Annual Review 2024

The Mariner Awards are named for one of the first successful interplanetary missions.

The 69 titles listed — out of 299 for the year — are the ones that the Review Editors have rated most highly in 2024. They have earned Bewildering Stories’ most signal honor.

We know that all readers can cite other titles they feel belong on these lists; fair enough. Please write and tell us what else you would include and, most importantly, why. Discussions are welcome, and we like to publish them.

Since the Annual Reviews report the cream of the crop — the crème de la crème — this year’s Annual Review continues an innovation begun in 2023: each title link opens the Readers’ Guide in the issue in which the prose or poetry is listed. Readers will be able to find the title easily and, at the same time, appreciate the quality of the context in which it appears.

Bewildering Stories was originally founded to give new writers exposure that was very hard to come by in a field dominated by a few print publications. Since BwS was a pioneer on the Internet at the time, it aimed to set some standards at the outset.

The first was in featuring writing of high quality. To this end, BwS created — in a critical edition — a translation into modern English of Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World, a classic novel of early modern science fiction, one that had been heard of by many but read by few. In 2024, it has been formatted and issued in an intriguing and remarkably readable print edition by Michael E. Lloyd, manager of the Titles, Authors Genres index.

The next was to offer contributors coherent guidelines and discussion. The first rule we made was never to fall back on the empty dismissal that all writers rightly hate: “It didn’t grab me.” As we like to say, authors can speak for themselves; editors are the readers’ only voice. For that reason, Bewildering Stories’ aims to promote collegial discussions. We are proud of the frequent appreciation we receive for our forthright reviews; they tell us we’re on the right track.

Contributors have responded by sending us works of high quality, and frequency of publication has made Bewildering Stories probably the largest literary webzine on the Internet.

Submissions often run in cycles, where one genre or another predominates for a while. Over the past five years, the average length of prose submissions has increased markedly. In contrast, flash fiction is distinguished by two outstanding authors without whom the difficult genre might vanish entirely. Recently, though, a few promising new authors have shown an interest in flash fiction, and we hope it continues.

Like the Quarterly Reviews, the Annual Review lists titles alphabetically by author and multiple titles in chronological order. However, the Departments remain in the Quarterly Reviews and are easily accessible.

Regular publication is scheduled to resume with issue 1074 on January 6, 2025. Meanwhile, as we like to say, “There is no story so truly Bewildering as reality.” The Crew of Bewildering Stories wishes our contributors and readers a healthy and pleasantly Bewildering New Year!

Titles are links; they’ll open in a new window, so you won’t lose your place.