For our last post of 2024, each of the Skiffy & Fanty blog contributors has provided some reflections on some of our favorite things that genre gave us this last year. Please let us know about yours, and we’ll see you again in 2025!
TRISH
Inevitably, once this goes live, I’ll think of other things I should have mentioned. All I can do now is apologize in advance to whatever I’ve neglected.
Nonfiction: A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith, which discusses the feasibility (or rather, not) of settling Mars with current or near-future technology. Unfortunately, there are great challenges to be overcome, which make this a distant possibility, but the Weinersmiths leaven this depressing conclusion throughout with illustrations and humor.
RPGs: I really enjoyed playing Star Trek Adventures and Stargate earlier this year, but they’ve been on hiatus for months. My favorite new game is a role-playing game campaign using adapted rules from Cold City: Hot War (https://handiwork.games/cold-city-hot-war) but set in London a few months after the Martian invasion in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The campaign is called Thunderchild, and everyone in the party has the overt agenda of working for an agency seeking to gather up Martian technology and keep it out of the hands of the Wrong People, but each of us has a hidden agenda. I’m playing the daughter of an industrialist and secret suffragette (well, obviously a suffragette, but I’ve concealed how radical my character is); we also have a royal nth-cousin who’s angling toward the throne, a journalist who’s secretly a spy, and a spy who’s secretly an anarchist. I met the GM and players via the Discord for The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, and I’m having a blast with the yes-and cooperative play (well, the Players are cooperating to create a good game/story, although the Characters are at odds).
But since none of my dear readers can check out this game, instead I recommend checking out Jason Thompson’s Dreamlands, which can be as imaginative as you want to make it.
Podcasts: The happiest surprise this year has been Season 11 of Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast. A factual history podcast until now (Duncan was famed for his The History of Rome podcast before Revolutions), it has become a future-history recounting of the Martian Revolution. He’s taking all the dreadful lessons provided by past real revolutions, looking at current economic and political trends, and using them to weave a sardonic yet convincing and compelling narrative of how things might go in the future. (Subtle salutes to other Martian fiction writers include naming a corporate division after Kim Stanley Robinson.)
Videos: I haven’t watched many movies this year, mainly assigned viewing for Skiffy and Fanty shows and Hugo voting. I enjoyed individual episodes of “First Level” and “What If?” but found each series a bit spotty. I loved “Agatha All Along” except that I found the final episode a bit disturbing, since I didn’t think she did nearly enough to deserve what happened at the end.
Science Fiction Novels: Shockingly, I don’t seem to have read much pure science fiction, without any fantasy elements, in the last year. I’m making an effort to include more in my 2025 selections. I thought Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, was absolutely great; I’d passed it up in the library because it looked like fairly standard Chosen One milSF, but gave it another chance when it was nominated for a Hugo, and wow, I’m glad I did! The initially arrogant main character goes through a huge amount of learning and growth, and the shifts in reality are mind-blowing. It deserved its win for Best Novel.
I also really enjoyed what eventually became a Lodestar nominee, Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer; it stirred a lot of interesting thoughts and comparisons, which I wrote up for Skiffy and Fanty.
Science Fantasy Novels: I adored Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk; it’s the third in a series, but you don’t need to have read the previous books to dive into this one. As I said in my review here, “This is a fantastic near-future book that combines magic and hopepunk with vibrant, joyful optimism, where a diverse community works together to survive and thrive as an independent cooperative amid an increasingly corpocratic world.”
I also thought Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa was really good. It seemed at first to be pure dystopian fiction (civilization has retreated into partly submerged towers), and was good at that and at characterization, but fantastic elements eventually made their presence known.
Fantasy: Equally great in very different ways were The Naming Song, by Jedediah Berry, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell, and To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose (which won the 2024 Lodestar). Each book has a strong focus on identity, and who gets to define that, and how and whether a recipient of labels can accept that, hide, or resist how they’re perceived, and how sometimes unexpected allies can be found, and bonds of community can be formed. Wiswell’s book is full of wicked humor; Berry’s features perhaps more thoughtful questionings; Blackgoose’s is strong, smart, and proud; each is pretty amazing, depending on what mood you want to explore.
