You ever notice how the end of the year hits like a cosmic reminder that time is a practical joke? One minute you’re stuffing beach towels into a drawer, the next you’re standing in the aisle of a bookstore trying to remember which sci-fi epics you swore you’d finish before the frostbite kicked in. Then December strolls in wearing a smug grin, tapping its watch like, “Hey buddy, how’s that TBR pile looking? Big enough to qualify as a load-bearing structure?”
Let’s be honest: December is when we all pretend we’re gonna catch up on reading even though half the planet is too stressed, too tired, too cold, or too busy screaming at holiday travel delays to absorb a paragraph. But every year, like desperate time-travelers with seasonal amnesia, we convince ourselves that these final 31 days are our chance to reset, recharge, and rediscover the joy of speculative fiction—also known as the genre that warns us about all the terrible ideas we’ll try anyway.
And December 2025 brings a batch of sci-fi and fantasy that hits every part of the human condition: revolution, resistance, memory loss, dictatorship, wormholes, motherhood, star-touched radishes—because of course—and an eleventh camper who shouldn’t exist but insists on roasting marshmallows with the rest of the crew.
So let’s take a tour through this month’s best (and a few earlier releases you probably meant to read but forgot because your brain is a poorly managed file system). Think of this as your end-of-year memory rehab.
WE WILL RISE AGAIN — AND PROBABLY ARGUE ABOUT IT
Edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older (Saga Press, December 2)
Anthologies about protest and resistance always fascinate me. Humans can barely agree on pizza toppings, yet we think we can organize revolutions. These editors bring together storytellers and essayists who imagine futures where people push back against systems designed by the world’s worst committee. And let’s face it—when a government tells you everything is fine, that’s how you know you’re about to inherit a spectacular mess.
This collection builds on a tradition started a decade ago, asking how speculative fiction can inspire social change. Short answer? By showing us the consequences of our stupidest decisions before we have the chance to enact them. It’s a little like having a GPS that screams, “DON’T TURN THERE, YOU MORON, THAT ROAD LEADS TO A CORPORATE-SPONSORED DYSTOPIA!”
The contributors here explore revolutions of every flavor: hopeful, desperate, chaotic, poetic, and occasionally powered by advanced technologies the military definitely wants but promises it won’t use unless something “really important” comes up. Stories and essays work in pairs, blending imagination and analysis, giving you an aerial view of what resistance might look like in the future we seem determined to sabotage.
It’s a book about the people who light the match, the people who fan the flames, and the people in power who yell, “Hey! Stop that!” while standing on a pile of kindling soaked in gasoline. And in between the lines, you get the reminder that even if history doesn’t repeat itself verbatim, it sure loves to plagiarize.
THIS BRUTAL MOON — NOW WITH EXTRA DICTATORSHIP
Bethany C. Jacobs (Orbit Books, December 2)
There’s nothing like a trilogy that ends with the entire galaxy falling apart. The Kingdom Trilogy wraps up with a new dictatorship crushing an already fragile colony, because apparently no imaginary universe is complete unless someone with a crooked crown and a questionable résumé tries to take over everything.
The First Families—who sound like the kind of people who would own interstellar yachts—have to team up with the rebels they’ve spent years avoiding. That’s always my favorite part of sci-fi: when old enemies have to work together because the alternative is being vaporized into cosmic confetti.
Enter Cleric Chono and hacker Jun Ironway, two characters who have the energy of people who haven’t slept since book one. They’re trying to keep the peace, save the Jevani people, and track down someone named Six, a mysterious figure who probably has all the answers and none of the courtesy to share them in a group chat.
This is a finale about betrayal, identity, and the universal truth that every government is two setbacks away from turning into a cautionary tale. Think of it as a cosmic family reunion where everyone arrives armed, suspicious, and ready to overthrow the host.
THE DEFINITIONS — MEMORY LOSS, SITCOM NAMES, AND A CURRICULUM NO ONE ASKED FOR
Matt Greene (Henry Holt and Co., December 2)
Ah yes, the classic dystopian setup: a group of people wake up in a mysterious rehabilitation center with no memories and only the vaguest understanding of grammar. Sounds like most political debates, but sharper.
