Category: Swords and Spaceships

Kin Stewart is a regular 9-5 IT worker with a massive, unbelievable secret: he’s a time-traveling secret agent who got stuck in 1990 after a mission went completely belly up. He does what he’s supposed to and lays low, eventually giving up on rescue and continuing on to have a life…until his rescue team shows up 18 years too late, determined to erase the family he’s built in the past and return him to the one waiting for him in the future, which he can no longer remember.

This is a very classic time loop “living life over and over until it’s right” novel, but this one is a standout to me because the writing is lovely, with just enough dark humor to it, and the time period (starting at the ever of World War I and careening toward World War II) is excellently rendered.

Brandon’s brand of speculative horror poetry could be characterized as Lovecraft meets hip-hop (Lovecraft would be scandalized, good) and explores both monsters we know and the ones who cloak themselves with racism, sexism, and violence.

The title says it all, really. Margaret uses her lyrical poems to humanize the relationship with technology that we have, as well as the loneliness and humor of millennial life.

Tananarive Due’s mother was involved in the civil rights movement at its height and fought for justice — and instilled those values in her daughter. Together, they’ve written a memoir about the movement, its achievements, and the future of justice in America.

Anyone who has ever read China Miéville’s work or listened to him speak is completely unsurprised that he’s thought deeply about Marxism and Communism. He has now written a guide to and new reading of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. (And he was recently on Chris Hayes’s Podcast Why is This Happening? to talk about it.)

A perfectly normal midwestern family finds out that have a far-less-than-normal supernatural force coming after them…when the family’s grandmother invites everyone to her house on the occasion of her death. And then instead of dying, she turns into a tree. Things only get stranger and more dangerous for the remains of her family from there.

Jessamyn already has enough problems on her plate, between still being unemployed and also deeply in the closet, to go with the stress of moving back to Malaysia, a country she hasn’t seen since she was a toddler, with her parents. So when she starts hearing the voice of her recently deceased grandmother, she does her best to ignore it. But then she finds out that Ah Ma was a spirit medium, and she’s not going to leave Jessamyn alone. Because Ah Ma, it turns out, has a grudge against a businessman who offended the god she was a medium for, and she wants Jess to see it through.

The Blazewrath Games are the World Cup of dragons and riders, where 16 teams from across the world compete in an often-deadly relay. Lana Torres is a rider who much prefers dragons to people — but she dreams of representing Puerto Rico in their first Blazewrath. When a former sports superstar and a dragon who’s been cursed into human form start burning down dragon sanctuaries around the world unless the games get cancelled, Lana must navigate an international conspiracy that promises to be far more deadly than her favorite sport.

The Races have come from centuries-long tradition, started when the first Ashlords were given phoenix horses by their gods. And any competition has its rules that can be bent almost to breaking — murder is disallowed, but breaking the bones of a rider or poisoning the alchemical ashes of a horse at night? Legal, and even encouraged as entertainment. Eleven riders will compete in this year’s Races, and three have more at stake than the rest. Will glory go to the daughter of a former champion, an entrant there only by grace of a scholarship, or a revolutionary’s son?

In this near-future capitalist dystopia, Qualityland is the best country on Earth, and it’s governed by a universal ranking system that dictates the social place of every member of society. The algorithms of Qualityland are without peer and infallible. Peter Jobless is a scrapper who keeps being sent slightly imperfect but otherwise functioning machines that he can’t bring himself to destroy. And then he one day receives a shipment from the equally infallible TheShop that he knows he does not want. All he wants to do is return this useless item, but if he does so, he will prove the entire system has been wrong.

Nalah is the 16-year-old leader of the most dangerous all-girl crew in Mega City, but she doesn’t revel in the violent throwdowns. All she wants to do is escape the streets and gain residency in the Mega Towers. In order to do so, she must prove her absolute loyalty to the “benevolent” founder of her deeply classist city — which will involve doing the unspeakable and sacrificing the family she’s created.

While technically third in the series (and the other two books are also GREAT), this book is functionally standalone. In this adventure, the wandering cleric Chih travels into the titular riverlands to collect the stories of this brutal and conflicted region filled with near-immortal, legendary martial artists. They soon find themself in the midst of an ancient feud that’s deeply entangled with the stories they came here to collect.

Jewel is a courtesan in a House, a luxurious place that provides its own brand of protection from a government that will cull someone for even the smallest mistake. But when one of her fellow courtesans is murdered by a client, that shakes her badly enough — but then her friend comes back to life, somehow.

This is the start of a paranormal mystery series about an African American classical musician named Gethsemane Brown who finds herself investigating mysteries, often at the behest of ghosts. This first book starts in the Irish countryside where Gethsemane has been hired to turn a group of ill-behaved schoolboys into an orchestra…and her lovely cliffside cottage she’s staying at is haunted by the ghost of a man falsely accused of killing his wife and himself.

This book combines two things I love — murder mysteries and time loops. Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day until Aiden Bishop can figure out who her killer is and break the cycle of her death…and every day as he investigates, he wakes up in the body of a different guest at Blackheath Manor.

A team of women steal back the spaceship and the mission originally meant for them before it was taken over by a group of men in this dystopian, sci-fi thriller set on a spaceship. But it soon becomes clear that though their intentions are good, they might not all be on the same page with what their mission — and the future of humanity — holds in store.

In this alternate history novel, a meteorite has obliterated much of the eastern coast of the United States and the oncoming climate cataclysm caused by its impact will soon make Earth uninhabitable. Dr. Elma York is one of the scientists working to put a man on the moon, but she soon begins to wonder, with so many capable women pilots and scientists involved in the International Aerospace Coalition, why does it have to be a man?

In contrast to the other two titles I’ve mentioned, Escaping Exodus is more space fantasy than science fiction. And calling the main character an astronaut might be a stretch, considering her people live on a biological spaceship among the stars. But she is nonetheless the heir to a matriarchal ship, and it’s through her leadership that her people will find a way forward when it becomes clear that their way of live is coming to an end.

Ever wondered what a restaurant of the future might look like? How about sentient dough, stasis cubes to keep food from spoiling, and a time accelerating machine that allows you to cook elaborate meals in no time at all? There’s so much more to this book than just food, including philosophy and politics and friendship, but the food and the most famous restaurant in the galaxy make it perfect for fans of foodie genre fiction.

Like The Sol Majestic, this novel is about far more than food. We’re talking a family of alien refugees, a renowned violin instructor paying off a deal with the devil, and a trans music prodigy who becomes wrapped up in their affairs. But it’s the donut shop that the alien family runs, featuring machines that create the perfect donuts, which earns it a place on this list.