Category: Swords and Spaceships

Qalia is a hidden city where a tea infused with spice magic awakens the magical affinities of any who drink it. Imani at sixteen has an affinity for iron and looks to be the next great warrior to fight the djinn…but her older brother who has tarnished her family name after being caught stealing spice and then fleeing to die beyond the Forbidden Wastes. But when Imani discovers clues indicating that her brother is still alive and may well be betraying Qalia by selling its magic to foreigners, she sets out to cross the wastes herself, to bring him to justice — but what she finds on the other side will be far greater secrets than she could have imagined.

In Coventry, Massacheusetts, Halloween night in 1984 is not a happy time for two families that are falling apart. But while that domestic drama plays out, something more sinister is going on. Four eerie children who do not belong on that street or in this time or in this world are going door to door and begging the neighborhood kids to hide them from The Cunning Man.

Blackthorn, Massachusetts is an uncommonly magical place, but it has only one hedge witch: Aziza El-Amin, whose job is to manage all of the magical problems, large and small. But when the boundary between the human and fairy worlds begins to erode thanks to the machinations of a dark entity, things begin to get dangerous, and Aziza needs help. Who she gets is Leo Merritt, who has been miserably wandering America for the last year since a curse destroyed all the memories of his true love and left him feeling nothing but a nameless absence; he’s more than happy to run patrols with Aziza if she’ll help him figure out this problem. Soon it’s too much for the both of them, though, and they need the aid of a mysterious necromancer that neither of them trust, but both of them need.

The planet Jai stands on the brink of destruction after the artificially intelligent Gods of the galaxy stop protecting it in the face of an ancient enemy. Yasira Shien, devoted to saving Jai, would give her life to save it — and she might have to, since Dr. Evianna Talirr, who began Jai’s rebellion and caused its decimation, returns with a prophecy that the only way to save the world is with Yasira’s death. Yasira is certain it cannot be that simple, but time is running out, and her only road to salvation will lie with destroying everything she knows about the galaxy, the Gods, and herself.

Neve is the youngest daughter of the kingdom of Eire, where banshee and water-wights are but a few of the threats its people face. Any magic the people might use to defend themselves has been outlawed by her father, and what remains is the purview of his Druid priests. Neve grew up hating these Druids; a Druid’s apprentice-turned-thief named Ronan is thus an unlikely ally for her, but they’ve been brought together by the mark of dark magics. When a power struggle threatens the kingdom, Neve must rely on Ronan and a group of dangerous outcasts to take the throne of Eire and save the kingdom — and her people.

Song Yan is a former concert pianist who gave up her career because she wishes to have a child, something her husband has refused to consider for the last three years — and continues to do so after Song Yan’s mother arrives to campaign for a grandchild. Also haunted by dreams of being trapped in a room with no doors occupied by a strange orange mushroom, her life becomes even stranger when packages of mushrooms begin to arrive at her house. When she finally receives a letter from the sender of the mushrooms, it summons her to a seemingly ageless house incongruously occupying the center of a busy city, where she finds a fellow pianist who disappeared ten years ago.

After six cataclysms that have heralded a nuclear winter, humanity’s few survivors live on the Tibetan plateau, haunted by spirits and terrorized by warlords. The seventh and final cataclysm is prophesied to happen soon, but nonetheless young Karma searches for his father, presumed dead after disappearing ten years earlier. Led by the eerie call of a horn that only he can hear, Karma journeys into the Himalayas and discovers the answer to his father’s disappearance might be a mystical mountain that connects the physical and spirit worlds, which also might be the answer to saving humankind.

Esther, an older mother with adult children, has not spoken to her Hex, her magical traveling party, since they were all banned from the alien space of the Beyond for ten years. But when her grown son’s cry for help wakes her in the middle of the night, her Hex are the only people she can trust to go undercover with her, brave the Beyond, and find him.

Katrina’s life is spiraling out of control; she’s the black sheep of her family, utterly broke, and more than a little unhinged, but the one thing she’s certain she’s not is a stalker. Her surveillance of her coworker Kurt is a coping mechanism, like the other rituals she does. But when Katrina receives a message from Kurt that implies he knows she’s watching her, she goes to the Cayatoga Bridge to perform the most powerful ritual she can to take back control of her life — and arrives just in time to witness Kurt’s suicide, one which he tells her is her fault in the moment. Katrina has no choice but to study every detail she’s collected about Kurt to find answers, and what she does find disquiets her utterly. Because as much as she’s been watching him, he’s been watching her.

Antoinette, also known as Antsy, has lost her father… metaphorically. He’s gone missing from the Shop of Where Lost Things Go, and she’s certain she’ll never see him again. But when she loses herself quite literally, she must leave the Shop for good, and that’s not as simple an endeavor as it sounds.

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.