Category: Swords and Spaceships

Iraxi is a commoner who is ostracized even among the lowest of the low because she refused the advances of a prince and because she’s pregnant and alone. In any society her situation would be difficult, but in this ark that carries survivors over a flooded kingdom, her struggle to survive is desperate. Worse, the child she carries may be more than human, and the her fate promises both darkness and power.

After exposing the depredations of the Ascendance, former agent of the First House Elyth is on the run. She wishes she could put it all behind her, but she’s soon cornered and… offered a deal instead of punishment. If she agrees to explore a mysterious new planet that seems to have appeared from nowhere, all of her sins will be forgiven. Wanting to live, Elyth agrees to join the team of explorers, but she quickly discovers this new world is conscious, and it very deliberately wants all of them dead.

A group of friends decides to get their thrills by partying in an abandoned Heian-era mansion, one whose foundations rest on the bones of a bride and whose walls are filled with the girls who were sacrificed to follow her into death. While a late night with lots of alcohol starts revealing dark secrets among the friends, the house’s lonely, hungry ghost comes calling.

Reynevan has been given a secret and dangerous mission by the Hussite leaders, forcing him to come out of hiding and head for Silesia. On the way, he still needs to find revenge for his brother’s death and discover the location of his vanished lover.

Vanja was the dutiful servant to a princess until a year ago, when her adopted mothers–Death and Fortune themselves–demand she pay them back for all the care they’ve given her. She must take the princess’s place using a string of enchanted pearls… but she wants to steal her own life back, becoming a jewel thief and stealing from the nobles she rubs elbows with by day. One theft away from freedom, she crosses yet another god and is cursed. She has two weeks to break a curse and make her getaway, with a detective on her tail and the princess’s sinister fiance complicating her life.

Lieutenant Iari finds herself in charge of a murder investigation where there’s only one suspect–a decommissioned battle mecha that cannot possibly have committed the crime. But she’s not the only one on the case; Gaer, an ambassador who is actually a spy, is also investigating. The truth they find is deeper and more dangerous than a simple malfunction.

Manuela is an undocumented immigrant on the run from both the government and her father’s Argentinian crime family, trying to live her life in Miami. But when her mother is arrested and her grandmother is attacked, Manuela has to look to her past to find solutions to these present problems. And that past takes her all the way to a cursed city in Argentina, where she finds out she’s even more “illegal” than she could have imagined.

Moon is an orphan who can shapeshift into a winged creature; it’s something he’s been hiding for his entire life. Just as he is about to be thrown out of another adopted tribe, he meets a shapeshifter like himself, one who can tell him the truth about his lineage and his existence… and what he means for the survival of the tribes around them.

A cleric named Chih and her mammoth-riding companion find themselves at the mercy of a family of shapeshifting tigers. To survive, they need to buy enough time for help to arrive… and the best way to do that is to trade stories. What better story than one about a tiger and the woman she fell in love with?

A college professor named Alok in Kolkata listens to the odd confessions of an even odder stranger and agrees to transcribe a series of yet still odder notes. These notes document a people who are both human and beast during Mughal India, and the story of a wanderer who falls in love with a ferocious woman.

Min is the young daughter in a family of gumiho who have been hiding their magic and their true selves for centuries. She dreams of joining the Space Forces like her older brother did so she can shake the dust of her backwater planet off her boots. But then her brother is accused of going AWOL in search of the fabled Dragon Pearl, and Min knows that can’t possibly be the truth. She moves up her timeline to leave home and runs away, determined to clear his name… but she’s in for a wilder adventure than she could have ever imagined.

Two warring clans face off: the Tiger and the Wolf. Maniye’s an outcast of the Wolf clan, even though she’s the chieftain’s daughter, because her mother was queen of the Tigers. But she has an even bigger secret: she can shift to either animal form, and not just that of her father’s clan. She rescues a prisoner of her clan and escapes, but with a murderer on their trail to bring them back.

At the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, rich and famous families rule both society and the country. Thalia is a nobody; all she’s got going for her is a talent for stage magic.. until a trick goes horribly awry and she finds out in the process that she’s a shapeshifter. It might be her ticket to wealth and power, but only if she can control it and survive.

