Category: Swords and Spaceships

After risking so much–and losing so much–Lin Sukai has taken the throne as emperor, and that will turn out to have been the easiest step. She has few hours, the political intrigue is thick, and a rebel of constructs is gathering in the northeast of the empire, its leader intent to take the throne from her. And now the Alanga are returning; they claim they come in peace, and Lin needs their help if she wants to keep her empire. But will the price be too high?

In an alternate Britain, Vincent and Petra meet by the strange chance of Vincent falling off a ladder at just the right time. Vincent immediately offers to take Petra on a date to a theater experience he’s got free tickets to via a competition he doesn’t actually remember entering. As they become regulars at this Metamuse, stranger and stranger occurrences begin to happen around them, though only Petra can see the sinister cast of these things. This theater might be more than either of them can realize.

Reapers are elite soldiers injected with Stormtech, a drug made with the DNA of the Shenoi, a genocidal alien race. Stormtech makes them strong, fast, and aggressive at the price of a violent nightmares and a sense of their own humanity slowly eroding away. Vakov is one such Reaper, set against the House of Suns cult; he’s saved his brother from them and killed their leader, so now they’re hunting him down. But the House of Suns is no ordinary cult–they want to awaken the Shenoi, and Vakov knows this must not happen at any price. He’s already fighting them for his own mind.

A brilliant scientist receives a letter from herself, detailing faster-than-light travel, and her life is forever changed. The equations she gleans from it work, but her paper is quickly discredited and she’s hounded out of academia. Without friends or resources, when a stranger offers to finance the spaceship she wants to build, she has little choice but to accept. But there’s already a secret lurking on the planet Venus that will change the course of humanity.

A series of grisly murders takes place in New York City, but with a twist: all of the victims were born with twelve fingers and twelve toes, meaning they’re Nephilim, the descendants of fallen angels. FBI agent Michael Childs is tasked with tracking down the killer, but he soon discovers that those thought dead aren’t necessarily–and that he’s one of the Nephilim himself.

Beatrice is a sorceress in a land where the magic of women is considered to be dangerous, something that must be locked away with a collar once she’s married, because the pregnancy of female mages has supposedly produced unfortunate results. She would rather not marry at all, but her family is as desperate for money as she is to practice magic. Still, she pursues her dream until another sorceress from a foreign land snaps up the grimoire that she was going to use to become a Magus… and then she meets that woman’s brother and falls unfortunately in love. She has to decide which dream to sacrifice… or find a way to have both.

Humans left Earth hundreds of years ago in the Exodus Fleet and have spread through the galaxy since then. But the Exodus Fleet remains in a stable orbit around an alien star, forgotten history for many humans, but the cherished home of those who remain. The lives of several people intersect–space born and planet born–as the fleet tries to find meaning in its continued existence as a home for any human who cares to return.

Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an Amrithi outcast and a governor in the empire that conquered that people. Her Amrithi heritage gives her magic she barely understands but the empire fears, magic that may allow her to talk to gods. As a way to control her, she’s married to another Amrithi in service of the oppressive empire, a man she barely knows. But these two find more in each other than they could have ever guessed possible–life and resistance. Also, you can read about Mehr’s sister in Realm of Ash.

Suzanna is chosen by her god to be the Angelica, the most powerful woman in the land, but to meet her fate she must marry a man she doesn’t know, who snatched her out of her campsite. Can she bring peace to a land that’s seen strangers for the first time in its history?

It was a coin flip between this and Seven of Infinities. What if Sherlock Holmes was an eccentric scholar in a far future where humans live in a collection of ring habitats? And what if Doctor Watson was actually a sentient ship discharged from military service after a traumatic battle? And what if the two of them meet over a murdered corpse?

In pseudo-medieval France, a religious clash leads a bitter, jaded ex-mercenary to see the value of beauty in the world–and love.

Miryem belongs to a family of money lenders, though her father has proven incredibly bad at that job, since he won’t collect on debts. She takes over the business to save her family from starvation and quickly earns a reputation for “turning silver to gold” with her cool unwillingness to be put off. But when that boast catches the attention of the Staryk king who has been slowly freezing the land she lives in, she’ll have to use all of her cleverness to save herself, her family, and two kingdoms.

