BEST OF SYNTHESIZED SUNSETS: START HERE!
Synthesized Sunsets is a magazine and podcast about speculative fiction, romantic art, and the evolution of popular culture. Every few months, the magazine will rebrand to reflect a new “season”, complete with an aesthetic theme. The current season of the magazine is SUMMER 2025: THE SOLAR ISSUE, and we will be highlighting works by the Hudson River School. To learn more, check out our season intro post.
Synthesized Sunsets has a wide range of content, so we decided to create an updating “Best Of” listing here for new readers. This listing is broken up into six categories: podcast episodes, reflections, reviews, speculations, surveys, and fiction. For more information about these categories, read the descriptions below. Thanks for reading!
Podcast Episodes
One of the best ways to experience Synthesized Sunsets is in conjunction with our podcast. Our podcast is a two-segment show, where we interview authors and friends in the first part and discuss recent articles in the magazine in the second. You can get a much better sense of our vibe than you can from reading the articles alone.
Reflections
Reflections are essentially stylized personal essays about childhood infused with speculative ideas, usually with references to several works of speculative fiction. These essays originally made up the majority of Synthesized Sunsets posts; and while there are more other types of essays now, we expect to continue to come out with these into the future.
'Grand Nostalgia' and the Temporal Injustice of 'Castle in the Sky'
How ‘Concrete Island’ by J. G. Ballard Echoes the Purgatory of Childhood
Reviews / ‘What Makes This Author Great’
Reviews are what they sound like. Some of our reviews are more conventional X/10 evaluations, while other ones argue for the merits of some author or work that we particularly enjoy. We tend to write about authors who we believe are underrated in general or in one particular aspect.
The Most Underrated Sci-Fi Writer of the 2010s Is… Scott Alexander?
The 2025 Hugo Awards
‘The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere’ and the Art of Good Fantasy Conversations
In Caroline M. Yoachim's Fragile Worlds, Acts of Care Take Center Stage
Speculations
Speculations are attempts to imagine how literature and popular culture may evolve, especially as a result of changes in the Internet and other digital technology. We have recently been on an AI speculation kick, but we tend to be most interested in how speculative fiction could evolve into new digital forms of media (like hypertext).
Surveys
Surveys are comprehensive listings of some type of speculative fiction that is out there and/or how some part of the speculative fiction landscape came to be. These articles tend to be less polished, but they are our most popular type of article and likely to be quite useful for readers just diving into some area of speculative fiction.
Original Fiction
We occasionally publish original fiction. In the future, there will hopefully be much more original fiction to come!