Snowy SFF to Read During a Blizzard

The events of this book collapse in on the inflection point of the winter solstice, which is when a god may be reborn and an empire might fall. And as one might expect of a winter solstice, it’s cold and snow in the canyon that’s the center of that empire. I know I mention this book a lot, but that’s because it’s so freaking good.

With the Crescent Empire about to fall to a revolution, five sisters are going to determine its future. Each one has her own life and desires, but the Great Thinking Machine that may or may not be powered by evil magic has no time for their pedestrian lives. The whole setting is historical fantasy Russia, so expect it to be cold.

Apollo Kagwa and his wife Emma are supposed to have a happily ever after with the birth of their new baby, but then Emma insists the baby is not actually hers, but a changeling… A story that’s in a lot of ways about post-partum depression and the difficulties of being a new parent–but also about an ancestral curse all the way from Norway laid on a family that really does not deserve to have bad crap happen to them. There’s not actually snow until the end of the book, but the whole thing feels like winter, emotionally.

This book is split roughly in half, with part of it describing the City, which is a boundless afterlife that’s neither heaven nor hell, a place where the people remain as long as there is someone alive who remembers them. The other half is about an employee of Coca-Cola who is dispatched to Antarctica to research if they can use the ice melting courtesy of climate change in their products. Things go very wrong for her, with a deadly virus that was probably engineered in a lab sweeping across the world right as she arrives and leaving her stranded.

A very dysfunctional crew of humans and their robot servants are sent by a corporation to explore an ice planet where some very strange things are happening. This book swings between the claustrophobia of being trapped on a ship with a bunch of people who don’t like each other to being trapped on a hostile ball of ice and snow where everything is going wrong. And then things get werid.