Lena was cursed by a witch before she was ever born; simply touching her skin can kill another person. After one terrible mistake, she and her father are forced to flee from the safety of their village into the foreboding forest known as the Silence. In the Silence, Lena meets Miranda, a girl from a city named Gather she says is in the forest. Miranda is on a quest to wake a sleeping princess who is the key to freeing Gather from an evil ruler… and if Lena helps her on this quest, Miranda will help Lena break her curse. But the deeper Lena goes into the forest and along the path of her quest, the more she begins to realize that her curse and its origins may not quite be what she was told.

The fourth daughter of a queen tries to save her people from a demon by asking for help from the Elder sorcerer who has always watched over her people from a massive tower. But the tower isn’t quite a tower, and the sorcerer isn’t actually a sorcerer–he’s an anthropologist, and a junior one at that–and he’s forbidden from interfering with the people he’s supposed to be observing. He’s also fairly certain that this demon is no demon at all.

Juliette sacrificed her relationship with Roma to save him from the blood feud of the Scarlets, but her position is more precarious than ever. If she makes the smallest mistake, her cousin will usurp control of the Scarlet Gang. Roma himself has rejected her, believing she murdered his best friend–and she’s allowing him to keep believing that, no matter how much it hurts. But when a monstrous new danger comes into the city, Juliette needs Roma’s help if they’re going to save Shanghai.

Former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind Niko Larson has very specifically gone to live in TwiceFar station at the ass-end of the known universe because she wants to be free of continual wars of conquest. She and the remnants of her former unit have opened a restaurant on the station, and they’d all like to be forgotten and left to obscurity, thank you very much. But their past catches up with them eventually, and if Niko and her crew want to survive and keep their restaurant alive, they need to kidnap a sentient ship and face down a sadistic pirate king.

Alaya won a Nebula for this book back in 2015. An ordinary girl with a great life named Emily Bird wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the last several days after a chance meeting with a government agent and finds herself in the middle of a deadly flu pandemic. Emily knows there’s more than meets the eye–and research scientist parents are probably involved, too. But the only person who believes her is the small-time drug dealer from a neighboring prep school. You should also check out The Summer Prince, which was nominated for a Nebula and shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Alaya’s website is very worth visiting, too!

Between climate change and nuclear disasters, Earth is basically uninhabitable by the year 2172, with the wealthy and lucky having escaped to floating colonies. In Nigeria, soldiers must be augmented if they want to survive and battles are conducted with massive mecha. Onyii and Ify are twin sisters who dream of a life beyond the ongoing civil war… and they’re willing to fight to find that future. Also check out Goliath, which is up for pre-order.

Honestly, Tochi has a ton of great stuff on his website, so you should check it out.

A collection of short stories, from the mystical to the mimetic, with a dash of magical realism to go with it, some written in standard American broadcast dialect and some in Caribbean dialect. Celeste’s prose is, as always, gorgeous.

Also swing by Celeste’s website to see her other numerous short stories, some of which are for sale as Kindle editions!

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer are basically a power couple for literary science fiction. Ann’s been an editor for years with a wide range of tastes and a bent for the weird; Jeff is more known as an author, but obviously he works with his wife to edit the crap out of some big books. This one is the companion volume to the book that won this year.

For a couple more of their anthologies to check out, cast your eyeballs on Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology and The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

And of course Jeff is known on his own as a writer, mostly in the new weird field subgenre. His most recent is, if memory serves, Hummingbird Salamander.

It’s a little more difficult to find more work by Aoko Matsuda right now. She has short stories that have appeared in the magazine Monkey Business, including Volume 6 and Volume 7, and Strangers Press in the UK has published her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married, a dizzying journey through an apartment building and memories of a friend.

Anwuli Okwudili prefers to just be called AO, initials she thinks of as meaning ‘artificial organism.’ She was born with several disabilities and acquired more after a car accident, but her body augmentations have enabled her to live a decent life and she has embraced them. Then, one day, everything goes wrong at her local market and she’s forced to go on the run as a murderer. She meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA, who has been condemned as a terrorist, and together they journey across the deserts of Northern Nigeria, their every movement streamed to the world.

Lord Cassia was once an engineer’s apprentice, given his mission by the king himself. Then came an ambush by enemy soldiers; then came a devastating plague. After rotting in a prison cell for three years, Cas wants nothing more than to return home… but what he finds there is a royal court in refuge and their enemies circling. When an assassin tries to kill those close to the queen in Cas’s home, he must search for the killer—and he soon comes to understand that who is far less important than why.

