Best of British science fiction gets bundled (news).
What is this, we hear at the Nest, somebody has now bundled fifteen rather fine examples of British science fiction, fantasy and horror together for the price of a modest takeaway? Crikes! The 2026 Best of British SFF Bundle is the fifth annual raid on the nation’s speculative bookshelves by author and editor Lavie Tidhar. Pay what you fancy and you receive the three core books. Raise your contribution to $30 and the bundle expands alarmingly, disgorging twelve additional ebooks for a total of fifteen. That works out at two dollars a book, which is less than some cafés charge for allowing hot water to become acquainted with a teabag.
The books are supplied as DRM-free ebooks, so they can be read on Kindles, tablets, phones, laptops and probably an enchanted hand mirror if you have installed the correct app. Buyers can also decide how their payment is divided between the authors and StoryBundle, with the option to send ten per cent to Locus. It is capitalism, but wearing a cardigan and trying to be helpful.
The three books waiting at the bundle’s front door are hardly scraps thrown down to tempt the peasantry.
Ian McDonald’s The Broken Land takes place in a living, sentient world where biology can be persuaded, sung to and reshaped. Mathembe Fileli grows up amid talking trees, organic machines and family members with unusual relationships to botany, until war tears her home apart. McDonald, a Belfast-based winner of assorted Hugos, Locus Awards and enough BSFA Awards to require reinforced shelving, turns political conflict and genetic strangeness into something beautiful, troubling and gloriously difficult to file under “elves”.
Rose Biggin’s Make-Believe and Artifice gathers fifteen stories playing with myth, literature, theatricality and the machinery of storytelling itself. Biggin is a writer, performer, creative-writing lecturer and former Miss Pole Dance UK finalist who has also written jokes for BBC Radio 4. This makes her considerably better qualified for surviving a modern literary festival than most authors, who are defeated by the first folding chair.
Juliet E. McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir brings ancient British folklore into a world of CCTV cameras, police databases and social media. Daniel Mackmain is a solitary travelling worker with a secret ancestry and a strong preference for not being noticed. When a young woman is murdered in Derbyshire, he realises the crime belongs to the hidden supernatural world that ordinary investigators cannot see. It is rural fantasy with mud on its boots, murder in the woods and the uneasy possibility that the trees know more than they are telling.
Then the $30 threshold opens and twelve more books come tumbling out, presumably accompanied by a small fanfare and the sound of your ebook reader reconsidering its storage arrangements.
Ian R. MacLeod’s The Light Ages imagines an alternative industrial Britain powered by aether, where magic has become industry and the Great Guilds control society. Robert Borrows escapes the factories of Yorkshire for London, only to discover changelings, class divisions and secrets larger than his ambitions. It is Dickens filtered through steampunk, magical realism and the sort of industrial relations meeting where somebody may be turned into a gargoyle.
Anna Smith Spark’s A Woman of the Sword puts the aftermath of heroic fantasy under an unforgiving lamp. Its protagonist is not merely a warrior but a mother, veteran and damaged survivor trying to navigate family life after violence has become the language she speaks most fluently. Smith Spark is often crowned the queen of grimdark, though one suspects the coronation involved blood, screaming and a throne that failed several health-and-safety inspections.
Marie O’Regan’s The Last Ghost and Other Stories collects tales of hauntings, grief and supernatural unease from a British Fantasy Award-nominated author and editor. These are ghosts less interested in floating decoratively along corridors than in dragging old wounds back into the room and asking why nobody has dealt with them properly.
Best of British Science Fiction 2025, edited by Donna Scott, performs exactly the useful service promised on the tin: gathering notable short science fiction from British writers published during the year. It offers a compact survey of what the national genre has been thinking about while everybody else was arguing with automated customer-service systems.
Joanna Corrance’s The Hamlet follows the inhabitants of a small community during a national emergency as ordinary social boundaries begin to melt into body horror and fairy tale. Isolation reveals people’s true selves, which is rarely good news. Most of us discovered this during lockdown when the chap next door started conducting loud business meetings from his paddling pool.
Philip Palmer’s The Great West Wood is a magical-realist thriller set in a South London district built over the remains of an ancient forest. Trees talk, children float and a resurrected peat corpse becomes a feared crime boss. Here at SFcrowsnest, we previously described the novel as alive with “energy, wit, and menace”, and StoryBundle has very sportingly used that verdict on its own page. Our opinions have escaped into the wild again.
James Lovegrove’s The Age of Ra begins his bestselling Pantheon sequence in a world where the Egyptian gods have defeated rival deities and divided Earth into competing territories. British soldier David Westwynter reaches Freegypt, the last state beyond divine control, and becomes entangled with a rebel called the Lightbringer. Imagine geopolitics conducted by immortal beings with animal heads and no discernible respect for the United Nations.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Hungry Gods crosses a poisoned post-apocalyptic landscape populated by tribes named for Rabbits, Seagulls, Pigeons and Cockroaches. After her people are destroyed, Amri joins a fallen god seeking revenge against the beings who betrayed him. Tchaikovsky has written acclaimed books about intelligent spiders, uplifted octopuses and insect civilisations, so anyone surprised that he can turn tribal scavengers and vengeful gods into compelling fiction has plainly not been paying attention.
Will Wiles’ The Anechoic Chamber finds horror lurking inside bureaucracy, property development, NHS files, memory-foam mattresses, smart televisions and unfortunate internet purchases. Its title refers to a room designed to absorb every echo, leaving a silence so complete that the human body becomes the loudest object present. This is unsettling enough before the supernatural elements arrive and begin checking the terms of your warranty.
Lavie Tidhar includes his own The Violent Century, an alternative history of twentieth-century superheroes, espionage, war and betrayal. Rather than capes, inspirational speeches and cities rebuilt by the next film, Tidhar gives us damaged people whose extraordinary abilities cannot insulate them from politics or history. It is the superhero century after the propaganda posters have peeled away.
Tom Lloyd’s Devil Inside mixes contemporary fantasy, crime and supernatural menace, with characters whose sharp edges and questionable judgement suggest that nobody will be resolving the plot through healthy communication and a restorative cup of tea.
Finally, Fight Like a Girl: Volume 2, edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall, gathers stories examining women, combat, courage and the assumptions surrounding all three. The result promises warriors of many kinds rather than another parade of improbably armoured heroines apparently dressed for battle during a severe national shortage of trousers.
Altogether, the bundle covers living worlds, industrial magic, Egyptian gods, British folklore, haunted bureaucracy, superheroes, urban forests, grimdark veterans and at least one reanimated criminal bog body. This is a healthier range than most physical bookshops can fit onto a single table without the manager becoming nervous.
You can inspect the complete bundle, read descriptions and previews, and choose your payment at https://storybundle.com/bestof.