Ahn is a girl with no family and no past, a throw-away. Altan is a boy whose inheritance and future were stolen from him as a child. Each sees the other as a potential tool for regaining what they have lost— or never had in the first place. But the price of a throne and a past is steeper than either could imagine.

Sequel to Blazewrath Games. After cancelling the Blazewrath World Cup forever, Lana Torres’s team has nothing to do but return to Puerto Rico and try to recover and find a new purpose. But they’re not going to get the breathing space they need; they find out someone is kidnapping dragons, and is coming for theirs next. If they want to save their dragons, the team from Puerto Rico needs to take down an evil underground dragon fighting ring… a hard enough task already, but this fighting ring is also run by magicians.

Sequel to White Trash Warlock. Adam Binder returns to his small hometown in Oklahoma for the funeral of a beloved aunt, where he finds an evil druid is hunting down members of his family. This all seems connected to the long-ago death of Adam’s father— who may not be dead after all. With the police on his trail and the man he loves in danger, Adam must investigate his family’s secrets and come face to face with the enemy he’s vowed to stop.

Before the Empire, the Jedi were in the service of feuding lords and their clans. One sect of Jedi, tired of the infighting, rebelled in an effort to control their own destiny; they became known as the Sith. Now, a lone Sith wanders the Outer Rim and belongs to no sect, serving no lord. No one knows his past or where his future will take him, but a bandit also claiming to be Sith crosses paths with him and demands a duel; his former life has finally caught up with him.

Humanity has been resettled on the planet of Eleusis after Earth was destroyed by alien conquerers. The planet has only four habitable areas, which become stratified, the residents of each clashing as they interact with each other and their alien captors. A confrontation is coming where the fate of all on Eleusis will be decided.

Less than 100 years in the future, Earth is ice free and there is still no fix for the ongoing climate crisis that has altered the surface of the planet and the fabric of human society. As conditions continue to worsen, it’s up to a population of poor people, artists, and misfits, those who were left behind in the mass exodus inland, to find a new sustainable society.

We can’t have alien horror without some very classic parasitic alien action. It’s a familiar story, where safety protocols get ignored at a remote outpost and next thing you know, there are aliens walking around wearing human skins and spreading themselves around. It’s up to a few plucky survivors to stop the advance and save all of humanity… if they can.

An astronaut who retired in shame after her mission to Mars ended disastrously has a shot at redemption. There’s an alien object in the solar system that’s heading right for Earth, and she’s humanity’s best hope to figure out what it is–and then how the hell it might be stopped, because it’s very much not friendly.

It may not seem horror at first, but don’t worry, there’s some body horror in store for you, and alien eggs and other weird stuff. This takes place on a spaceship that’s carved into the body of an alien space whale that they are slowly consuming from the inside, which is a horror all its own. And the clan is planning on moving on soon, once they’ve completely taken over this creature.

Olivia and Viola are twin daughters of xenobiologists, and they’re tired of being dragged around the galaxy while their parents do research. But in this newest temporary home of theirs, they find an alien artifact…one that contains eggs, and then things only go downhill from there. But among the chest bursters, there’s a terribly family secret about to burst into the open, too…

It’s well known that John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? inspired the extremely classic (and still good after all these years) movie The Thing. Well, here’s the original, previously unpublished version of that novella that has an extra 45 pages of backstory.

Aliens have come to earth and, by general international agreement, they’ve been given the run of the US Virgin Islands while they’re doing a mysterious “research” project. While at times they seem benevolent, they react to any threat, real or perceived, with terrifying and disproportionate force. This leaves the largely Black population of Water Island dealing with capricious aliens while the rest of the world enjoys the benefits of their relatively gentle invasion. When a young boy dies at the hands of the aliens, a greater conflict becomes inevitable.

Zinnia’s twenty-first birthday is rapidly approaching, and it’s going to be her last. While no one understands the nature of the medical condition a strange industrial accident left her with, no one in her situation has ever lived to see their twenty-second birthday. When her best friend decides to throw her a Sleeping Beauty-themed party, Zinnia pricks her finger and finds herself falling through worlds, where she meets another sleeping beauty who also needs to escape her unlucky fate.

The magic competition of Where Dreams Descend has come to a bad end, with the loser’s failure front page news. All he cares about, however, is the contestant he started to fall in love with, who is missing and no doubt captive in the hands of a dangerous magician. He must find here where she’s fallen through a mirror and into a strange world of memories and shadows.