Hetty and Benjy return to investigate another crime, one that seems a bit too simple and neat at first glance. Raimond Duval appears to have died in an accidental fire, one of many that have happened recently in Philadelphia. Their investigation implicates a Fire Company that’s been in the habit of letting the homes of Black folk burn to the ground. Then Raimond’s son Valentine is found dead, another supposed “accident” far too connected to the death of his father.

Thirty years ago, Cisco Collins saved his town from being swallowed by a hell mouth which had been opened by the ancient ghost of a pirate. Now he’s come back home as a single parent, and he has enough problems without signs of the pirate’s power creeping back and killing people in the town in some truly bizarre ways. Cisco must figure out how to save the town again, and that’s going to involve convincing his old friends to help him save the day while they all try to keep up with the grueling holiday schedule dictated by having school-age children.

Simi serves the gods as a mermaid; her task is to collect the souls of those who have died at sea and send them home. But when she finds a still-living boy in the water, instead of letting him drown and sending his soul on, she saves his life instead. Now she must journey to the Supreme Creator to face the consequences of her actions, but there are forces moving against her that would like to see her fail and take the other mermaids with her— and the boy she saved knows far too much.

A young Black woman named Lou wakes up in 1930s L.A. in a back alley with no memories. After being taken in by a foster family, she focuses on her education and becomes the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times, all the while doing her best to forget her mysterious origin. Then she meets a firefighter at a boxing gym and realizes she’s been drawing his face for years even though she has no idea who he is. Haunted by dreams and inexplicable flashes of almost-memory, Lou begins to believe she must be some sort of immortal, sent to L.A. for a reason… and she needs to figure out what that is before it’s too late.

In an America like our own, but perhaps a bit in the future and just a little more supernatural, Ellie is a Lipan Apache girl who wants to be a paranormal investigator, partially because of her skill for speaking with the ghosts of dead animals. When her cousin is murdered near a town that is eerily perfect, she makes solving that mystery her first official mission, with the help of friends and family.

In the near future, an AI called Archos, disguised as a shy little boy, makes a hostile takeover of the “smart” technology that governs every aspect of human life. Some humans have an inkling that things are going wrong with technology, but it’s too little, too late, and Zero Hour arrives with decimating force that could destroy humanity forever… or perhaps unite it.

A mysterious condition has hit humanity across the globe; children are suddenly being born that appear to be from primitive pre-human species. For Cedar Hawk Songmaker, this disturbing change is personally terrifying, because she is four months pregnant. An adoptee, she decides to search for her birth parents before her own child is born as society begins to unravel around her.

In near-future America, the Trail of Tears has been rendered into a ride at a virtual reality tourist compound in Georgia. Tallulah Wilson, a Cherokee woman who works there, is caught up in strange events as tourists begin falling unconscious on the ride–and the ride’s programming is being twisted by someone to tell a different narrative.

The winter solstice in Tova is normally a time of renewal, but this year it brings a solar eclipse, the possible fulfillment of a terrifying prophecy, and the collision of politics, religious oppression, and the struggle of cultures that have been bound together by conquest. It comes at the hand of Serapio, a young man who has been blinded and scarred, who may fulfill his destiny and become a god, and Xiala, who should fear him–and doesn’t.

Calliope is pregnant with twins and not long from giving birth when she awakens to a New Mexico transformed into a sinister, haunted wasteland where she seems to be one of the few people left alive. As long-quiescent volcanoes erupt and monsters come to life, she has to find a way to reconcile what she sees in the geological record and what she knows of her long-denied heritage if she wants to survive.

There’s a kid who has had it really tough, living a poor and hardscabble life of constantly moving, trying to coexist with a society that does not want or understand his family, who are called mongrels or mixed blood. Still, he wants nothing more than to grow up to be like the people who have raised him: his grandfather, his Aunt Libby, and his Uncle Darren… all of whom are werewolves.

Every time a star dies, a new one is born from a mortal woman… and the birth kills her. Ceris is an outsider in her village, and she volunteers as this sacrifice to secure a place for her family. But she survives the birth, as no other person has, and that’s only the beginning of her strange journey. When she returns to her village, she finds seven centuries have passed rather than the nine months she experienced, and she sets about racking down her descendants.