PAUL
2024 was a year rich in much SFF content. There was always something new to read, to watch and to experience in the land of speculative genre.
Books: I might as well start with the trickiest one that I consume the most of. I read a lot and figuring out a Hugo ballot, much less my single favorite book is always a challenge. I am going to land on Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, one of the most unique and strange visions of a post apocalyptic world that I have ever seen. One might think of this as science fantasy, or allegory, the world where words are only brought back into the world when they are defined is a weird one, and how this society tries, and fails, and tries again to avoid the mistakes of the previous and not well remembered prior civilization (us!) is instructive. Plus at its heart its about a woman searching desperately for her sister, a tangible human connection and bond that can carry the reader through this weird world.
Audio Books: I listen to a fair number of books in audio. Usually in the case of SFF these are re-reads but not always. Some books are magnificent in audio as their first time, and I am going to land on Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil. It’s a fantastic and immersive production of Brennan’s work, where she depicts a woman dying of cancer who is sucked into the world of her sister’s favorite book series. Problem is, she doesn’t remember all that much about the books as she should. Even worse problem: she has been put into the body of a minor villainness who is due to be executed the next day. This is a novel that is all about the meta, deconstructing and interrogating a whole slew of fantasy tropes, with a narrator who works harmoniously with the text.
Movies: I’ve not seen many first run movies this year. I don’t got to the theater much anymore and the wide landscape of streaming and the fractured nature of platforms means I miss things, all the time. I am going to land here on Dune: Part Two as my favorite new movie of 2024. Dune: Part 2 takes even more liberties with the original text than does the first movie, but it completes the dangling participle of the first movie and gives us a complete experience of the original book by its end. I feel Dune is going to be one of those properties that is just going to be remade again and again. It has different strengths and weaknesses than the 1984 Dune, but is worth watching, just as that one is.
Television Shows: Much of the television I’ve watched in 2024 were limited run series. One of my very favorites was toward the end of the year, with Agatha All Along. Although I didn’t expect to fall for it so hard as I did, Kathryn Hahn’s performance and immersion into the role took a sudden reveal at the end of Wandavision and turned her into a complex character who still has an overriding single goal in life, but with a lot of style and verve. Hahn acts her heart out in the series, and it shows.
RPGs: I didn’t get to play much *new* RPGs this year, in terms of systems, all the games I played were systems I have encountered before. I have been highly enjoying Planescape: Turn of Fortune’s Wheel, a multiverse D&D RPG run by Christiana Ellis. By its basic nature, I and the other players have had a chance to play multiple alternate versions of our characters, and I’ve gone from Rangers to clerics to warlock, to, finally, a cleric again. (I DO have a type). It’s a fantastically run idea by Ellis, and as we are closing in on the finale, I have had a lot of fun with it.
Video Games: Since I finished it in 2024, I am going to solidly hit the Hugo Award winning Baldur’s Gate III, which is the modern heir to all of the goldbox and other D&D games over the years. It has a great storyline, excellent characters, rich environments and really only suffers a bit of a letdown after a can’t-be-topped first act. It’s a game I finished and have played a a bit of with a variety of other characters, the replayability is rather surprisingly strong, because it is impossible to find and reach everything on a single run through.
Favorite re-consumption of a classic: In 2024, I got myself a nice and new and fresh BluRay version of one of my heart shows, The Prisoner. Over the last couple of months I’ve been spoon feeding myself episodes, commentaries, documentaries and more from the collection. The series is as wild, weird, and self contradictory as ever. And rewatching it still makes me want to visit Portmeirion sometime. In an uncertain world, with mysterious governmental and other forces causing all sorts of chaos, and threatening authoritarianism everywhere, the world of The Prisoner feels more relevant than ever before. McGoohan saw…clearly.
Be seeing you!
CAM
Here are some of my favorite short stories from 2024.
“A Saint Between The Teeth” by Sloane Leong (published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 164): In this story, set in an alien world with alien creatures, Kharatet is a carnivore who needs to eat not just other creatures, but sentient, intelligent creatures. Kharatet isn’t happy about that, but his meal genuinely wants to be eaten and has good arguments for it. It’s a deeply weird and alien story about the ethics of carnivores. Read my full review of it here: Short Fiction Review: January 2024.
