Year-To-Date
by Rating (Recommended stories grouped by RSR Rating)
Year-To-Date by Score (Recommended stories grouped by Score)
Year-To-Date by Magazine (Recommended stories grouped by Magazine)
Year-To-Date by Score (Recommended stories grouped by Score)
Year-To-Date by Magazine (Recommended stories grouped by Magazine)
Year-To-Date
by Rating
The year’s 5-star
and 4-star
stories recommended by Rocket Stack Rank are listed below like the monthly ratings.
The 3-star,
2-star,
1-star,
and Not
Rated stories are filtered to show only the ones recommended by
other reviewers.
Rating: 5
-> Hugo-worthy
Stories: 2; Estimated Time: 2h:32m (46K words)
(Portal Fantasy; Wayward Children)
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children caters to children who went to a
portal world, came back, and can’t cope. No one planned on the arrival of a
child born in a portal world, much less one asking for help—from a dea
|
(Near-Future SF) Fourteen-year-old
Ghost gave up on finding a foster family a long time ago. She’s just waiting
until she turns 18 and can leave “the Agency.” Then a new girl turns up—one
who can actually remember her life before she was sent there.
|
Rating: 4 ->
Recommended
Stories: 15; Estimated Time: 7h:29m (135K words)
(Dystopia) Levi is not telling this
story. He is not a freedom fighter—the world is so perfect no one needs to be
a freedom fighter. Secrets don’t exist anymore.
|
(Near-Future SF) You travel to visit
an AI so powerful that it has to be isolated from all possible contact with
modern technology.
|
(High Fantasy) As a composer,
D’Isle knows that the Bloodlords
tightly control music because it can attract demons from the forest. He’s
alarmed when his new prima donna starts improvising illegally.
|
(Near-Future SF Adventure) The
narrator boards an aerostat for a leisurely aerial cruise, but his job is to
protect the life of a scientist, and he has no idea why anyone wants to kill
him.
|
(Modern Fantasy) The narrator and her
friends go fishing for snakehead in a stream in Singapore, but the biggest
one is something more than just a fish.
|
(Colony SF) On planet Skale, the
seasons are three years long, and as winter ends, Jadey finds that spring
brings real challenges to the ranch she works on.
|
In the Lost City of Leng by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di
Filippo Time: 1h:11m (Novella) Issue: Asimov's 01.02|18
(Lovecraft Pastiche) In 1933, Doug
quits his job to go on an expedition to Antarctica to kill the Great Shoggoth
and retrieve the priceless treasures of the lost city of Leng.
|
(Fantasy Adventure; Baldemar) Baldemar
is just a young henchman for the mage Thelerion, but he’s the only one who
can wear the Helm of Sagacity, and right at the moment, they’re doomed
without its help. But that help comes at a price.
|
(Near-Future SF) A Chinese woman
living in the Bay Area needs to raise money to get her daughter into
Stanford. She tries to sell her English-language proficiency, but even after
fifteen years, it’s not good enough. But her native fluency in Mandarin is w
|
(Post-Apocalypse) Mara has made a deal
with a scavenger girl to help her rescue her best friend, who left the
underground habitat to try to talk to the aliens and never came back.
|
(Alternate History Horror) In this
version of 19th-Century England, only the upper classes are entitled to eat
human flesh once a year in a special ceremony.
|
(Math Fantasy) Niall had a powerful
gift for math, starting as a child. So powerful he can identify people with
equations and predict their futures.
|
(Alternate History) In a world where
we learned to talk to elephants in the 1800s, we get two stories about how
elephants were associated with radioactivity, how they (and people) were
abused, and what came of it all.
|
(Future Fantasy) Even the ghosts have
abandoned the ruins of the space station once known as the City of High
Bells. All but the faithful temple cat, who sees a starship reenter the
system after many long years.
|
The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our
Births by JosΓ© Pablo
Iriarte
Time: 25m (Novelette) Issue: Lightspeed 92
(Modern Fantasy) Jamie’s a non-binary
teenager in a small town, but they remember at least a dozen past lives, one
of which relates to a forty-year-old murder.
|
The 3-star,
2-star,
1-star,
and Not
Rated stories are filtered to show only the ones recommended by
other reviewers.
Rating: 3
-> Average
Stories: 23; Estimated Time: 11h:25m (206K words)
(Apocalypse) After memory-loss plague
strikes the world, Gouda helps clients track missing family members they can
barely remember—even though she can’t even remember her own last name.
|
(Mannerpunk) Biantera doesn’t make
enough in her hat business, so she moonlights as an assassin. A customer has
stiffed her, so she decides to teach him a lesson.
|
A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of
Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow
Time: 16m (ShortStory) Issue: Apex 105
(Modern Fantasy) The narrator is a
witch who works in a public library somewhere in the American Mid-West. Her
job is to get patrons the books they need, but a lonely teenage boy poses a
challenge.
|
(Multiverse) Chenra is a gunner for a
Mad Max-like cluster of fighters in a world devastated by climate change.
She’s surprised when strangers come looking for her. Strangers driving
equipment that looks like it was made recently—not decades ago.
|
(SF) The army wakes in the new solar
system and prepares to face enemy attack. But the enemy doesn’t show up.