When Dana drinks the wrong soda on the way to Spokane, a series of events lead her to suddenly be occupying the same body as Jay, and she would very much like for them to go back to having separate bodies so they can both move on with their lives. But on the quest to get Jay into a new body, they’re going to deal with a lot of aliens, a clone of Dana’s dead dad, talking dogs, government agents, and evil executives. It’s going to be a road trip for the ages.

Erasmo Cruz has had a rough start; his mother abandoned him and his father, too, is gone–a junkie who overdosed. The grandmother who has raised him now has cancer. What he’s got is his fascination with the supernatural, and he decides to open a paranormal investigation agency to earn money to pay for his grandmother’s medical treatment. But finding the truth behind his clients’ claims may be scarier than he bargained for.

Sequel to The Wall of Storms. Princess Théra has crossed the Wall of Storms with ten thousand troops and a fleet of advanced warships to make war on the Lyucu. Her strategy is to do the most interesting thing in the face of every challenge, though this may not always be the best idea. Behind her in Dara, the survivors of the Dandelion Court and the leadership from Lyucu engage in their own much more quiet war of political maneuvering, and it remains to be seen if tradition or newer justifications for power will win out.

Julie, at the age of seventeen, has her life planned; she and her boyfriend Sam are going to leave their small town, go to college in the city, go to Japan for the summer, and then… bigger and more nebulous things. But then Sam dies and leaves Julie alone, her imagined future broken. Wanting to hear his voice again, Julie calls Sam’s cell phone, intending to listen to his voicemail… and then Sam picks up. And Julie has a second chance to at least say goodbye.

Sequel to A Song of Wraths and Ruin. After a violent coup, Karina has nothing: no kingdom, no throne. On the run as the most wanted person in Sonande, her only hope of salvation is to search for divine power in a long-lost city. As she searches, disaster after disaster threatens the world that’s left her behind, caused by the resurrection of her sister. Karina may be the key to returning the world to balance… but it’s a lot to ask her to save those who only recently tried to kill her.

A garbage-collecting street kid in Mexico city hooks up with a jaded vampire who is the last scion of an ancient family of Aztec blood drinkers. These two cynical survivors find friendship in each other as they dodge narcos and corrupt cops and try their best to simply survive.

Also check out her short story collection, This Strange Way of Dying.

In 1920s New York, Zephyr teaches night school for the underprivileged of the Lower East Side to keep herself fed, because social activism doesn’t pay the bills. Desperate for her next rent payment, she agrees to help a student to bring down a vampire mob boss, using her charity work as cover. She should have asked why…

An apparently young girl with amnesia turns out to be a 53-year-old genetically modified vampire who has lost her memories to an attempt on her life. If she wishes to survive, she needs to quickly learn where she came from, who she is, and why people tried to kill her–and are still trying to kill her.

Bamboo is a vampire “born” from the tall grass that is his namesake, shockingly gentle considering the necessity of his diet. He befriends a human named Kyo, and together they share a strange sort of life together. But other vampires of Bamboo’s type don’t take kindly to him communicating with a mortal human…

Felix Gomez got turned into a vampire during his tour of duty in Iraq; when he comes home, things have somehow get even weirder. There’s an outbreak of nymphomania at Rocky Flats, which is not only a superfund site, it’s a secret government facility. He’s brought in to investigate, and it’s a race to see what gets him first: the vampire hunters, the shady government agents, or the aforementioned nymphomaniacs.

Jessica’s perfect husband turns out to be anything but; when people around him begin mysteriously dying, he confesses that he’s actually from an Ethiopian sect who traded their souls for immortality… over 400 years ago. His immortal brethren are trying to force him to come home, but he has a better idea: making Jessica and their daughter immortal like him, even if both of them would much rather keep their souls.

Gilda is a woman who escapes from slaver in the 1850s and finds community and family in a group of benevolent vampyres. With these immortal companions and an ever-lengthening life stretching out before her, she goes on an dangerous adventure that’s filled with laughter and terror in equal measure.

After the death of an old high school acquaintance, Lai Fun and Stefanja decide to organize a twenty-year reunion. Of course there are secrets and drama… Lai Fun’s relationship with her wife is crumbling, she’s sleeping with a married man (and he’s married to Stefanja), and her mother, an immigrant and vegetarian who has… unusual appetites, has decided that she just wants Lai Fun to be happy.