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (published in Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 209): This story responds to and builds off of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s horrific (just read the title), but it is also intelligent, inventive, and honestly quite playful. Read my full review of it here: Short Fiction Review: February 2024.
“A Magical Correspondence, to the Tune of Heartstrings” by Valerie Valdes (published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 57): This is a cozy romance about a busy woman trying to fit in just one more thing — in this case, a correspondence course in witchcraft. The setting feels like classic medieval fantasy, but thematically, it struck me as quite modern and relatable. Read my full review of it here: Short Fiction Review: March – April 2024.
“The Ex Hex” by Jae Steinbacher (published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 172): In this story, a witch tries to hex their ex in a fury of vengeance, screws up the spell in the process, and then needs to make it right. The story is firmly rooted in restorative justice and community reparations, and it’s got fun characters with delightful dialog. Read my full review of it here: Short Fiction Review: September 2024.
“A Most Lovely Song” by Albert Chu (published in PodCastle Episode 861): In this tale, a talking bird accompanies a Chinese boy and his descendants through times of war and protest, but the bird isn’t as altruistic as it first seems. It’s a moving and urgent story that challenges its readers to remain sensitive to violence, to war, and to colonialism. Read my full review of it here: Short Fiction Review: October 2024.
DANIEL
I’ve never felt much of a need to watch or read something immediately upon its release, so these year-end ruminations always felt somewhat limiting. I end up consuming more older or recent things than those brand-new. So here are ruminations on things both from 2024 and some that I just happened to finally get to in 2024.
Movies: This has been a year of focusing on horror for me. I got a Shudder subscription and discovered The Last Drive in with Joe Bob Briggs. Given my love of MST3K and movies in general, I was surprised never to have heard of the Joe Bob persona and shows before. (Probably because they were on a channel that showed only edited movies.) So I’ve been diving into and loving the hosted movies available, both good and bad, with the great commentary. Shudder also has allowed me to watch the V/H/S franchise, which I’ve greatly enjoyed. I’ve now seen all of them except the new 2024 release. The one thing of new releases I have kept up with in the last months were theatrical horror releases. I just saw Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, and I’m still processing it too much to call it a favorite. Instead, I’d say Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo stands out as the most memorable film I’ve caught. It’s bonkers in all the right ways, interesting, and creepy. In prep of seeing MaXXXine, I watched Pearl. On its own Pearl is fantastic. MaXXXine seems to be the least favored film of Ti West’s trilogy with Mia Goth. On its own I get that. But as the capstone to the trilogy I thought it was brilliant. I’m hoping to write something for the blog in 2025 on the entire trilogy. Finally, hands-down the biggest joy and surprise favorite for me this year wasn’t horror, but a mash-up of Buster Keaton, Looney Tunes, and video games. Hundreds of Beavers is not to be missed, and you can watch it free on Tubi. Everyone should watch it, and I think we should cover it for At the Movies. No, Shaun, it is not a porno.
Short Fiction: Prior to 2024 I had kept up with a large chunk of SF, Fantasy, and Horror short fiction for two-and-a-half decades, with subscriptions to all the major short fiction markets. This past year it finally became just too much to keep up with. And, it seems as though printed material was on such a severe continued decline that it no longer felt worth it. I’m not a fan in general of streaming, or ebooks/ezines. I prefer physical media always and forever. The printed SFF magazines have become so infrequent and unreliable in release/shipping that I let them go, and dropped everything else along with it. This is also the year where I cancelled my last remaining magazine subscription. I’ve had National Geographic since I was in junior high school. But its quality and content have steadily declined like so much else. I then discovered they’d recently fired almost all their staff writers. Yet another reason I must beg everyone to stop supporting the Mouse. All that being said, I’m incredibly grateful for Cam and the short fiction reviews he brings to the blog to give them the attention they deserve.
