This week’s episode features a few news items, but as usual you have to listen closely to find them among our usual free-association digressions.

Awards season is underway. Nominations/and or votging for the Nebulas, Locus Awards, and Hugo Awards (once again we are eligible in the Fancast category, and Jonathan in the Editor Short Form category) is underway, and just closed for the BSFA Awards. There's also, news from a major distributor in the US that may mark the beginning of the end of the mass-market paperback, while other publishing news involves the consolidation of three major print magazines—Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF—under a single new publisher.

While at this point we don’t know more than anyone else, this leads us into discussions of romantasy (and the growing SF or space opera equivalent), how the way readers have discover new writers has changed over time, the value (if any) of promotional letters and blurbs (which Gary is not very good at, it turns out), the growing popularity of premium and collectors’ editions, and the difference between casual readers, fans, collectors, and simple accumulators of books.

Other topics pop up as well: Jonathan’s forthcoming anthology of stories in honor of Ursula Le Guin raises the question of which authors should be recognized with such anthologies, for example, and which have already been recognized and why.

Each year, we sit down and look at the year ahead and, inevitably, end up discussing the books we are looking forward to. This year we invited long time friends of the podcast Charlie Jane Anders and Ian Mond to join us.

During a lively conversation it became clear that, no matter what else is happening in the world, there's a lot of wonderful work coming out in 2025, and this only scratches the surface of it.

As always, our thanks to Charlie Jane and Ian for making the time to join us.

As promised, here are our lists.

Charlie Jane Anders

1. Oathbound, Tracy Deonn
2. Harriet Tubman Live in Concert, Bob the Drag Queen
3. Terms of Service, Ciel Pierlot
4. Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman
5. Meet Me at the Crossroads, Megan Giddings
6. Harmattan Season, Tochi Onyebuchi

Ian Mond

1. Waterblack, Alex Pheby
2. The Crimson Road, A. G. Slatter
3. Exit Zero, Marie-Helene Bertino
4. Major Arcana, John Pistelli
5. The Antidote, Karen Russell

Gary K. Wolfe

1. Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay
2. When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory
3. A Granite Silence, Nina Allan
4. Frankenstein Rex, Adam Roberts
5. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders

Jonathan

1. Luminous, Silvia Park
2. Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
3. The Devils, Joe Abercrombie
4. The Everlasting, Alix E Harrow
5. All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu

For those who might have been hoping our 2025 podcasts might get a little more focused and coherent, our apologies. Following up on several discussions on social media about how to learn about overlooked but deserving novels (mostly fantasy), we speculate on the factors that help a book or author gain and keep some sort of traction. Reprint programs like the Gollancz Masterworks or Tor Essentials might help, but we mention a handful of authors who have written wonderful work that is worth a fresh look, including Tanith Lee, Michael Bishop, Lisa Goldstein, Tim Powers, Michael Moorcock, Graham Joyce, and others. We also touch upon the notion of formula in SF and fantasy, and end with some of our current reading.