The rebellion of the Rim Confederation against the 5 Suns Alliance was a glorious failure from its inception, one in which Captain Jared Clement destroyed his career and reputation by being on the losing side. Ten years later, he’s given the chance to battle humanity’s first truly faster-than-light ship to a newly discovered star system that might hold alien life.

A future where humanity has made it to the stars and spread out across many systems, the peace is shattered by the appearance of new ships, ones just slightly more advanced than that of humans, enough to devastate the peaceful society. Humanity is pushed back to Earth, and two starship captains stand between us and total annihilation against this enemy that refuses to even speak its name.

Emmy has stayed away from her literally magical hometown of Thistle Grove for years so she can avoid her family–and also Gareth Blackmoore, who may have broken her heart once. But even she can’t resist the pull of tradition when it’s time for the spellcasting tournament her family is in charge of, and she finds herself back at her old haunts, reconnecting with family and friends–and getting pulled in on a revenge plot against Gareth, since he’s played with far more hearts than just hers.

The sleepy town of Evenfall has thrived for over 400 years in the quiet care of a family of witches. But when one of the argumentative locals dies while staying at the B&B the witches run, one of them is pinned as the prime suspect. And it’s up to Brynn, the youngest, to do some old fashioned investigating and a bit of magic to solve the mystery and clear her aunt’s name.

In a post-apocalyptic world, the Diné have walled themselves off in their former reservation and become reborn as a nation. Their gods walk the land again–but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a professional monster hunter with a difficult past and a lot of complicated relationships… and she’s caught the attention of the gods to boot. To find a missing girl, she has to enlist the help of an unconventional medicine man… and they both end up getting more than they bargained for.

A monster that cannot die stalks the ruined, festering, abandoned city of Elendhaven, sent on tasks by his frail master. The monster’s ultimate goal is revenge on all those who have wronged his city, no matter what he will destroy along his path.

Laina gets tragic news one October morning: Boston police have shot and killed her brother. But soon, this horror reveals something far stranger: monsters are real. And they’re coming out of the shadows now, looking for safety. This shift in the social fabric of the world leads to strife and protests. But the one question no one seems to be asking as society reshapes itself is: what has frightened the monsters so badly that they came out of the dark?

Nita’s mother is a monster hunter who makes most of her money by selling the parts of the things she captures on the internet–parts that are dissected out by Nita herself from still-living monsters. Nita, however, draws the line at cutting up a scared teenaged boy, no matter what her mom says he is. No good deed goes unpunished, however; when she saves him, she gets sold in his place, since she’s a bit of a monster, too.

Zephyr is a Harpy, which means she’s a half-god and should be a an extremely competent assassin… but instead she’d rather watch tv. She sucks at magic anyway. But then her sister is murdered, and Zephyr is forced to use a forbidden power to keep herself alive, which means she’s now on the run from her own people as well as the would-be assassin. What she’s running toward might be even worse–a destiny she’d rather not fulfill.

Four friend from the rez made a big mistake one night, committing a fundamental sin as hunters that gets them in trouble with local police and elders. It’s ire they can escape by simply leaving. But they’ve angered something far worse as well, something that has no trouble following them no matter how far they run from the reservation.

Andrew and Eddie are best friends, closer than brothers, and the longest they’ve been apart is when Eddie heads off to start his graduate studies at Vanderbilt, on the understanding that Andrew will be moving out to join him in six month. But just days before Andrew’s arrival, Eddie is dead, apparently of suicide, and he leaves behind questions and secrets and a hungry ghost that Andrew must now deal with.

A group of ordinary people go about their lives as one day, a huge star suddenly begins burning in the sky. No one knows what could have caused it; after the initial excitement, people return to their ordinary routines. Strange things begin happening across the world, at the fringes of human existence… but it won’t stay on the fringes for long.

El has made it to her senior year in the deadly school known as Scholomance, where the very institution tries to do its best to kill its students. She’s made a few allies along the way, but it’s not enough — the school seems desperate to kill her unless she accepts her destiny of dark sorcery. But she is determined to survive, to find her own fate, and to get herself and her friends out alive.

