Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!
Published in Locus magazine’s February 2022 issue, this list is assembled by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. This year we considered over 900 titles between short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations, combined and trimmed to a somewhat reasonable-length list, are our best recommendations for your consideration. We know there will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. Any one of our recommending group would have put forward a different exact list, but this is the combined sum of opinions, assessed with great affection and care for the field.
https://locusmag.com/2022/02/2021-recommended-reading-list/
Just follow the link above to see the full lists. Below are the ones I have actually read…
NOVELS – SCIENCE FICTION
Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK) — good conclusion to the series. Loved the epilogue.
.Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; Faber & Faber) — not a winner for me.
A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK) — some great ideas, but I didn‘t love it.
Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US) — yep, one of my favourite reads of the year. Looking forward to the sequel in May.
YOUNG ADULT NOVELS
The Gilded Ones, Namina Forna (Delacorte; Usborne) — considering that YA is not my genre, this was decent.
FIRST NOVELS
A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom; Orbit UK) — good. I liked the novellas and short stories more.
Winter’s Orbit, Everina Maxwell (Tor; Orbit UK) — m/m romance in a SF setting. Fun!
NOVELLAS
Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells (Tordotcom) — Murderbot. What else.
Well, I did not read a lot of the entries. Is there anything that you loved and that I really should have read?
Cathy's Reading Bonanza 
I haven’t read nearly as many of these as I want to—several are still on my TBR. However, I did enjoy several of the novellas. (Psalm for the Wild-Built, Fugitive Telemetry, and Defekt are my favorites of the lot, though I also enjoyed A Spindle Splintered and Fireheart Tiger.) And among the shorter pieces, I loved both “Bots of the Lost Ark“ by Suzanne Palmer and “A House is Not a Home“ by L Chan.
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Well, there is plenty left for me to read. A few of them are on my want-to-read. For example Fireheart Tiger…
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I have to check out “Bots of the Lost Ark“ by Suzanne Palmer. I have read something by her before and I am pretty sure I liked it. Have to look that up as well.
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Here it is, Secret Life of Bots… same bot, I think… https://cathysreadingbonanza.wordpress.com/2018/07/19/little-bot-and-the-ratbug/
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Yes, yes! It is the same bot. I loved both stories a lot. I would happily buy a whole book of stories about this bot.
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I am just about to finish my current read. I plan to read this short story straight after, before diving into the next buddy read…
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We read a few of the same books from this list, I see. And I’m using it to help me find a few more books as apparently I haven’t read as much 2021 SFF as I thought I had.
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According to my StoryGraph stats I read twice as much SF as Fantasy. I do need to mix it up a bit with other genres though, if I don‘t want to burn out…
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I’m pretty sure that’s the same for me, but I do prefer SF to fantasy, so it seems about right.
I haven’t tried StoryGraph, I’m curious now.
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It doesn‘t have the social media or facebook feel of goodreads yet, but they are working on options and the stats are nice.
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I may just check it out…
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I took a look at StoryGraph. There’s a lot of emphasis on mood there, and that’s not how I choose books. But I may want to revisit it some time later to see how it develops.
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I started using it because of the stats, something that GR doesn‘t really offer.
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Those pie charts do look nice.
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