Author: Alex Acks

Jacklyn Albright is the acting captain of the starship Calysto, shepherding all that remains of a failed colony on a distant planet back to earth on a barely functioning and disaster-plagued ship. There’s already strain enough to break the crew, between starvation and accidents and spreading unrest…and then an unknown intruder begins haunting the ship, hunting and bloodily killing the crew.

On a distant planet ruled by a corporate aristocracy descended from Africa, life is good for the privileged who employ powerful cybernetic technology to ensure their place as nearly immortal rulers of a downtrodden underclass. The Primes have been genetically engineered in a secret underwater lab to lead a rebellion against them, but when the hideout of the cult that made them is attacked, their bodyguards, Proxies Nandipa and Hondo, get their charges to safety in the world above…and find everything they’ve been led to believe is false.

The gods are warring after centuries of being quiet, but 18-year-old junior journalist Iris Winnow is more concerned by her mother’s struggles with addiction and the fact that her older brother has gone missing on the front lines of the god war. Her best hope to helping with either of those problems is getting a promotion to columnist at the paper she works at, the Oath Gazette. But she has a rival, Roman Kitt, also gunning for the job, and somehow the letters she’s been writing to her brother and tucking under her wardrobe door keep ending up in his hands.

Ren Yu lives and breathes swimming and spends all of her time training; if she’s good enough, she’ll get scouted, go to a good school, and finally have the love of her parents and the kindness of her coach. But in her heart of hearts, she dreams of being a mermaid, a beautiful monster that drags humans to their doom and drowns them. And she will do anything to gain that life of freedom, no matter how much blood will end up in the water at the end of it.

Gita Chithra is the captain of The Tempest, an intergalactic ship that specializes in missions of retrieval and assistance. But when she gets a distress call from an AI trapped in an artificial, alien-made solar system known as Loki’s Ring, it becomes very personal and far more dangerous. Because that AI, Ri, is one that Gita trained from her inception — and is the closest Gita has to a daughter. With every organic person in Loki’s Ring dead due to a mysterious contagion, Gita needs all the help she can get, even if it means calling in a favor from an old friend.

Darling Seabreak survived the slaughter of her family by House Dragon; after hiding in the sewers for a time, she was rescued and raised by House Kraken. When her adoptive father is captured in battle, she vows to rescue him, and she will kill any member of House Dragon who stands in her way. But she didn’t reckon with Talon Goldhoard, the War Prince of House Dragon, whom she ambushes. Talon quickly realizes that she’s the girl his brother, whose rule has become increasingly erratic, has been obsessively painting for years.

Ren Monroe is a scholarship kid at Baelmerick University, and she promises to be one of the greatest wizards in her generation. Not that her top marks will mean anything if a major house doesn’t recruit her…a house like Theo Brood’s, who is an unpleasant and rich boy. When he is punished for a failed party trick by being made to use the same portal home as the scholarship students (ugh), his unpleasant presence causes a fight to break out and then the spell to go awry in the chaos. Six of the waiting students, including him and Ren, are whisked away to the middle of nowhere…and only five make it alive. If the rest want to make it out, they’ll have to work together.

In the City of Lies, everyone has their tongue cut out when they are 13 under the orders of the Ajungo Empire — a brutal requirement if they want to continue to receive water from their overlords. Tutu is three days from his 13th birthday, but he knows his mother won’t make it that long. He makes a deal with an oba: if she gives his mother water now, he will leave the city and find water to bring back for everyone.

Lucha is a have-not in Robado, a city where the haves are happy to forget people like her exist. Her drug-addicted mother often leaves her and her beloved younger sister Lis to fend for themselves; it’s up to Lucha to provide for both of them, using her innate abilities to hunt monsters. Left homeless by their mother’s most recent disappearance, the sisters must go on the run to survive…and find themselves in the middle of a feud between two gods.

Narra Jal is an outcast, someone who has been considered lucky her entire life, doomed to live on the fringes of society. But to save her mother, she returns to the city that turned its back on her, Bato-Ko, and enters into the trials that will determine its next ruler. The fact that she has no weapons, no armor, no magic, no training, no chance will not stop her. With sheer, fierce determination, she will show her opponents that they were right to fear would bring them ill luck.

One terrible night destroyed Ava and Kaye’s deep friendship — the night the vampires broke through the barrier protecting their town, killing Kaye’s mother and turning Ava into one of their number. These two young witches are now at odds, and it only gets worse when Ava’s mother plans to destroy the town herself, forcing Ava to seek help from the very vampires that attacked them two years ago…and forcing Kaye to try to hunt her down.

