A quick glance at some books coming in 2026. Every year ends up surprising and there are always books you expect to read but never get to, and books you planned to read that disappoint.
This list is simply a few books I’ve seen scheduled that I think could be interesting:
A Trace of Blood, Robert Jackson Bennett
To Ride a Rising Storm, Moniquill Blackgoose
The Subtle Art of Folding Space, John Chu
The Faith of Beasts, James S.A. Corey
Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar
She is Here, Nicola Griffith
Traitors’ Nest, Frances Hardinge
The Language of Liars, S.L. Huang
The Book of Bots, James Patrick Kelly
Sublimation, Isabel J Kim
Intergalactic Feast, Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Radiant Star, Ann Leckie
The Last Contract of Isako, Fonda Lee
Code and Codex, Yoon Ha Lee
The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, Ken Liu
Prescribed Burn, Arkady Martine
Loss Protocol, Paul McAuley
Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur, Ian McDonald
The Rouse, China Mieville
Wickhills, Premee Mohamed
Palaces of the Crow, Ray Nayler
Massif, Garth Nix
Season of the Serpent, Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead, K.J. Parker
River of Bones and Other Stories, Rebecca Roahorse
Frankenstein Rex, Adam Roberts
The Iron Garden Sutra, A.D. Sui
A Forest, Darkly, A.G. Slatter
Nonesuch, Francis Spufford
The Universe Box, Michael Swanwick
The Fist of Memory, Wole Talabi
Pretenders to the Throne of God, Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Christmas Eve 2025. A completely different affair than last year, should you look back at the entry. We were coming off a stinking hot day of 44.3C and the weather was turning mild. Today, by comparison, it got up into the high 30s and tomorrow should be 40 with maybe a thunderstorm. We’ll see.
The day started with Gary and I releasing the last two episodes of Coode Street for 2025, and making plans for the next few weeks. Sophie and I then went out at about 7am to do some errands – collect the mail from two post offices (one of my pieces of offical merch went astray), get some groceries, have some breakfast and so on. Then back to the house for tidying and prep for the big day. I ended up going out on another trip to get groceries and such and then spent time to laying out my tasks for tomorrow morning. All of the usual stuff.
Along the way, I spent a little time wth my favourite new podcast (Bill Nighy’s Ill-Considered), read a bit of Ben Aaronovitch’s Moon Over Soho, and felt slightly stressed about being not prepared enough. We then had Chinese for dinner and watched Miracle on 34th Street. A nice day, with no car accidents, for busy and not super Christmassy.
Tomorrow will be up early to see if Santa’s been, some family gifts, then breakfast, cooking and final tidying. The family are due about noon, and the turkey should be coming out of the oven aaround then. We’re sitting inside, so it’s a little cramped, but it’s also well air conditioned, so you have to pick what’s important to you. We’ll share gifts, no doubt, and then food and games and such for the rest of the afternoon. At some point, I’ll eventually slip into a mild food coma, and then watch something or other and crash.
As to Boxing Day – cricket, reviews editing, and year-in-review column writing. I owe Locus a review column after all these years, so that’s on the to do list. All in all, a busy few days.
I keep hearing about how good this England* side is — once-in-a generation players, incredible talent and so on. Blah blah. But here’s the thing — pretty much every time I’ve seen them play they consistently fail to bring it. Not just here in the 2025-26 Ashes, but most every other time. They’re great when things are going their way, They’re great when the conditions are good. But when things get hard, when it’s ‘game on!’ time, they don’t come together as a team. They don’t play great cricket. Mostly, they kinda waft about and fail, looking for some magic quick fix solution that usually doesn’t work. Or they’re sitting around hoping for some magician (ie. their captain) to save them.
And what of Stokes? There’s no doubt Stokes is special. An honest-to-god Test cricketer of quality with the spirit to play the game. A credit to England and the game. And Root? A terrific batter, though for mine a bit overrated. After that? Not so much. Not consistently. I see Stokes supporting the team again and again, but I don’t see them supporting him.
England are 2-0 down in this series because that accurately reflects how they played as a team. They had one and a half good days, and that was it. Could easily have won in Perth. Could probably have won in Brisbane. Both are tough, but the Australian team was at its weakest due to injury etc. And yet they couldn’t focus, couldn’t come together, couldn’t put in the hard yards, do the hard stuff where you knuckle down and play the percentage game so you can turn the game your way.
