Category: Swords and Spaceships

Tessa Yang’s debut short story collection is filled with fiction both speculative and literary. Stories include: a mother picking up a hitchhiker in the hopes of finding a hidden restaurant for runaways, a man starts having his girlfriend’s dreams, survivors of a global epidemic deciding if they will merge with a clan who wants to repopulate the Earth, and more!

If you’ve read the Daevabad Trilogy (and if you haven’t, I recommend you do! It starts with The City of Brass), this is a collection for you: stories that take place before, during, and after the trilogy, from the viewpoints of characters you’ve both loved — and hated.

Tesla Crane is a brilliant inventor and a fabulously wealthy heiress, and she finally has her chance to get out of the spotlight when she goes on a honeymoon cruise between the Moon and Mars. But when someone is murdered mid-cruise, her husband gets arrested as the chief suspect — and Tesla bends her intellect to proving his innocence and stopping the killer from striking again.

Cinnamon Jones longs to be an actress, following in the footsteps of her grandparents — unfortunately, she doesn’t have the talent for it, though she’s not going to let that stop her. She also has a book called The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer, which her brother gave her before he died. It’s the story of a Dahomean warrior woman and an alien at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. There seems to be little connection between these spheres of her life, until Cinnamon’s family is hurt by a violent act and she calls on her theater group to solve the mystery of it.

Mallory Viridian is an amateur detective, which means she ends up surrounded by death all the time, and that’s made her a social pariah and a perennial suspect for the murders she investigates. When she’s given the opportunity to hide out and rethink her life on an alien space station, she takes it in the hope that she’ll have some murder-free quiet. Instead, not long after her arrival, humans and aliens begin to mysteriously die… and she’d better solve this mystery before the whole station perishes.

After being chased out of England, Ren has undergone some changes — she’s now the Goddess of Death and the ruler of Japan’s underworld. She doesn’t have long before Ivy, Britain’s Goddess of Death, will come calling and looking for revenge, though. Her only hope is help from the god of storms and seas, and he has a price: a sword lost a thousand years ago. Teamed up with the moon god Tsukuyomi, Ren journeys to find the sword — and save Japan in the process.

Eva Santos Moon is a practitioner of brujería and curanderisma and a Chicana artist who is suffering from blackouts, a feeling of being disconnected, and plain old creative block. Then her husband is arrested for murder, and she’s soon under suspicion as well. The stress dredges up fragmented memories of an eerily similar murder in her childhood, and Eva begins to question if she was involved in both murders. Her only hope is to use her abilities as a bruja to protect herself and her family — and confront her past.

Hundreds of years ago, several young children went missing in a small town and a young woman named Ilsbeth Clark was accused of causing these disappearances with witchcraft. In the modern day, an author and social media influencer named Elena and her ex-childhood friend Cathy clash over ownership of Ilsbeth’s story — and become quite literally haunted by it in the process.

Shay Johnson is going places and has plans for her life; she’s already top of her class at T.K. Anderson Magical Magnet School, and now she just needs to win the Brockton Scholarship to get into her dream university. But if she wants the scholarship, she has to co-star in her school’s musical with her academic nemesis, Ana Álvarez. But as they work on the musical together, she discovers Ana might not be the enemy she once thought — and could be more than a friend. And Shay needs all the friends she can get, after being on the receiving end of some very inappropriate attention from the head of the scholarship committee.

Simi traded everything to save those she loves; now she has sworn herself to a new god and must stay at the bottom of the ocean, watching over the Land of the Dead. But when demons begin to appear, Simi realizes that they have a way into the human world now — and it’s her fault. To save the world, she must break her oath and team up with the trickster god to go on a perilous quest. But if they succeed, she might just be able to unbreak her heart, too.

