We’re closing out this strange year with a “big-picture” episode: editor & critic Dan Hartland is on to talk about trends and directions—or lack thereof—in recent speculative fiction. We talk about the interesting spread of books & awards this year, do some armchair speculating about genre shifts & their accompanying arguments, and have some very insider-baseball discussion of what gets reviewed (or not) and why. And, of course, Dan and Casella talk about their favorite reads from 2025.

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• Guest: Dan Hartland
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Critical Friends podcast
• Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence
• Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall
• Award spread this year- see for instance SFADB
• Article on UK romantasy sales numbers
• Romantasy, LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, Baen Books
• Locus
• SFT= Speculative Fiction in Translation
• Strange Horizons issue on the NEA cuts and SFT
• Richard K. Morgan
• Orbus by Neal Asher
• Jenny Hamilton’s work at Reactor
• AO3= Archive Of Our Own
• When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift
• Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
• Niall Harrison’s review of Swift
• William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy
• Hugboxing vs Scab-Picking
• H.G. Wells
• Sylvia Park's Luminous
• Eva Meijer’s Sea Now, tr. Anne Thompson Melo
• The Booker Prize
• “Prestige TV in the Time of Climate Change” by Sarah Miller
• The Sopranos & Breaking Bad
• The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
• Hannah Arendt & Baruch Spinoza
• John Wyndham & J.G. Ballard
• The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, tr. Sarah Moses
• Becky Chambers
• Colourfields by Paul Kincaid
• Margaret Killjoy's A Country of Ghosts
• The Expansion Project by Ben Pester
• The Goldsmiths Prize
• Olga Ravn's The Employees
• Jeff VanderMeer's Area X
• Ned Beauman
• BSFA short SF in translation award
• Translated Hugo Initiative
• Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, tr. Rahul Berry
• Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors
• Christopher Priest
• Debbie Urbanski's Portalmania
• Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
• Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others
• Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids
• Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis
• Kelly Link, George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Elwin Cotman
• Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das
• Countess by Suzan Palumbo
• Annie Bot by Sierra Grier
• Erika Swyler's We Lived On The Horizon
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, Premee Mohamed
• Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms
• Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams