Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar: Magic doesn’t play well with the Spanish Inquisition, unless you can convince everyone that your powers come from God. Luzia is the descendant of conversos, always at risk of being denounced as a Judiazer, and she can also do magic. When she reveals this to her employer, she sets off a chain of events that leads her to great danger and great opportunity. I really liked that each person in the story was clearly the hero of their own narrative (or the villain).
 
Ben H. Winters, Big Time: A briskly moving story about a woman who’s kidnapped away from her infant daughter—except that she starts having memories of a different life entirely, perhaps related to a strange drug port on her chest. An FDA official tasked with investigating the source of the port becomes involved—as does the woman who did the initial kidnapping. Very noir ending.
 
Naomi Alderman, The Future: The more I thought about The Power, the less I liked it, but I saw enough buzz about this that I tried it, and I found it quite readable. Three billionaires—a barely hidden Elon Musk stand-in, a Steve Jobs-ish type, and a woman who might have a model in a Chinese billionaire but was less placeable—prepare to escape the apocalypse and control the future. Meanwhile, people in their inner circle—one grown child, one exiled founder, and one trusted assistant—are trying to figure out what they can do to reverse the damage these greedy, tyranny-supporting, environment-destroying monsters have done. And the trusted assistant’s new lover, a survivalist, is trying to learn more about what she’s gotten herself into, especially when the software she didn’t know she had on her phone helps her avoid an assassination. The narrative moves briskly; the repeated references to Job/Sodom and Gomorrah largely work well. I was left with the sense that it was somewhat less than the sum of its parts—the best I can say without spoiling is that it felt a lot like a really elaborate Twilight Zone episode.
 
Lena Nguyen, We Have Always Been Here: Park is the backup psychologist on a mission to explore a new planet, with a strangely smaller-than-usual complement of humans and a lot of androids. When things start going wrong, she falls back on her greater affinity for androids, but they are acting strangely too. Park is presented as neuroatypical, but nobody ever says anything except how weird and offputting she is, which felt wrong to me—even the corporatized, post-ecopocalyptic hellscape would surely remember the lingo if it can also make androids and use FTL travel. Ultimately I didn’t connect with Park any more than she would have with me.
 
Premee Mohamed, The Siege of Burning Grass: Alefret is a pacifist in a fascist nation at war. It’s kind of biocyberpunk—there are tanks that are like pillbugs, curling around their drivers, and worms that light cigarettes, and flying cities. After long torture, he is offered a chance to end the war with less suffering, by connecting with pacifists in the enemy’s citadel. This never makes any more sense as a motivation, although perhaps he is just broken and won’t admit it; he clearly doesn’t believe that the plan will reduce suffering but just kind of goes along anyway in hopes that it might, trying not to do individual harm even as his kill-happy minder gets closer to success. It’s not surprising that the enemy turns out to be only arguably preferable to the fascists, and it’s not a hopeful story.
 
Aimee Ogden, Emergent Properties: Novella featuring an AI journalist investigating a story on the moon—a story that already got it blown up/its memory deleted once. Noir-ish, though for me that meant I never really connected with the hardboiled, somewhat resentful character. (The AI was created by two women who are now divorced; the AI is still pretty resentful.)
 
Tade Thompson & Nick Wood, The Last Pantheon: Novella about two African superhumans, Pan-African and Black Power, who play hero/villain roles in the 1970s, until Pan-African surrenders and serves a prison sentence. After he’s released, his renewed visibility brings Black Power back—and Pan-African is still pretty mad about Black Power’s failure to succeed against CIA interventions/assassinations and South Africa’s apartheid regime. But part of the point of the story is that punching does not solve Africa’s problems.
 
Robert J. Sawyer, The Downloaded: A disaster disrupts the cryogenic storage/mental uploads of a group of astronauts headed to a distant planet and a group of convicts serving their sentences digitally. Novella-length audiobook; Sawyer does better for me when playing with ideas in more extended form. Attempted rape and a reasonably graphic murder scene (remembered by one of the convicts).
 
