The Novel Nebula Finalists You Should Read

The empire Luca is to inherit is crumbling around her as her uncle, sitting on the throne, continues to make matters worse. Her best opportunity is a land long since conquered, where she can sway the rebels there toward peace… and use them to reclaim the magic her land has long since lost. There she meets Touraine, a soldier conscripted by the empire as a child, whose bonds of blood to her homeland should be long broken… and aren’t.

It’s 1912 in a Cairo very different from the one we know, where Djinn have come into the world and the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities regulates magic. When an entire secret brotherhood is slain, Agent Fatma is put on the case and discovers the murderer claims to be the man to whom that brotherhood was dedicated–al-Jahiz himself, the one who opened our world to magic. Whether he is real or imposter, he must be stopped, and she’s the woman to do it.

By 2095, people generally don’t die from violence–instead they get taken out by designer diseases or starve in the streets because they can no longer keep up with AI squeezing them out of the gig economy. The key to survival is a plethora of pills. Welga is an executive bodyguard in this milieu, and when her client is killed by a mysterious terrorist group called the Machinehood, she finds herself in the middle of a plot to stop all pill production.

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire sees Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass leaving the heart of the Teixcalaanli empire to go to the edge of space, where an alien species that no one knows how to communicate with has begun slaughtering Teixcalaanli colonies. Together, they must figure out how to talk to a species whose language quite literally makes them ill… and also how to talk to each other.

Plague Birds are the melding of human and artificial intelligence, marked by their bright red hair and clothes so ordinary people know to fleet them. They serve as the judges and executioners in the world that still survives after civilization has collapsed. Crista first met the Plague Birds when one killed her mother when she was a child. As an adult, she becomes this thing she hates and fears most in order to save her village. Her first mission is to chase down a group of murderers who wield what looks like magic.