Mara has fallen to the Karensa Federation, and Striker Talin is forced to betray her fellows and the remains of her nation if she wants to save her mother from the hands of the Premier. She must become one of the Federation’s Skyhunters, though hope is not wholly lost. Red remains as well, and though his link with Talin is weak, together they might be able to salvage their home.

Koffi is sixteen years old and has been indentured at the Night Zoo to pay off her family’s debts. But she has a secret of her own–magic that should not exist flows in her blood, and if that is found out, she will be killed. But when she has to used her power against the cruel master of the Night Zoo, she flees for her life and accidentally saves the young warrior Ekon from a fabled monster called the Shetani. Together, they form a tentative alliance and hunt down the beast, Ekon for redemption, and Koffi for freedom.

Tamar and Fayard have lived thousands of lives across the history of the world, with one thing in common — their love for each other and the lengths they’ll go to be together. The one thing they’ve never experienced is how their story ends — and to see that, they must break the cycle. But it may require more than they’re willing to sacrifice.

Shizuka made a literal deal with the devil to escape damnation. The price? She has to convince seven of her fellow violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She’s managed to swindle sixth, but in her pursuit of the final soul, she runs into complications she could have never imagined: a retried starship captain who she can’t help but love and a runaway with a wild talent who all too quickly feels like family.

Unit Four is a biological robot created to oversee a Helium-3 mine in Jupiter’s atmosphere. It is activated in the middle of a crisis, with aliens attacking. It should seem a simple matter of ship-to-ship combat and following its handler’s orders, but something is wrong. There are missing files, missing information, and more afoot, and Unit Four will need to become something more than a simple tool in short order.

Persephone has never known her family; she was abandoned as an infant and spent her childhood being shuttled around the foster care system. And she’s was a weird child at that, with inexplicable things always happening around her. As an adult, she has remained rootless, moving from town to town and working only temporary jobs. After accidentally showing off her magic, she quickly moves on… only to be invited to Wile Isle by the one friend she’s managed to make. There, she begins to find answers about herself and her family… and the curse that haunts them.

Best Novel–Adult

Winter Solstice is usually a time of celebration in the holy city of Tova, but this year, it coincides with a solar eclipse that the Sun Priest claims will unbalance the world. A ship will arrive on that fateful day, captained by a woman who can calm the waters with a song, and its only passenger is a supposedly harmless young man.

Best Novel–YA

Bree tries to escape her grief at the death of her mother by joining a residential program for bright high school students at UNC. On her first night there, she witnesses a demon, the “Legendborn” students of UNC that fight it, and survives the experience with her memory intact, despite the best magical efforts of those students. It’s an experience that unlocks her own powers—and makes her realize that there is more to the “accident” that caused her mother’s death than she first realized.

Best Middle Grade

Right before Halloween, two best friends (Syd and Lucely) accidentally cast a spell that awakens malicious spirits that go rampaging through their town of St. Augustine. They must seek the help of Syd’s grandmother, who is a witch, and her tabby Chunk to save their home.

Best Novella

A Black girl with psychic abilities so powerful that she could level a city watches as her younger brother is incarcerated–and must decide what she will and won’t do about it as she watches him suffer through their connection.

Best Anthology/Collected Works

An absolutely gorgeous SFF anthology filled with resistance, hope, and stories of Black women and gender non-conforming people.

Best Comics Team

A beautifully illustrated graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s famous and terrifyingly prescient novel.

The greatest weapon of Huaxia are the Chrysalises, giant transforming robots used to battle the aliens that attack from beyond the Great Wall. They are piloted by a male and female pair… but the girl often dies from the mental strain sustained during battle. Zetian offers herself up as a pilot at eighteen, not because she wants to fight, but because she wants to kill the male ace pilot who is responsible for her sister’s death–and she gains her vengeance by killing them through their psychic link, becoming an Iron Widow. The next pilot sent to her is supposed to tame her, but Zetian has tasted power, and she will survive.

Wallace Price is dead, but he hasn’t really lived much of the life he’s departed. When a reaper comes to his funeral to collect him, he doesn’t go to heaven or hell, but rather to a tea shop run by a man named Hugo, who moonlights as they ferryman for souls like Wallace’s. Hugo tries to help Wallace ready himself to cross over and live some of the life he missed… but when the mysterious Manager shows up and gives Wallace a one week ultimatum, he has to try to live a whole life in seven days.

