Author: Alex Acks

A spoiled aristocrat named Nehal wishes for nothing more than to go to the newly-opened Weaving Academy, where she can learn to take full control of her powers as a waterweaver. However, thanks to her father’s habit of gambling, she is instead forced to marry a wealthy merchant who is entirely indifferent to her — because he’s in love with a bookseller named Giorgina, who is secretly a powerful and uncontrolled earthweaver.

At the hospital to be treated for clinical depression, Whimsy meets a boy named Faerry, and they recognize in each other a bone-deep magic. Then when Faerry moves onto her street with his family, they begin to understand that their fates have been intertwined for a long time. And they share one more thing in common: their fear of the forest at the end of Marsh Creek Lane, which whispers to Whimsy and promises Faerry something he cannot define but has long felt is missing.

This anthology is filled with stories of a wide range of characters who all share two very important features: all of them are geeks and all of them are Black. The genres run the gamut from contemporary stories to fantasy and science fiction, brought to you by beloved and awesome authors such as Tochi Oneybuchi, Tracy Deonn, and Roseanne A. Brown.

Iselia “Seelie” Graygrove is, to all appearances, the identical twin of her sister Isolde…but she’s actually an autistic changeling left in the human world by the fae. Her unpredictable magic makes it difficult for her to socialize — and it also puts her on the hunt for a fabled treasure that will have her and her twin unraveling mysteries rooted in the history of both human and fae.

Lan is a songgirl in Haak’gong, scavenging for her past under the rule of the Elantian conquerers. She once had a different name, and a family, and lived under a magic unique to her people; now all she has is a strange mark burned into her arm, her mother’s last act before her death, and no one but Lan can see it. That is, until one night, when a boy shows up at her teahouse and saves her life. His name is Zen, and he’s one of the last practitioners of that now-forbidden magic, and he recognizes Lan for what she is: someone with a hidden and powerful ability that could be the way to overthrow the Elantians and regain the Last Kingdom.

Eight years after the Battle of the Serpent, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has taken back the Ice Needle Citadel, and there she creates monsters of snow and wood that will carry out her revenge. The only one who can stop her, Suren the child queen, has fled to the human world where she lives in the woods and releases mortals from foolish bargains they’ve made and believes herself safely forgotten. Then she is saved from a storm hag by the boy she was once betrothed to, and he has a mission for them both — to go north for a reckoning.

Hayes is a struggling documentary filmmaker whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of a handsome physicist named Yusuf, who claims he’s needed to understand a mysterious device called the Envisioner. At Yusuf’s say-so, Hayes is whisked off to a secret research facility. There, he learns that the Envisioner was created by an alternate version of himself from a different universe… a version who is angry, obsessive, and married to Yusuf. Soon, he finds the fate of countless realities in his hands — as well as the fate of his Yusuf, who he’s begun to fall for.

Ayanna Grace is a 17-year-old Black girl who survives by living in an abandoned subway that has become home to a full underground community. And the reason humans are scratching out a living underground? Two years ago, dragons came pouring out of a mysterious worm hole and the world burned. But now the medicine and water is running out, dragon attacks are imminent, and Ayanna is still a normal teenager who is interested in boys… and has several to choose from.

This book collects essays and thinkpieces from a myriad of science fiction creatives from multiple media that explore what futures science fiction has anticipated and what survival strategies it offers our communities.

Evermore is a town just off the coast of Ireland, a place protected by a goddess who wishes the lake of dreams remains untouched. But there are hostile witches who wish to take the lake’s power and release the Damned into our world. One hundred years ago, a woman named Brigid had devoted her life to guarding town and lake… and then she was offered her heart’s desire for a trickster god whose price was betraying Evermore. Now in modern day, the town is under siege, and Brigid’s descendant Ophelia and her fellow witch Finola must keep the monsters that attack it at bay. And then Brigid shows up, with no memory of how she came to be in the future, but knowing the answers she needs lie with the trickster god who once granted her wish and gave her a daughter.

The Never After crew is headed to Snow Country, though they make a stop to rescue the hapless Lord Sharif of Nottingham from a thieving scoundrel named Robin Hood. His are the least of their problems, though; Prince Charming has been turned into a frog, and there’s still an ominous capital-P Prophecy to deal with. The best bet to deal with all these problems is to find the League of Seven, a group of warriors devoted to fighting ogres — and even with their help, Olga and the ogres might still prevail.

In 1852, the father of twins Adolf and Adler Beck dies on a glacier; one of his sons goes on to become a respected scientist who studies climate, and the other claims to have become a famous opera singer. Both hear mysterious voices no one else can. In 2050, twins Charles and Greg Ramsey are, respectively, a police profiler recently made redundant and a climate journalist. At loose ends, Charles ends up digging into their family history. And all these lives intersect, along with a petty thief hanged in 1877, as the climate continues to change…

What happens when you take the only non-magical member of a family of powerful witches and keep setting her up on dates with her (unfortunately very hot) nemesis? A lot of annoyance… until our heroine makes her sister’s spell go awry, cursing her entire family by accident, and the only person who can help her untangle the mess is that very guy.

This collection of darkly fantastic and horror poems about misunderstood monsters, pandemics, aliens, and twisted fairy tales is by a Bram Stoke Award winner.

The unnamed protagonist of the book is a disaffected junior on the verge of dropping out from a prestigious university in Kyoto, where half his problem was joining the film club, where he clashed with its dictatorial jock of a president. His other mistake has been in his best friend, a diabolical creep named Ozu. But he might have a second chance to set his life on a better course as time is rewound and he has the opportunity to start over as a freshman.

The island of Endla is covered with the bloodthirsty Forest and protected from the outside world by a lake of poison. Life there is the only thing Leelo has known, but she begins to question the way her community lives when her younger brother faces exile by his next birthday. She also knows how her people are to treat outsiders, but when she sees a young man about to drown in he lake, she does the unthinkable and betrays her community by saving him.

Bora Chung has never before been published in the United States; this English translation of a selection of her short stories includes speculative tales that blend horror, science fiction, and fairy tales in which the most mundane — everyday apartment buildings, furry woodland creatures — becomes a dangerous disguise for monstrosity.

When a deadly earthquake shatters the port city of Sharis, one of those struggling for survival in its ruins is a cartographer named Rukha Marseen. With only her tools and her wits as means for survival, she stumbles across the wizard Eshu as he escapes a mirror pursued by hungry ghosts. Together, they travel across the continent together, trying to make it home. And together, they soon realize that the disaster in Sharis is but a part of something far larger. If they want to survive a world that seems headed for its end —and the wild god that now hunts them — they will need to rely on each other.

The planet of Swazembi is a colorful utopia and vacation destination, a place built by descendants of the West African Dogon Tribe. But the peace of the world is shattered when a mysterious skin infection strikes its populace; it turns Lileala’s skin, which once glimmered like diamonds and coal, to scabs and scars. Worse, Lileala begins to hear voices. Desperate, she searches for a cure, and instead discovers a new power within herself.

Grayson Hale is the most infamous murderer in Scotland, though he claims that he slaughtered his classmate at the behest of the Devil. When he is found hanged in his cell, he leaves behind a handwritten manuscript that tells the story of his fall from grace — and brings into question that perhaps the Devil did have some hand in all of this.