Although there’s still almost a month left in 2017, at least ten different sources have already selected their best SF/F of the year. File 770 has also posted a round-up of the year’s novellas. The SFWA has dozens of novels on the suggested reading list for Nebula voters, and the SPFBO project currently has one finalist that was published in 2017. Combining all those sources with the lists of new books posted at Locus and the new book lists posted at The Verge (including the list for December), I arrived at a list of over 700 probably Hugo-eligible titles that have ratings at Goodreads. For each title, I expressed the Goodreads rating as a percentage, squared it, and multiplied it by the log of the number of people who’ve rated the book, generating a single popularity score used to sort the lists below. This is obviously a little unfair to books that are just now coming out. I’ve also categorized the results in other ways that may be unfair:

• I’ve removed around two dozen “general fiction” titles when I have trouble imagining recommending them on the basis of their SF/F content. For example, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders rated very highly. In spite of its Booker Prize win this year, I don’t think any SF/F blog I read has even mentioned it, and although that could be a blind spot of my own, I suspect the way the story is put together limits its appeal to genre readers. Incidentally, I think the same author’s short story “Escape from Spiderhead” is one of the best works of SF/F that I’ve ever read.
• I’ve classified around 125 books as “young adult,” but this is often a judgment call, and I’ve neglected to distinguish middle grade from YA. To decide whether a book was aimed at younger readers, I relied in part on whether the book was shelved as young-adult at Goodreads and in part on what reviews said there about the content.
• I’ve separated standalone and “starting-point” novels from sequels that assume knowledge of the series. What counts as a standalone or starting-point novel is debateable, and although I’ve consulted reader reviews, it isn’t always clear.
• Finally, although I did initially look at distinguishing urban fantasy and horror from SF/F, there really weren’t enough examples of them among non-YA standalone / starting-point novels to worry about. There were well over 50 urban fantasy sequels, but only around 30 standalone or series-starting urban fantasies, most of which did not rate very well. So relatively few appear on the lists below.

Top 125 standalone or starting-point books (non-YA)

1. Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology
2. Mark Lawrence, Red Sister
3. Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale
4. Nicholas Eames, Kings of the Wyld
5. E. William Brown, Perilous Waif
6. John Scalzi, The Collapsing Empire
7. Andrew Rowe, Sufficiently Advanced Magic
8. Martha Wells, All Systems Red
9. Naomi Alderman, The Power
10. Brandon Sanderson, Snapshot
11. Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
12. Jeff VanderMeer, Borne
13. Omar El Akkad, American War
14. Stephen King and Owen King, Sleeping Beauties
15. Austin Chant, Peter Darling
16. Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders
17. Andy Weir, Artemis
18. S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass
19. Catherynne M. Valente (with illustrations by Annie Wu), The Refrigerator Monologues
20. Joe Hill, Strange Weather
21. Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
22. Daniel Suarez, Change Agent
23. Ed McDonald, Blackwing
24. Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep
25. Ann Leckie, Provenance
26. Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks
27. Marcus Sakey, Afterlife
28. Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes
29. Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues
30. Seanan McGuire, Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day
31. Victor LaValle, The Changeling
32. C. Robert Cargill, Sea of Rust
33. Kevin Hearne, A Plague of Giants
34. Theodora Goss, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
35. Cory Doctorow, Walkaway
36. Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia
37. Kathleen A Flynn, The Jane Austen Project
38. Ellen Klages, Passing Strange
39. Rob Reid, After On
40. Lara Elena Donnelly, Amberlough
41. Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion
42. Linda Nagata, The Last Good Man
43. Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids
44. Kory Shrum, Shadows in the Water
45. Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts
46. Vivian Shaw, Strange Practice
47. Robyn Bennis, The Guns Above
48. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
49. Jim C. Hines, Terminal Alliance
50. JY Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven
51. Curtis Craddock, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors
52. Dan Moren, The Caledonian Gambit
53. Nicky Drayden, The Prey of Gods
54. Peter S. Beagle, In Calabria
55. Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty
56. Kat Howard, An Unkindness of Magicians
57. Caitlín R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland
58. Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide
59. Karin Tidbeck, Amatka
60. Annalee Newitz, Autonomous
61. D.J. Butler, Witchy Eye
62. Angus Watson, You Die When You Die
63. Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth
64. Jeremy Robert Johnson, Entropy in Bloom
65. Mira Grant, Final Girls
66. Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban
67. Alex Wells, Hunger Makes the Wolf
68. Hugh Howey, Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories
69. Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
70. Ann Claycomb, The Mermaid’s Daughter
71. Zachary Mason, Void Star
72. Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne
73. Tom Merritt, Pilot X
74. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Beautiful Ones
75. Michael Johnston, Soleri
76. Anna Stephens, Godblind
77. Marina J. Lostetter, Noumenon
78. Naomi Kritzer, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories
79. Elizabeth Bear, The Stone in the Skull
80. Tom Holt, The Management Style of the Supreme Beings
81. Corey J. White, Killing Gravity
82. Scott Oden, A Gathering of Ravens
83. Tim Pratt, The Wrong Stars
84. Tracy Townsend, The Nine
85. Sofia Samatar, Tender: Stories
86. Dave Hutchinson, Acadie
87. Daniel Kehlmann (translated by Ross Benjamin), You Should Have Left
88. Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project
89. Giorgio de Maria (translated by Ramon Glazov), The Twenty Days of Turin
90. Stephen Graham Jones, Mapping the Interior
91. Spencer Ellsworth, Starfire: A Red Peace
92. Fonda Lee, Jade City
93. David Drake, The Spark
94. Orson Scott Card, Children of the Fleet
95. Frank Chadwick, Chain of Command
96. David Walton, The Genius Plague
97. Angela Roquet, Blood Vice
98. Marshall Ryan Maresca, The Holver Alley Crew
99. James Brogden, Hekla’s Children
100. K.J. Parker, Mightier Than the Sword
101. Carrie Vaughn, Bannerless
102. J-F Dubeau, A God in the Shed
103. Charlie Jane Anders, Six Months, Three Days, Five Others
104. Walter Jon Williams, Quillifer
105. Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (eds.), The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories
106. Emma Newman, Brother’s Ruin
107. John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
108. Molly Tanzer, Creatures of Will and Temper
109. John Kessel, The Moon and the Other
110. Paul Cornell, Chalk
111. Chris Sharp, Cold Counsel
112. Cherie Priest, Brimstone
113. Dale Lucas, First Watch
114. Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton (eds.), Haunted Nights
115. Gardner Dozois (ed.), The Book of Swords
116. Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun
117. Brad Abraham, Magicians Impossible
118. Margaret Killjoy, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion
119. Christopher Golden, Ararat
120. Tim Lebbon, Relics
121. Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male
122. Anna Smith Spark, The Court of Broken Knives
123. Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn
124. Anne Corlett, The Space Between the Stars
125. Joseph Brassey, Skyfarer

Top 25 sequels (non-YA)

1. Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Fate
2. Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer
3. Ilona Andrews, White Hot
4. Ilona Andrews, Wildfire
5. V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light
6. Patricia Briggs, Silence Fallen
7. N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky
8. Karen Marie Moning, Feversong
9. Dennis Taylor, All These Worlds
10. Anne Bishop, Etched in Bone
11. Brian McClellan, Sins of Empire
12. Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Miracles
13. Faith Hunter, Cold Reign
14. Marko Kloos, Fields of Fire
15. Jodi Taylor, And the Rest is History
16. Michael J. Sullivan, Age of Swords
17. Sylvain Neuvel, Waking Gods
18. Seanan McGuire, The Brightest Fell
19. Peter V. Brett, The Core
20. Alice Hoffman, The Rules of Magic
21. Benedict Jacka, Bound
22. John Connolly, A Game of Ghosts
23. Nnedi Okorafor, Home
24. Glynn Stewart, Duchess of Terra
25. Diana Gabaldon, Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

Top 25 YA standalone or starting-point books

1. Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
2. Marie Lu, Warcross
3. Stephanie Garber, Caraval
4. Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands
5. Pittacus Lore, Generation One
6. Christina Henry, Lost Boy
7. Claudia Gray, Defy the Stars
8. Emily R. King, The Hundredth Queen
9. Veronica Roth, Carve the Mark
10. Ibi Zoboi, American Street
11. Wen Spencer, The Black Wolves of Boston
12. Lisa Maxwell, The Last Magician
13. Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints
14. Alastair Reynolds, Revenger
15. S. Jae-Jones, Wintersong
16. Ryan Graudin, Invictus
17. Julie C. Dao, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns
18. Garth Nix, Frogkisser!
19. Kelley Armstrong, Missing
20. Vic James, Gilded Cage
21. Jennifer Trafton (with illustrations by Benjamin Schipper), Henry and the Chalk Dragon
22. Cindy Pon, Want
23. Elle Katharine White, Heartstone
24. Laurie Forest, The Black Witch
25. Jodi Meadows, Before She Ignites

Top 25 YA sequels

1. Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin
2. Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
3. Sarah J. Maas, Tower of Dawn
4. Jay Kristoff, Godsgrave
5. Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust
6. V.E. Schwab, Our Dark Duet
7. Victoria Aveyard, King’s Cage
8. Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones
9. Megan Whalen Turner, Thick as Thieves
10. Susan Dennard, Windwitch
11. Elizabeth May, The Fallen Kingdom
12. Alison Goodman, The Dark Days Pact
13. Libba Bray, Before the Devil Breaks You
14. Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, The Silver Mask
15. Rachel Caine, Ash and Quill
16. Mercedes Lackey, Apex
17. Scott Sigler, Alone
18. Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior
19. April Daniels, Sovereign
20. Dan Wells, Nothing Left to Lose
21. Isaac Marion, The Burning World
22. Sarah Beth Durst, The Reluctant Queen
23. Arwen Elys Dayton, Disruptor
24. Kathleen Baldwin, Refuge for Masterminds
25. Kate Elliott, Buried Heart