My Favorite SFF Reads of 2021

Considering I wrote an entire spot on how much I freaking love this book, its inclusion in my favorites should be no surprise. All I can say is that I’m still thinking about and recommending this book to anyone who will listen, even months later. It’s gorgeous, and thoughtful, and healing. But remember, trigger warnings in this one, particularly for sexual assault.

This is just such a fun book, a combination of bananapants mecha action (I’m glad we’re apparently riding a mecha wave in SF novels right now) and absolute rage against the injustice of gender roles and patriarchy. All I can say is there darn tootin’ better be a sequel.

This is a fairly short novella that I would argue is more character portrait than story, in which you learn about the title character through the imprint she’s left in the lives of others. It’s so delicately and deftly done that it was a pleasure to read.

Another “no surprise” book–everyone knows by now that I love The Goblin Emperor, and I was pretty much doomed to love anything that followed, but particularly since it’s about my favorite sad gay elf, Celehar. This is very slice of life at times, which I find delightful, and was just screaming for a sequel… which is coming next year: The Grief of Stones

I am not much of a one for epic fantasy, but Rebecca Roanhorse got me good with this one. Her world is vivid and well drawn, she manages to make the politics of it legible and interesting, and she got me to buy all in on what is fundamentally a religious dispute with historically conquered people still resisting (partially) their conquest. The characters absolutely make it.

This book is honestly a bit too on the didactic side for my general taste, but it’s still on my list because there are just so many crunchy, interesting ideas… and it also offers a sense of hope about the slow motion climate catastrophe. There’s no airily waving the disaster away with science fiction, but offering that one can imagine a potentially realistic way to get through this, even with a world that isn’t terribly united.

The second installment of a series I love (first book: Savage Legion) and looking at it from a distance, I can say that I love it for many of the same reasons as I love Black Sun. It’s epic fantasy that operates on an imperial scale that’s very interested in examining how messed up empire fundamentally is and how it’s predicated on the existence of second-, third-, or worse- class citizens. Matt does it with such an economy of language that the books just fly.

I’ve been hearing for years how good and important this book is, and everything I’ve heard was true. Carmen Maria Machado takes on a topic that gets swept under the rug far too often in the LGBTQ community (domestic abuse, so big TW on this one) and does so with beauty and very necessary empathy for for herself.

Another absolutely gorgeous book that I was destined to love because it’s about the geological depths of the earth that have been created over millions of years. I’m a geologist, I can’t help it.

I mostly read romance when I need a little break from SFF, but I decided to give this cozy mystery a try–and it’s the first cozy I’ve read, I’d say. This book was just hecka fun, and it’s also got a cookie recipe in the back that I want to try.