy cold, this alternate 20th century history is a massive glacier of story. What if WWI never happened, Ice puts a student sent to the colds of Siberia to find his father front and center, uncovering all manner of political intrigue and uncanny natural phenomenon along the way. Dukaj weaves in philosophy and (real-world) history to create a dense, winding tale that leaves a freezing mark.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon – At eighty-eight years old (?), nobody expected Thomas Pynchon to come out with another novel. And yet in 2025 here we are. Leaning into the noir of Inherent Vice, Pynchon magically parallels an early-1930s' Depression-era Milwaukee with our current socio-political chaos. And he does so using all the magic he is known for—alliteration, dynamic plotting, colorful diction, brilliant characters, and an eye perpetually in the back of his head to relevant theme. It's not Pynchon's strongest novel, but anything by Pynchon is better than the majority of other books.

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel – Metallic Realms is the story of a lonely nerd who becomes infatuated by a group of writers who write pulp science fiction. Idolzing them, he does his best to ingratiate himself with the group, to help them be successful, and to live his own life in the process, resulting in a slow train wreck. In colorful, highly entertinaing fashion which rewards both pop culture and literary interests, Michel captures the humanity of his nerd in a way we can all relate to—a great hybrid novel.

When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory - First is Daryl Gregory's When We Were Real. Technically post-apocalyptic though anything but, the book tells the stories of a bus full of people on a cross-country journey to visit anomalies in reality. The book is post-apocalyptic as it's been revealed to humanity that we are indeed living in a digital simulation—without a red-pill option—and the glitches one would expect in a computer program or video game environment make for sightseeing pleasure in the characters' world.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett – Though a sequel to The Tainted Cup, A Drop of Corruption is a stand-alone story set in the same leviathan world and features the same main characters, the engraver Dinos Kol and his preternaturally intelligent boss, Ana Dolabra. The Tainted Cup was a wonderfully entertaining read, and A Drop of Corruption somehow tops it. The color, the smell, the darting movements of the plot, the whodunnit—Bennett writes immininently readable fiction.

3.5

The Rose Field by Philip Pullman – Third and final book in The Book of Dust trilogy, and likely final novel in the His Dark Materials... setting, The Rose Field tells the other half of The Secret Commonwealth in wonderfully adventurous fashion. The original His Dark Materials trilogy will likely go down in history as the better series, but Pullman's writing ability, sense of tension and drama, and evocative imagination remain in full effect here. He perhaps hits theme too square on the nose, pulling the curtain back to reveal some of the tricks he's kept secret in the series to date. But as a reading specimen, the pages turn, and turn quickly.

Making History by K.J. Parker – A confection of a novella, Making History takes an element of authoritarianism and plays it out in a secondary world. Historian ____ and fellow academics are tasked with creating a false history – money, languagee, artefacts, ruins, etc. - all the pieces needed to create the pretense of war with a neighboring kingdom. Parker writes sharp, effective prose, and the moral of the story is effectively snarky. But there is little substance beyond.

3.0

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson – The Raven Scholar will likely be up for many mainstream awards in 2026. It has the court drama, the romantic elements, and the sweeping story the majority of fantasy readers in 2025 seem to prefer. Hodgson's prose is often creamy smooth and her continual focus on character, internal to external, keep the reader looking for that proximity, engaged. The story goes through the paces one might expect of such an outlay, which is the (big) strike against it.

Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler – In reviewing Where the Axe Is Buried I described the novel as the left's worst fears come true: Trump finds a way to copy his consciousness into clones and becomes a perpetual dictator. The rest of the West moves on and elects AI as their leaders, letting the machines make the tough decisions—resource austerity, economic management, etc. Beneath it all a group of hackers look to make their mark on the global scene. If intentions matched execution, this would be a great novel. Nayler's technique, however, lacks the degree of sublety needed to make this human fiction, and after science fiction. Moreover, there are some thematic conflicts that are not resolved, e.g. AI leaders are different than dictators?

Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway – A surprise sequel to Titanium Noir, Harkaway reenters the world he created where the rich have the option of super-sizing their bodies into seven-foot behemoths towering over the average person. A murder has taken place on the beaches of a former resort town, and our detective Cal Sounder must sort out the whos and whys. Harkaway is known for his dynamic, engaging prose, but this novel feels more tiring than energizing. Fans of sci-fi noir may disagree.

Era of Ruin anthology by various – A surprise of sorts, Era of Ruin forms an epilogue of sorts to the Siege of Terra series, and to the Horus Heresy as a whole. Where The End & the Death focused on the final showdown between Horus and the Emperor, traitors and loyalists, Era of Ruin organizes the debris in eight stories. It closes off a few minor story lines left open and links the Heresy to the larger 40k universe—the Astra Militarum, Chaos marines, the Mechanicum, and of course, who sits the throne.

2.5

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay – Kay on auto-pilot, this spot of romantasy has pretentions of being Literature but possesses too many cheap plot points and too much purple prose to warrant the size of the L. The book is ostensibly the biography of a famous tavern poet, but its intentions are foggy. It would seem Kay wants the reader to think the novel is bittersweet humanism, when in reality it's a stab at capturing the current market, i.e. commercial success.

2.0

N/A

1.5

N/A

1.0

N/A

0.5

N/A