Books: Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo and Unraveling each got a gorgeous re-release from Del Rey this year, and that gave me the opportunity to read these for the first time. Though I wasn’t on the podcast recording with Shaun and Brandon talking to Karen, I will be featuring the series on what’s scheduled to be our first blog post of 2025. I adored this duology in what they share and what contrasts them as unique, and I found their central theme very meaningful. I’m convinced that Karen Lord is brilliant, and these novels really demonstrate it. This year I also treated myself to the collection of Paperbacks from Hell from Valancourt Press. I’ve been loving these so far, and have been featuring them here on the blog as I read them. As far as new releases for 2024, there are three that stood out to me and offered genre variety, all which I reviewed or interviewed the author for on the blog. First is Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice. I really enjoyed the indigenous perspective on a post-apocalypse in this novel and its predecessor. Second would be the deliciously creepy and atmospheric Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud. I’m hoping 2025 will be when I finally get a copy of his North American Lake Monsters collection to read. Finally for space opera would be On Vicious Worlds by Bethany Jacobs, the second novel in a series with thrills, twists, and heart. I’d also give an honorable mention shout-out in this category to Alex White’s Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye.
Television: What exactly constitutes a TV show anymore? With so much of streaming being limited series that seem more like extended movies, or shows that have abandoned any episodic structure, I find myself preferring to watch DVDs of older TV shows now far more than watching things new. I finished watching The Rockford Files and Wings, and discovered a British procedural called Wycliffe that was enjoyable. The one new show that caught me this past year would have to be Ghosts, particularly the original UK version. The still-running US version is good, but I vastly prefer the subtlety and humor of the British one. Without a Robin character to ground things, the US one often feels a bit hollow. But regardless, the two versions have both brought lots of smiles in rough times. I’m looking forward to soon watching the final season of What We Do in the Shadows that aired in 2024, right after I finish up the second season of Daryl Dixon. My resolution for 2025: Finally watch Babylon Five and/or Farscape.
DUKE
I had a pretty light year for reading/watching. Pretty much everyone knows why: job market + moving twice + tripling my family’s size = omg what is time. So much of this year was spent reading things for Skiffy and Fanty or resorting to comfort watches, with only a few exceptions. Even new things I started at some point in the year didn’t get finished (The Acolyte…). Plus, I now watch things with my wife, and our mutual viewing interests are relatively narrow! Here we go…
Movies: While I did a lot of rewatching this year for my own amusement, I was also fortunate to have excuses to rewatch some films I hadn’t seen in a while or watch films I’d missed that I’ve been meaning to get to. Skiffy and Fanty (and Daniel) are to blame…
Some examples of the first group: The Mummy (1999) and Independence Day (1996) are films we watched for Totally Pretentious and happen to be two of my favorite films ever made for similar reasons. I’d recommend them to anyone! We also rewatched Galaxy Quest (1999) (this 90s thing was not intentional…), which is a film I have rewatched more times than I can count. I also rewatched Total Recall (1990) because I love that move so much.
Some examples of the second group: Ringu (1998) is a Japanese horror film I’ve wanted to watch for years, and I finally got to do so with Daniel for our At the Movies show. It’s a phenomenal film, and I am not surprised that U.S. studios decided it would be a film worth remaking for Western audiences.
I did get to see a handful of new films. One that stands out is Things Will Be Different (2024); we’ll have a movie discussion about that on the blog soon! I do wish I had seen more films, especially new ones…
Books: There were quite a few fantastic books released this year that I was fortunate to read (and quite a few more that I didn’t have time to read *sob*). Here are just a few that need to be mentioned:
- R.S.A. Garcia’s The Nightward
- Suzan Palumbo’s Countess
- Cat Rambo’s Rumor Has It
- Eden Royce’s The Creepening of Dogwood House
- Layla Martinez’s Woodworm
I also read a few works published earlier, including Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (excellent collection) and Junji Ito’s Shiver (an excellent collection of his short horror manga which includes a piece I taught this past semester — “Honored Ancestors” (or “My Dear Ancestors,” depending on the translation)).
You also should get your hands on the new editions of Karen Lord’s books because they are absolutely gorgeous!