Misery Nomaki heard the voice of an angel, choosing them to pilot a holy mech and lead their people to victory. They know it’s a delusion, that they are a fraud… but if they want to survive, they have to convince everyone else it’s real. And soon, they may even begin to convince themself…

Marion Shaw’s ticket out of the misery of the slums is a job advertisement for a bloodmaid — a servant to the high and mighty nobles who live to the north, who are known to drink the blood of those in their employ. Her escape from deprivation takes her to the House of Hunger and into the orbit of the Countess Lisavet, dark and magnetic, loved and feared in equal measure. But Lisavet isn’t nearly the most dangerous thing in the House of Hunger, and the building’s walls hide every darker and older secrets that Marion will soon find out.

After her mother’s death, Layla finds herself back in contact with her maternal aunts, whom she hasn’t been allowed to even speak of for years. The news she hears is surprising: a Gullah-Geechee island off the coast of South Carolina now belongs to her. But as she learns more about this new property, and about her mother’s past, she finds another unexpected truth. She’s a Dreamwalker, a power passed down from her Gullah ancestors, and her family’s past is darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined.

Lawman Solitario Cisneros lost his family and his country in the 1870s when the Rio Grande shifted its course and abruptly made the Mexican town of Olvido the property of the United States. But when a series of gruesome murders and kidnappings strike Olvido, he has little choice but to pick up his gun and badge again and try to keep the mix of Mexican, Anglo, and Apache residents from destroying the town and themselves as accusations swirl. He finds an unlikely co-investigator in Onawa, an Apache-Mexican seer who will help him unravel a mystery that is only cover for a battle between the immortal forces of good and evil.

This short story anthology is filled with tales of supernatural creatures in love — because the love is the most powerful magic, greater than death and curses. A girl in a graveyard, a shipwrecked sailor, creatures from folk tales, and monsters from marriage – all of them find love in these pages.

Laura Ann Langston lives in a very different 1930 from the one where we know, where America is recovering from a blight on the mystical arts known as the Great Rust and throwing itself wholly into industry and technology. But Laura knows her future is still as a mage, and finds a job with the Conservation Corps of the Bureau of the Arcane, working on its mission to repair magic so the new technology can thrive. When she’s sent on a mission into the heart of the country’s oldest Blight, she must rediscover work long lost in the days when Black mages like her were killed for their power.

Ledge is a place of civilization in only the loosest sense; it’s a settlement trapped between a vast chasm and a sheer mountain face. The only way to leave is death. All they know of the outside world is the Glacians, winged creatures who bring them supplies in exchange for sacrifices. When Dawsyn is chosen as sacrifice, she knows only that her life has ended — until a half-Glacian named Ryon offers her escape. She must choose between the terrifying unknown of what waits on the other side of being sacrificed and trusting one of the creatures that have plagued her people.

After ending the Partisan War on Mars, Harris Alexander Pope wanted nothing more than to return to a life of solitude. But then he learns a terrible truth: war criminals have invaded the minds of others and are hiding there to escape justice. Harris teams up with other survivors in pursuit of justice, but soon begins to wonder if his memories of the war itself are even true.

Remy has left the kingdom to hunt a new kind of deadly vampire — never mind the rumors that he’s half-vampire himself. Along the way, though, he meets a vampire couple who claim to have the answers to the virus called Rot that’s spreading. As he grows closer to them, he begins to question everything he thought he knew about vampires.

Rose is living a dangerous deception — her name is actually Luna, she comes from a family of bruja, and she isn’t actually white. But the identity she hides behind lets her gain power as a bootlegger who deals with the criminal families of Kansas City as she works to get her own jazz club. But the perilous game is about to come to an end, and she’s going to have to learn to rely on her magic and her allies if she’s going to survive.

Roxanne, who is equal parts vampire and hot mess, resurrects her deceased friends. Of course it’s not that simple — she’s soon confronted by a Guardian of the Underworld who tells her she needs to replace them with three equally terrible monsters, or she will take their place instead. If she wants to save her friends and herself, they’re all going to need to team up and become monsters hunting monsters.