While they wait, one of them decides to study one of the inner planets.
|
(Alternate History Fantasy Adventure)
In a wild West with magic, Rhett and his crew of rangers run into trouble in
a town where the local sheriff thinks Rhett is an escaped horse thief.
|
(SF Adventure; Andrea Cort) Draiken
and Thorne seek out a torturer they once knew in hopes he can lead them to
surviving leaders of the organizations they once worked for but are now sworn
to destroy.
|
(SF Mystery) The hard-boiled narrator
runs investigations in cyberspace and reality. This time they’ve got a murder
to solve, and it’s proving a challenge—even though they saw it happen.
|
(SF) On a whim, Rick decides to make
himself 100% female for a night out with friends, but he meets a special guy
who falls in love with “her” and he’s not sure he wants to be female for him
all the time.
|
(Near-Future SF) The narrator is a
cyborg hitman, but the target is guarded by two Neanderthals, either of whom
would be a challenge to defeat.
|
(Epic SF) The Low-Temperature Artist
arrives from outer space, with plans for a fantastic work of art made of ice.
He won’t talk to any Earth people but ice sculptor Yan Dong, who struggles to
get the alien not to use up all the water for his sculpture.
|
(SF Adventure) A rich aristocrat hires
Kaslo to track down her young heir, who has gone off to a wild, dangerous
continent with an off-world woman he barely knows.
|
(Clockwork Fantasy) Rielle accepts an
offer from her husband’s rival to play accompaniment for his daughter in a
competition. They need the money, but there’s something too perfect about
this daughter.
|
(Hard SF) Claire is sure she can teach
sign language to cuttlefish, but progress has been slow and her grant is
running out.
|
(High Fantasy) In which we learn how
the new court magician was recruited and find out how even a “market rat” can
qualify. We learn that there is real magic, but it comes with a price.
|
(Near-Future SF) To reduce
discrimination , Pamela’s office is trying out “Equalizers,” special glasses
that make everyone look and sound the same. She wonders if they could improve
her love life too.
|
(Uncanny Horror) Ben Clarke travels to
Hollywood to settle his late brother’s affairs. He learns a variety of things
about his brother, but the biggest surprise is what he finds in the bedroom.
|
(SF Adventure) Mallory Iheji would do
anything to watch her favorite artist’s lost movie, “The Hydraulic Emperor.”
But what would she really sacrifice for it?
|
The Journeyman: Through Madness Gap by Michael F. Flynn Time: 49m (Novelette)
Issue: Analog 01.02|18
(SF Adventure; The Journeyman) Teo has
command of some forces for the invasion of Yavalprawns, but they’re only
half-trained, so he and Sammi look for a way to sneak through a forgotten
pass and take the enemy by surprise.
|
(Post-Apocalypse) In the ruins of a
China shattered by an electromagnetic pulse, five friends decide to flee
their dead city in the face of an oncoming harsh winter, seeking shelter in
the warmer south about which they know nothing.
|
(SF Adventure; Diving Universe) A
badly-damaged Fleet ship of long-obsolete design appears out of foldspace.
There seem to be 200 people on board, but they’re not trying to communicate.
Captain Dauber has to try to rescue them, even though it may be a tra
|
(SF Adventure) From a high Venus
orbit, McBride and Artanian manage a rover on the surface. Today they’re
supposed to inspect an anomaly that seems to be made of metal.
|
(SF Colony Adventure) The colonists on
Dust usually hunker down for their years-long winter, especially when the
companion star, Umber, blasts the surface with radiation, but a critical
package from Earth needs to be retrieved now.
|
Rating: 2
-> Not Recommended
Stories: 8; Estimated Time: 2h:50m (51K words)
(Surreal SF) A godlike being descended
from human uploads downloads into a “limbsuit” and goes slumming with real
human beings aka has a date.
|
(Dystopia) Lupita Garza hates her job
as a guard at the museum, her boss seems to hate her, and it looks like her
uterus transplant isn’t going to get funded. Things go downhill from there.
|
(Colony SF) A couple of children are
lost on the dangerous Barren Isle, which still has the original flora and
fauna of Coyote. The search and rescue team will have their hands full.
|
(SF) James and Dick would do anything
to get their candidate elected. Well, almost anything.
|
(Hard SF Adventure) Zhang Xuan steals
a starship to go hunt for her brother Kai, who went off to look for living
alien civilizations in the galactic core and never came back.
|
(Uncanny SF) Rourou is a Chinese
little girl who loves her papa but wonders what happened to her momma. And
why she can’t remember anything before age 5. And why she speaks fluent
English.
|
(Allegory) A man in the countryside is
scooped up by one of the “living cities” which immediately impresses him into
its workforce.
|
(Dystopia) Five vignettes showing how
three people get by in a horribly polluted world ravaged by climate change
where giant, intelligent mining machines chew up the landscape in search of
metals and oil.
|
Rating: 1
-> Needs Improvement
Stories: 1; Estimated Time: 14m (4K words)
(SF Background) In which we learn the
history of the intelligent plants of planet Flora and how 4107 came to travel
to planet Terminal.
|
Rating: Not
Rated
Stories:
No comments (may contain spoilers):
Post a Comment (comment policy)