Worlds Of Speculative Fiction Lineup For 2025
the next twelve sessions in this monthly series!
Every year, I reserve three of the twelve monthly slots in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series for viewer-suggested authors and series. In order to determine who to add into those slots, I first produce a video asking viewers for a wide range of suggestions, and then I take the best or most popular six responses, put them into a poll, and then take the three most popular results of those. Here are the results this time around.
You can see that the two big winners are Peter Watts and Stephen King, with Lois McMaster Bujold in a distant third, with Alastair Reynolds behind her in fourth place. Marion Zimmer Bradley and James Blish, sad to say, are entirely out of the running.
Here is the full, month-to-month, lineup for the coming year as currently planned
January - Steven Erickson, Malazan Book Of The Fallen series (continued). We will be going back to this series, on which we have already done two previous sessions (which you can watch here and here). This time around, we will be looking at books 5 and 6 in this massive series.
February - Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising series. I haven’t read these fantasy novels, set in our world but integrating a lot of elements of magic, mythology, and legends, since I was a child, but I remember really enjoying them and I’m looking forward to reareading them. There are five fairly short books in this series
March - Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher series (continued). This is another series I did a previous session on, discussing the first four books (which you can watch here). We’re returning to it this year, following out the series through books five to eight.
April - Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files series (continued). This is a third series we’re returning to this year, after I really enjoyed reading the first four books set in a Chicago full of supernatural creatures (you can watch the session on them here). We will be focusing on books five through eight this time.
May - Terry Pratchett, Diskworld (continued). This is yet another series that I have previously done sessions on, focusing on the novels in which Rincewind or Death & Susan are the main characters (you can watch them here and here). I have really enjoyed reading them, and we’re going to make another foray into the narrative universe, this time looking at those six novels centering on the witches.
June - David Eddings, The Belgariad (part 1). People have been recommending this epic fantasy series to me for quite some time, so I’ve decided it was a good opportunity to see what all the interest is about. It is rather long, so we will tackle the first three books in the first session
July - David Eddings, The Belgariad (part 2). We return to this narrative world for a second session, in which we will go through the longer fourth and fifth book of the series
August - Ken Liu, the Dandelion Dynasty series (part 1): This was a series that we were slated to begin as a fan-favorite last year, but just didn’t get to. So we will be working our way through the first two books in the series. If I enjoy it, we’ll pick up with the final two books the following year.
September - Christopher Ruocchio, the Sun Eater series (part 1): Another series that was selected by fans, this one is a science fantasy epic spanning six volumes. We’ll read through the first two of those, and see whether we want to continue on with the series in later years.
October (fan selection) - Peter Watts, the Firefall series: This is a science fiction series which includes two novels and one story. At this point I don’t know much more about it, but I certainly will once I read them.
November (fan selection) - Steven King’s novel The Stand: An interesting popular fan choice for a novel, rather than a series. It’s pretty massive as a novel, and does outline an interesting post-apocalyptic world, so I think it will work fine, along lines of Neil Stephenson's long novel Anathem (which we did earlier, and you can watch here)
December (fan selection) - Lois McMaster Bujold,the World Of The Five Gods series: This is a fantasy series that, as you can guess, centers considerably on rich and conflicted theological matters. My dad and a friend of mine have been recommending her work to me for years, so I’m really looking forward to getting into her works. We’ll be focusing on two of the novels from this long series.
If you’d like to get updates about the series, including notifications about when the sessions occur and how you can participate in them, you might want to sign up for the free online course in the Study With Sadler Academy.
Well. Truly a man of many parts, Dr Sadler. I’m off to take a look at the course. Thank you.