These patients enter as blank slates, which already raises questions. Who benefits from erasing a person’s past? Who gets to rebuild them? And why are these poor souls being renamed after sitcom characters? Joey, Chandler, Monica—somewhere out there a streaming service executive is screaming, “THIS IS NOT THE BRAND EXTENSION WE ASKED FOR!”
Greene leans into the familiar structure of learning the rules of the world alongside the characters, except here the rules include baffling subjects like “The History of the Twenty-First Century: A Story of Progress.” Anytime a regime calls something a story of progress, you know someone is hiding the receipts.
What begins as unity among the patients fractures as old memories leak through. Of course they do. Humans can forget their keys, their appointments, and the name of the coworker they’ve worked beside for eight years—but trauma? Oh, that sticks like superglue on stainless steel.
This is a novel about rebuilding identity in a system that wants everyone to forget who they were. And let me tell you, nothing says dystopia like a place that claims to “heal you” while quietly rewriting your operating system.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE QUEEN — TIME TRAVEL WITH A SIDE OF COURT POLITICS
Paula Lafferty (Erewhon Books, December 16)
Camelot: where logic goes to die and everyone is one prophecy away from making a terrible decision.
In this deluxe edition of a time-travel saga, a grieving twentysomething named Vera gets sucked through a wormhole—because of course she does—and emerges in a medieval castle where life is dirty, dangerous, and entirely dependent on who last talked to Merlin. And Merlin, let’s be honest, is the patron saint of cryptic messages and bad communication.
Vera becomes the vessel for Guinevere’s memories, which is a polite way of saying she gets mind-hijacked by royalty. Now she’s thrust into the political chaos of Camelot, where Mordred is eyeing the throne, Lancelot is eyeing her, and Arthur can’t seem to decide if he loves her, hates her, or wants to send her a medieval mixtape of conflicted feelings.
It’s the classic story of destiny versus free will. Can Vera rewrite the narrative? Or is she doomed to fulfill Guinevere’s fate and fuel centuries of gossip? This is fantasy that plays with memory, identity, and the timeless truth that kings always want something, knights always want someone, and wizards always refuse to give a straight answer.
BOOKS FROM EARLIER IN THE YEAR—THE TITLES YOU MISSED WHILE SCREAMING INTO THE VOID
Because despite our best intentions, we all lose track of new releases. Maybe it was work. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was that moment you turned on the news and immediately forgot your own birthday. Doesn’t matter. Here are a few sci-fi and fantasy books from earlier in 2025 that deserve your attention before the planet resets its calendar.
CASUAL — MOTHERHOOD, NEURAL IMPLANTS, AND MORE SURVEILLANCE THAN ANYONE ASKED FOR
Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous Press, February 11)
Pregnancy is already rough. Add a dystopian near-future, a failing social support system, and a therapeutic neural implant named Casual that helps a pregnant woman manage depression—and suddenly we’ve got a story about how society expects mothers to be superheroes while giving them the emotional resources of a damp tissue.
Valya, seven months pregnant and facing motherhood alone, is told she must remove the implant that keeps her functioning because it might interfere with her ability to care for a newborn. But there’s a catch: doctors offer a new procedure that would implant a matching device into her infant, linking their minds through neural tech.
Yes, nothing says “great parenting” like letting a corporation synchronize your emotions with a baby who can’t control its own bodily functions.
This novel dives into the sacrifices mothers are asked to make—their autonomy, their mental health, even their neural privacy. It’s a quiet horror story, the kind that doesn’t need monsters because the system itself is monstrous.
STARSTRUCK — RADISHES, FOXES, AND ENSOULED GRANITE
Aimee Ogden (Psychopomp, June 17)
This one is for readers who like their fantasy whimsical, philosophical, and slightly unhinged in a delightful way. The premise: when stars fall from the sky and land in nature, the creatures and plants that catch them become conscious, soulful beings.