Adam Roberts, The Midas Rain: Neo-noir: in a pollution choked future Detroit, the protagonist is trying to pull off a heist that might get him out of the dirty air and dirty deeds, by stealing from the megacorp that is constantly throwing valuable rocks from space to the ground, heedless of who gets killed as a result. But there are plenty of twists and turns in this novella. Ultimately I didn’t think it was very persuasive, but if you want a communist protagonist, here he is.
 
Premee Mohamed, The Butcher of the Forest. The only woman who’s ever managed to come out of the forest alive is forced by the Tyrant (who killed her parents) to search for his children, who’ve gone missing in the same forest. It’s an interesting novella about survival and trying not to blame children for the crimes of a parent—even when you can see they’re being raised by that same parent. I think I would’ve liked it more with more story, but that’s the novella form for you.

Carmen Maria Machado & Dani, The Low, Low Woods: Set in a dying Pennsylvania coal town where a fire burns below ground, this horror story follows two queer teens who wake up in a movie theater, not remembering the past two hours. Anyone with experience of Machado and/or the news will likely figure out the gist, though not its fantastic/horror elements, which are linked to the skinned men and deer-woman that stalk the woods around town, and to the existence of sinkhole women (body horror). If Stephen King does horror well because his answer to “Why do bad things happen?” is “because they can,” Machado’s horror comes from giving the same answer to “Why do people do bad things?”
 
Tobias S. Buckell & Dave Klecha, The Runes of Engagement: After magical portals open around the world, NATO and US forces have captured the portals and established bases on the other, magical world, but a Corrupted One keeps sending waves of attackers. That’s all setup: a band of Marines has to get an ally to safety, but weird things keep happening, including the appearance of a Ranger. It’s fun but don’t expect any interrogation of militarism/colonialism (though they end up fighting some greedy Earth humans).

Michael Marshall Smith, Time Out: Novella in which a “moderately unsuccessful” TV writer wakes up the morning after Christmas to find his wife and daughter missing—and then, it turns out, everyone is missing. In that loneliness he confronts who he is and whether he wants to be that person. It didn’t grab me as much as the best of his writing does, but it was a solid “the fantastic reveals our true natures” story.
 
T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night:The return of Alex the sworn soldier, investigating another eldritch mystery, this time at Alex’s inherited hunting lodge, where a mysterious woman might be stealing the breath of her victims—or maybe they just have pneumonia. Another good, short retelling of a classic story seen through the eyes of a soldier with PTSD.
 
Sin Blaché & Helen MacDonald, Prophet:I’ve seen this described as an Inception AU with the serial numbers filed off, which was honestly why I gave it a chance, but unless there’s some identifiable fanon I’m missing, it’s really just trope-adjacent: Sunil, an eerily talented fuckup, is protected by a supercompetent American soldier who is, on the inside, at least as much of a hot mess. Here, Sunil’s talent is the preternatural ability to tell whether someone is telling the truth—actually, it’s worse than that, which he only partially hides: he can assess the truth value of any statement, regardless of whether anyone in the room knows the answer. But he’s, uniquely, never been able to tell if Adam is lying. The military only knows about the lie detector part, which is how he acquired a bunch of his trauma: he was sent to Afghanistan and watched a whole bunch of people get tortured; the interrogators didn’t want to hear that their victims didn’t know anything. Anyway, this is all backstory to the main plot, which is that an American government contractor’s experiment with a psychoactive substance goes very wrong, leading victims to manifest objects that then make them catatonic with a kind of horrific nostalgia. Sunil might be the only one who can figure it out, but will he and Adam ever admit their feelings for each other? (This is why it feels so fannish: lots of mutual pining and wordlessness, and we mostly have to take on faith that they are MFEO. To be absolutely clear, I am fine with this!)
 
Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds: Follow-up to City of Last Chances, it follows one of the characters—an embittered priest who can’t seem to get rid of his god of healing—who’s captured by the fascist Palleseen and put to work in an experimental hospital, where they allow otherwise forbidden magics if they’re in the service of healing Palleseen soldiers. The various characters all have their reasons for aiding the war machine, from ambition to dull acceptance, and the key question of the book is whether there is anything in the future but relentless horror for them. I quite enjoyed it (despite this description!).
Fonda Lee, Jade Shards:Short stories about key clan members, set before the beginning of the Jade trilogy. Interesting background; I should read the third book!