That’s why I doubt they’ll do a lot better in the next three Tests. Not because Australia will be fielding progressively stronger sides (though they will), but because I think this is who this England team is. A bunch of almost-good-enoughs led by genuine champion relying on extraordinary rescues to save them rather than skill and application.
It may not be 5-0. There could be a draw somewhere if the weather gets in the way, but likely it will be. This isn’t the greatest Australian Test side I’ve seen — that was probably Waugh’s Australians — but it’s a good side. Great bowling unit, top keeper, and a frankly unsteady but sometimes brilliant batting unit. That’s enough to do the job because as a team they do everything England does not.
2025 looked, on the surface of it, like a quiet year for me. Less Tordotcom work and no new anthologies. In truth, I completed three anthologies, and two that were scheduled for October are now coming out in 2026.
Still it was a year when I edited two Subterranean Press novellas, two Tordotcom novellas, ten short stories for Reactor and Subterranean, and acted as reviews editor for Locus for the 23rd consecutive year. As a podcaster, I co-hosted and produced all of the 2025 episodes of The Coode Street Podcast.
Fiction edited in 2025
Novellas
The Orb of Corraido, Katherine Addison, Subterranean Press, 2025
I’m toying with the idea of a doing a proper list of books I’m looking forward to in 2025, but for the moment I thought I’d start with the books that look good for this month, January.
While the book that most people are probably going to buy is the new one from romantasy phenomenon Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm, I’m yet to dive into that series, and other books have more immediate appeal to me.
First up is one I edited. I fell for Sarah Monette’s (written as by Katherine Addison) Chronicles of Osreth when The Goblin Emperor was published, and I’ve hugely enjoyed The Cemeteries of Amalo sequence, which is why I jumped at the chance to work on a new novella, The Orb of Coraido, that is coming from Subterranean Press. This one is set just after the initiating events of The Goblin Emperor and is the story of an unlikely historian unraveling an academic mystery.
When I read Charlies Stross’s The Atrocity Archive when it was serialised in Spectrum back in 2001 I didn’t think I’d still be reading stories about the Laundry a quarter century later, but here we are. Another tale of Cold War shenanigans and Lovecraftian nightmares, but this time focussed on a man who was scooped up by the Laundry for playing Dungeons & Dragons as a teen and ended up in custody until his 40s. Until he gets the chance to escape so he can visit a local gaming convention. A short novel, it has a lot of the pleasures of the Laundry Files, and is another step closer to the end of it all.
There’s not a lot of discussion that I see about how much of the most enjoyable science fiction and fantasy out there is basically crime or spy fiction in an SFw setting. Cory Doctorow moved into this territory with his first Martin Hench novel, Red Team Blues, back in 2022. The third, Picks and Shovels, is Hench’s origin story and looks like enormous fun.
There are several trends happening in genre at the moment, and one has been the biggest resurgence in horror since the 1980s. Alongside Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, and others, Grady Hendrix has been making a huge name for himself. This one, which comes very highly recommended, is the latest and apparently best and comes out this week.
Nnedi Okorafor has been a force in the field since her first work appeared nearly 25 years ago, delivering major work after major work, like Who Fears Death, the Akata Witch sequence, and Lagoon. Last year she got a lot of attention for getting a huge advance for what she described as the book she’d been waiting to write. This ambitious and exciting novel is both the story of a writer and the life they’re living, and a book within a book. I’ve not picked up a new Okorafor for a while, so I’m looking forward to this one now it’s finally coming out!
About four or five years ago Ian Mond alerted me to the incredible books being published by Galley Beggar Press, and particularly highlighted a remarkable new fantasy series, Cities of the Weft, being written by Alex Pheby. Rich, strange, and wildly imaginative, the series started with Mordew in 2020 and was followed by Malarkoi in 2022, and now concludes with Waterblack. If you love fantasy, if you loved Mervyn Peake, if you want something new and different, this is the one. Everything about these books is amazing, and I can’t wait to read this when it gets here.
And, finally, a debut. Hammajang Luck came out in late 2024 in the UK and Australia, but is a January title in the US, so I’m sneaking it in here. Described as a Oceans 8 meets Bladerunner, it’s a heist novel set on a space station. All of the reviews are good, and I have a copy sitting on my desk to read before the month is out. This one looks like a lot of fun. and I’m looking forward to getting a chance to sit down with it when I can .
A Conventional Boy
Picks and Shovels
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
Death of the Author,
Hammajang Luck