I do want to read more… I don’t read enough anymore. It makes me sad…
Television: I did a LOT of rewatching this year because some things are so good you just have to rewatch it. One of those rewatches was The Expanse, which remains one of the best works of SF television ever made. I also did a rewatch of The Magicians and Vikings: the former because I find its twisted homages to classic fantasy tales for children in an adult narrative wildly engaging; the second because it’s such a deliciously ridiculous take on myth-level Vikings full of brilliant battle sequences, chewy dialogue, and doses of weirdness. Some other shows I returned to: Stranger Things (it’s still good), The Last Kingdom (it’s still good and still ridiculous), Lucifer (still utterly delightful), The Walking Dead (still absurd), Evil (trying it again to see if I can get into it), Dexter (still great), Heroes (still fascinating) and Fear the Walking Dead (I still prefer it to The Walking Dead until the wheels come off…).
On top of all this wonderful TV rewatching, I got a LOT of viewing in with my wife. Since we are interested in very different things, we decided to figure out what we would both want to watch together, and that turned out to be sitcoms. We finished How I Met Your Mother, which I submit is still the best sitcom of its kind to date AND is nominally science fiction; we both love the fact that the characters change as the series progresses and that there is a central narrative driving the various (very ridiculous) plots. Once we finished that, we moved on to some other classics, all of them non-genre. The ones we’ve found the most joy in have been Home Improvement, Frasier (which surprised me because it’s not the kind of show I’d expect my wife to like), and (especially) The Golden Girls (seriously, this show is amazing and everyone should watch it). We’re having fun even if we’re not always enjoying the stuff we end up watching!
STEPHEN
2024 was the year I returned to reviewing for Skiffy & Fanty after a pretty lengthy gap — almost five years! (Which means that I can’t even completely blame the pandemic, although it certainly didn’t help.) So one of my favorite things this year is just reviewing again! I love reading and thinking about comics and graphic novels — and I’m grateful to have the opportunity and space to share those thoughts.
Graphic Novels: Yes, unsurprisingly, I read a bunch of excellent graphic novels this year, some new 2024 releases, some older. Some so I could review them, some just for me. Ones that I really want to spotlight are…
- Wine Ghost Goes To Hell, by Sage Coffey
- Blackward, by Lawrence Lindell
- Belle of the Ball, by Mari Costa
- The Chromatic Fantasy, by H.A.
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton
Three of those are graphic novels I read so I could write about this year’s Lammy Award nominees in the Best LGBTQ+ Comics category. Which I think really emphasizes that value of awards nominations. They’re so important in helping readers — like me! — find new works to appreciate.
Of course, I also did a lot of prose reading this year, as well as some movie and TV watching.
Books: Honestly, I think this was a wildly good year for books. So good, that unlike my graphic novel picks, I’m going to try to focus only on books that were new in 2024, to keep my list to a manageable length.
- The Siege of Burning Grass, by Premee Mohamed
- Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Track Changes: Selected Reviews, by Abigail Nussbaum
- These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, by Izzy Wasserstein
- Countess, by Suzan Palumbo
- Calypso, by Oliver. K. Langmead
- The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar
This year, I also continued my projects of a) reading contemporary romance b) filling some of my gaps in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Almost all that reading involved books that weren’t new in 2024, so I won’t mention any now, but I might go into more detail about both of those projects another time.
Movies: I rarely go out to see a movie. When I do, it’s most often with family, especially with my son, who’s made it clear that he doesn’t like “violent movies” and does like “animation movies”. Since the live-action film we saw together in 2024 was Madame Web, I can’t really fault his criteria! So yes, the list of movies I especially enjoyed this year is brief and heavy on the animation, and that’s why.
- Robot Dreams (this was a delight; I’d really like to see a Skiffy & Fanty At The Movies about it)
- Inside Out 2
- That Christmas
TV: Like Shaun, I do a lot of my TV watching with my wife, so not everything is SFFnal. But this is also the year that I bit the bullet and got Paramount+ so I could finally get caught up on new(er) Star Trek. The list below is accordingly a trifle biased towards boldly going!
Bridgerton Season 3
Star Trek: The Next Generation. And no, this one obviously isn’t new. I was already hoping to get my wife into Star Trek, and when she asked me what my “heart show” is, I had to be honest and admit that it’s TNG. We’re slowly working our way through the series — currently we’re about half-way through Season 2. No spoilers!
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (I’m about 80% of the way through Season 1)
Cobra Kai Season 6, Parts 1 and 2
And that is it from all of us current regular contributors to the Skiffy & Fanty blog. A very happy New Year from all of us to you the world over!