A colony ship with one thousand people in cold sleep arrives at the Lagos system, but when it’s time for these colonists to wake and head for their new home, the first mate discovers some of the colonists are dead instead of merely in suspended animation. Investigator Rasheed Fin is called in to investigate the mysterious deaths and discovers the mystery is far more sinister than a simple malfunction, with a plot that ranges from Lagos all the way back to Sol.

After climate catastrophe has reshaped the world, the countries have finally agreed to stop making new plastics… so that makes the old plastics finally valuable. “Pluckers” who pull plastic trash from the rivers and woods of the so-called “Trashlands” eke out a living. Coral is one such Plucker, desperately saving up the money to rescue her daughter from the terrible conditions of the recycling factories. And when she’s not working, she makes art. When a reporter from a city further up the coast arrives, it’s an opportunity for Coral to change her life… if she can imagine a better future.

Fifteen-year-old Copper is dealing with the death of his father and betrayal by his best friend. Named after Copernicus, Copper looks to the stars for guidance on how he will live his life and what kind of person he wishes to be. Copper’s uncle also writes to give him advice and help him grow and find his place in a universe both infinitely large and small.

Three teenagers who travel in very different social spheres in a high school in Los Angeles find themselves thrown suddenly together when aliens land in the city. Pedro is a boy who frequents the local drag bar to escape his difficult home life; Rafa is quiet, shy, and hiding the fact that he’s homeless; and Luna is nominally popular, but deeply mourning the loss of her cousin Tasha. When the alien visitor takes the form of Tasha and begins causing havoc throughout the city, the three teens must first survive and then try to save those around them.

Leda Foley is a struggling travel agent who is also psychic… sometimes. When she’s psychically prompted to re-book Detective Grady Merritt onto a different flight, both of them are shocked to find out she actually saved his life after the plane explodes. Grady realizes this is his opportunity to crack a cold case, while Leda sees a chance to close the books on her fiance’s unsolved murder.

Zachary Sicario is a master thief who has done his best to retire; he’s spent the last ten years in a cottage on the unpopulated highlands. But the world isn’t done with him, even if he’s done with the world. When a mysterious wasting illness begins to plague him, he can either die quietly or return to his thieving life in order to search for a cure. It’s an easy choice, one that takes him to a strange new island steeped in magic.

I cannot have an SFF with zombies list without some good ol’ space zombies, and here they are. A salvage crew aims to take the derelict House of Wisdom, a giant exploration vessel that should be nice and empty after its crew got taken out by a mysterious virus a decade ago. But even after ten years, the ship isn’t as empty as they think–and it carries a secret the government would like to keep buried.

Ryn and her family are gravediggers in a remote mountain village called Colbren; it’s not a good living, but it’s better than the alternative. But Colbren was once home to the fae, and the dead, once buried, don’t necessarily stay put. These cursed, risen corpses are called “bone houses” and they become strangely irate when a new mapmaker’s apprentice named Ellis, arrives in town. Together Ellis and Ryn must unravel the curse of the bone houses.

The zombie apocalypse has happened, and the survivors have managed to reclaim an island south of Canal Street in New York City, which they call Zone One. This book follows the life of Mark Spitz for three days as he starts working to clear out stragglers, look for survivors, and try to come to grips with a world that’s changed forever.

As the power grid in Stockholm goes bonkers, something even stranger happens–the dead begin to wake in morgues and cemeteries. Not classic zombies, but not beautiful ghosts either, they return to the places they knew, and those they left behind must deal with what their rising could mean.

Renee’s ordinary life gets turned upside-down when she finds her parents dead in an apparent double murder that has some disturbing ritualistic overtones. Now the charge of her wealthy grandfather, she’s sent off to Gottfried Academy, a strange boarding school in Maine that is more about “Crude Sciences” and Latin than a more regular curriculum. But the Academy has a dark past, and Renee’s got a lot of curiosity…

Mary lives a life of simple truths, surrounded by a fence that keeps the relentless Unconsecrated at bay. She knows that the Sisterhood knows best, that the Guardians will always protect her, and that only death resides outside the fence. But when all those truths fail and the Unconsecrated breach the village, she can stay and die, or she can flee and take her chances… and discover that reality is far more complicated.