Anaïs is at a party — the anniversary of the kingdom, a massive and glittering affair — and wishes she were anywhere else, hopefully as far away from the pompous Prince Leo. At midnight, she’s temporarily granted her wish when a massive explosion destroys the palace and kills everyone — including her. Then she wakes up in her bedroom, before the party, and she’s the only one who remembers the disaster. She must relive it again and again until she can find a way to stop the attack, which means diving deep into court intrigue and betrayal.

It has always been raining in Aloisville, at least that anyone can remember…but that is because the rain itself washes away memory. Stay outside too long, and a person can lose everything they ever were. Laverne begins keeping a journal too late — her town has already changed irreparably, and a mysterious force prevents anyone’s escape. But all she wants to do is survive, and remembering anything at all will be the key.

Carmen Sanchez has returned to Mexico to supervise the renovation of an old abbey, with her daughters in tow since they are too young to be left alone in New York. But when an accident at the abbey reveals a collection of ancient artifacts, Carmen loses her job and the family trip is caught short. Something follows Carmen and her girls home to New York, stalking the family and warning of coming catastrophe…

An alien crashes their spaceship in the middle of nowhere, an unfamiliar and unremarkable planet (of course we’re talking about Earth) where the gravity is a massive problem that means they need to practice walking. Good thing their pursuit of delicious humans provides excellent motivation. But after a fun time hunting, they begin to understand their prey a little too well…and why humans might want to survive.

Elle is the ignored middle child — but she’s also a descendant of the Chinese god of medicine, which makes her a disappointment as well. Instead of a doctor, she’s a mediocre magical calligrapher employed by a temp agency. She still finds challenge in outfitting her client (and main crush), the half-elf Luc, with very powerful and well-crafted glyphs. Luc has his own burden: he’s trying to repair a curse laid on someone during a botched assignment. Together, Elle and Luc might be able to find both fulfillment and happiness…but they need to gain their freedom first, and that will require sacrifices of them both.

This is Anuja Varghese’s debut collection of speculative fiction stories that blend reality and worlds beyond to explore family, sexuality, community, and cultural expectations, focused particularly on the ways racialized women have their power stolen and the dangerous journeys they undergo to reclaim it.

Yang Wei arrives in C City expecting a normal work trip…but when a complimentary bottle of water from the hotel causes him horrific stomach pain and renders him unconscious for three days, he finds himself trapped in a labyrinthine hospital system where there is no diagnosis, but there are a lot of secrets being kept from all of the patients.

Emma rushes out the door on an ordinary Monday, so distracted by the demands of her job and social obligations that she doesn’t notice the distress of her own family. That night, she fights with her husband and realizes too late that she’s forgotten their anniversary — just in time for him to walk out of the house with their dog and be hit by a car. The next day when she wakes up, her husband is alive…and it’s Monday again. And again. And again. Until she figures out how to right all of their lives.

This new short story collection — her first in almost a decade — from Margaret Atwood focuses on family, memory, and loss with her trademark, thoughtful speculative twist.

The sequel to The Unbroken starts with the rebels having won and the empire withdrawing from Qazal. But unbinding once-conquerer and conquered is no simple or easy task. Luca still needs to take her throne back from her uncle and gain her rightful place as queen, and Touraine must grapple with the fact that leading a revolution and leading a country are very, very different things. Together, perhaps the two can overcome history and heartbreak.

Dr. Tyson Klein, a quantum physicist at CERN, has found something strange in the data from the Large Hadron Collider — a pattern in the output, like there’s a broadcast happening over what he comes to call “quantum radio.” Is it a message from another time, another universe or something even stranger? But he’s not the only one who’s noticed, nor the only one trying to decipher the signal. And there are those who want this discovery to never see the light of day.

Jade Nguyen comes to Vietnam to visit her estranged father with one goal in mind: pretend to be straight, Vietnamese, and American enough to get the money for college tuition out of him that he’s holding over her head. But the French colonial house Ba is restoring has an eerie air and other plans for her, starting with strange noises and sensations, and soon escalating to a ghostly bride who gives her a simple but cryptic warning: Don’t eat. If Jade is brave enough, she may be able to save her family…this time.

In Simta, women’s magic is outlawed. The few who have the gift are called Nightbirds, and jealously guarded by the Great Houses thanks to their most important skill: the ability to gift their magic to another with a kiss. Nightbirds spend a year bestowing their magic on those who can pay well, and then are expected to be married into a Great House and settle down to become the mothers of the next generation before their lose their powers. But this Season’s Nightbirds find themselves at the center of a political plot that may well expose them to a church that would very much like to kill them — and reveals to them the deepest secret of the Nightbirds. There are more girls like them, and they are far more powerful than they’ve been allowed to discover.