Tangent Online 2018 Recommended Reading List

As with previous years, this list is not meant as comprehensive, there being a number of items we didn’t see. As was the case with the last several years we narrowed our focus (with a few exceptions) to those stories published in professionally paying markets as defined by SFWA.

There are 342 stories on this year’s list (down from last year’s 378): 276 short stories (down from last year’s 292), 52 novelettes (down from last year’s 76), and 14 novellas (up from last year’s 10). As with any such list–especially ours with its ever-changing staff–different reviewers bring different tastes and perspectives on how to approach stories, how they are thus measured, and of course the stories themselves are of different “quality” (up or down) if such a thing as quality can be measured by any objective standard. That said, it does seem as if each year has its own nebulous, general level of quality, with some years being known in retrospect as great years for quality fiction and others not so much. There are just too many variables to nail down as to why any given year–or recommended reading list–has more or fewer stories placed on it by a different cast of reviewers, each of whom brings their own individual set of standards (some liberal and others more strict) to the fiction they read.