Swords and Spaceships for February 16

In the parallel world of the Gardens, a select group of masters rule their decadent paradise with cruel glee, punishing the teenagers who serve them for growing up. Dora and Thistle try to flee, traveling through time and space and dipping into our world to find the person who can grant their freedom.

When the people of the Black Keep see sails on the horizons, they know this is the day they’ve been preparing for: when the clanspeople of Tjakorsha will invade. But the force of riders on war dragons they send meets not invaders, but refugees fleeing a despot who is trying to bring about the end of the world.

After years of wishing for magic, Arrah finally has exactly what she wanted… but at the price of a shattered family and a kingdom falling apart. As the last witch doctor, she must try to hold all of these things together while searching for survivors of the demon attack. But worse, the demon king wants Arrah, and he will destroy everyone and anything standing in his way.

Near future Earth is a place of deep jungles and monstrously transformed animals, with the surviving humans divided between the dangerous surface and a ring that orbits at the edge of the atmosphere. Pearl is a young techie who lives among the jungle but is promised to a man in the orbiting settlement. (I have seen this pitched as a reimagining of Wide Sargasso Sea and I am fascinated.)

Robin Thorpe has hidden her magic for years to avoid imprisonment by the state. But times are changing; freed witches are flooding the streets and returning to the families robbed of them. Robin has a chance to push for an Aeland that is more free and just for all–and then her childhood love who vanished into one of the witch asylums twenty years ago returns.