The Earth has been largely emptied of human inhabitants thanks to a series of environmental disasters and roving AI armies. Now cut off from the scattered colonies of humanity by the Interdiction Zone, it’s a treasure trove of priceless artifacts for the greedy and desperate, who don’t mind facing the wrath of the tyrannical Sol Commonwealth government. The crew of the Arcus are just those sorts of people, but when they make it to Earth, they’ll find out conditions are nothing like what they’ve been told.

The crew has fractured in the wake of Séverin’s apparent betrayal, leaving Enrique, Hypnos, and Zofia to search for their friend through the haunted waterways of Venice. As they search, Séverin must cater to the deranged Patriarch to buy time so he can find the location of the temple where he will play the Divine Lyre and bring his desires to fruition–and offer him divinity at a terrible price.

The Commonwealth was once ruled by shapeshifting monsters who fueled their magic with the souls of their human subjects. These evils were defeated and entombed and became legend… but now a Warlord wants to disturb a shapeshifter’s tomb to wake them once again. With the Warlord comes a crew of dungeon delvers… and if the world is unlucky, they’ll find what they’re looking for.

A collection of traditional stories retold with a twist for our modern times by Soman Chainani and illustrated by Julia Iredale.

Penador is a kingdom where what we’d think of as technology is fueled wholly by magic, making the guilds of mages as powerful as the king. But even the greatest mages fear Rosalind Featherstone, the Gutter Mage. Roz has been hired to find the missing son of Lord Edmund, following a trail that leads her to an old enemy and a deadly plot that could kill thousands and destroy the nation.

This one may look very familiar to you, because it only came out a week and a half ago, but it is on this list because you bet your butt it is good. The Montoya family is one surrounded by inexplicable magic and mysteries they know better than to ask about. But when Orquídea Divina, the matriarch who refused to ever leave their home, even for weddings and baptisms, invites them to her own funeral, rather than answers or a direct inheritance, her transformation leaves them only with more questions. After seven years, this inheritance has manifested differently for each of her descendants… and put them in the line of fire of a mysterious enemy that seems determined to pick them off, one by one.

In a near-future America that labors under ever-more draconian border policies, immigrants and their children, whether documented or not, naturalized citizen or not, are tattooed to mark their status and tracked relentlessly by the machine of the state. In desperation, the “inked” form their own alliances and try to claim their home with ingenuity and resilience.

I love everything I’ve ever read that Anna-Marie McLemore has written, so it was hard to pick one book to put on this list. But ultimately, I picked this multi-award-winning book about two best friends who each have a strange magic to them and the four beautiful sisters even odder than them who are rumored to be witches who want their magic for themselves.

The Merry Maids are an elite black-ops team who work undercover to clean up the messes created by the Order all across the galaxy. With her newly honed abilities in telekinesis and movement, Alyvia has only just joined the team when her crew is sent to pick up the pieces of a dangerous artifact, scattered across the stars. But the person who hid them is still around, and they’ll do anything to destroy the artifact before Alyvia can complete it.

La Muerta Blanca is a mysterious dragon-like ghostly creature that’s been stalking Central America since the days of the Aztecs, eating hearts and spreading terror. Now, Miguel Reilly comes to modern-day New Mexico and falls in with a shaman named Tomás, who shows him that he’s not “pure” Irish-American while trying to train this innocent nerd into a dragonslayer. Along his journey, Miguel meets a Maya med student named Maritza who has survived a brush with the spectral monster and come away with her own ambitions to slay it. Náhuatl codices lead the two to Chichén Itzá for a final, fantastical battle to slay a dragon and find themselves.

A short fiction and poetry collection from the author of Infomocracy, which includes AI, the anthropology of a dying Earth, and a corps of fighting midwives.

A clanless young man hopes to escape life as an outcast by standing before the Eldest Throne so he can become an awakened guardian of humanity. But when he finally achieves that dream, he finds himself only with a fraction of the powers he should have been granted, not yet truly immortal. However, after the life he’s led, he’s used to doing more with less, and he isn’t going to let anything stop his ascension, even if he has to find his own path to do it.