Prish, a radish, and her wife Alsing, a fox, are seasoned veterans of welcoming these newly awakened beings. But then comes trouble: the stars stop falling. And as if cosmic supply-chain disruptions weren’t enough, they encounter the first starstruck inanimate object—a piece of granite that suddenly has opinions.
Then there’s the abandoned human baby, which raises several questions: Who left it? Why? And how do you raise a human in a community where vegetables have deeper existential reflections than most people?
Ogden’s novella explores belonging, change, and what it means to evolve. It’s tender, strange, and occasionally absurd in the way that only the best fantasy dares to be.
THE EXTRA — THE ELEVENTH CAMPER THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST
Annie Neugebauer (Shortwave Publishing, September 9)
Ten hikers go into the woods. Eleven hikers sit around the campfire. And suddenly everyone is rethinking their life choices.
This is horror distilled to its purest form: simple premise, maximum dread. Every character remembers the extra person. No one knows who they are. And every reader wonders how fast they’d sprint back to civilization if they found their camping group had magically increased by one.
It's the kind of story that plays on ancient instincts—tribal memory, group cohesion, the need to know who belongs and who doesn’t. Nothing triggers human alarm bells faster than realizing the math doesn’t add up.
This is one of those tales where the forest feels too quiet, the shadows too thick, and every conversation too normal to be safe. The fear sneaks in sideways, the way cold air slides under a tent flap. That’s the good stuff: horror that whispers instead of screams.
THE YEAR IN SPECULATIVE FICTION: A POST-MORTEM
You ever think about how sci-fi and fantasy act like society’s emotional support animals? These genres keep trying to warn us about authoritarian governments, environmental collapse, artificial intelligence, memory manipulation, and invasive technologies—and we treat them like entertainment.
These books shout, “HEY, DON’T DO THIS. BAD IDEA. BIG MISTAKE.”
And humanity responds with, “Wow, cool story. Anyway, let’s do all of that but with worse planning.”
Every December release on this list deals with some form of memory—how it shapes us, how it betrays us, how it gets stolen, how it gets rewritten by time, trauma, or medieval wizards. Even the earlier books play with memory in their own ways: maternal bonding through neural linkage, a world where radishes remember the stars, a hiker who remembers the stranger who shouldn’t exist.
We chase the future, and the future chases us, and both sides keep insisting the other one started it.
WHY WE READ THIS STUFF AT THE END OF THE YEAR
Because December is the perfect time for stories about broken worlds, rebuilt worlds, forgotten worlds, and worlds on the verge of making the same mistakes again. It’s the month where everything feels like a season finale and a pilot episode at the same time.
We read these books during the dark months for the same reason we light candles: to see what’s coming and maybe feel better about the fact that the present is just a dress rehearsal for the future’s blooper reel.
Speculative fiction strips us of illusions, then hands us back hope like a half-charged battery. Maybe it’ll last. Maybe it won’t. But you keep going.
That’s what these December releases are saying: We fall, we rise, we forget, we remember. Sometimes we rebuild a kingdom; sometimes we reboot a brain. Sometimes we adopt an ensouled rock because it needs a stable home environment.
And sometimes—if we’re lucky—we rewrite the narrative entirely.
YOUR TBR IS A MONUMENT TO OPTIMISM
Look, you’re not going to read everything this month. Nobody reads everything. Not even people who claim they do. Especially not people who write listicles pretending they’ve read everything.
But you’ve got options now—good ones. Strange ones. Hopeful ones. Dark ones. Stories that will drag you into the depths and ones that will pull you back out by the collar.
The year is ending. Your stack of unread books is whispering. And somewhere in that pile, a radish, a fox, a cleric, a hacker, a queen, an amnesiac, a rebel, and an extra camper are all waiting for you to finally give them the time of day.
Pick a book. Escape into a world where the problems are big but at least interesting. And if you don’t finish it now, that’s fine—it’ll still be there in January, judging you gently.