Author: Alex Acks

Princess Lu is still fighting for the imperial throne she knows is rightfully hers, while trying to keep her promise to Nok, the shapeshifting boy that she loves, and his people. But her final opponent is her greatest: her younger sister Min, now sitting on the throne, wielding ancient and unimaginable magic that might just consume her before she learns to control it. This epic sibling rivalry will cost one of them the throne — and maybe both of them their lives.

Senna, a woman with every reason to want to escape her past, has traveled to a facility on Ganymede for a chance to participate in a cutting-edge treatment, one that will erase her traumatic memories. But she quickly finds more than her traumas have disappeared; the side effects have her barely able to recognize herself or her life. With each day the disconnect growing worse, she must work with the other participants to figure out what’s gone wrong with all of them.

Despite growing opposition among the nobility and public, as well as rising economic problems, Queen Jasminda is determined to see unification through. But domestic opposition isn’t her only problem — the True Father has raised an undying army to attack her land, one that can only be stopped by Nethersong. A former assassin named Kyara and a novitiate named Zeli must each go on a dangerous mission if they’re to see this new world forged and survive its making.

At seventeen years old, Rowan has graduated from the brutal training that shows she is fit to be a guardian of Heliana, a floating city that is home to shapeshifting winged lions. But before she can take her oath and her place on the city walls, a mysterious disease begins to tear through Heliana’s children. Two of Rowan’s friends are sent to search for a cure; waiting for them at home, she discovers a truth that could cause the mission to fail if she doesn’t go against her orders and save her friends.

After narrowly escaping the collapse of the Divide, the Sentinels have gathered their survivors and taken stock of what they have to work with: no engines, no way of calling for help, and only themselves. It’s up to Adequin Rake to gather a team to find the materials to get them out — and the allies that will save them from a ruthless enemy still on the hunt.

What if the first Ming emperor was a woman? Set in 14th century China under the rule of the Mongolians, the daughter of a starving peasant family takes on the name and the destiny of her older brother after he dies of despair. She enters a monastery, pretending to be a male novice, and driven by her need to survive and the greatness that is hers in her brother’s place, leads a rebellion.

What if the native peoples of Africa developed steam power before their would-be colonial oppressors did? Everfair is a land created by Black people from many nations, “purchasing” land from King Leopold II to set aside as a safe haven and Utopia for the people of Congo and those who have escaped their enslavement in other nations. It becomes a place of international cultures and peaceful exploration where those who were silences in our version of the world fly airships and tell their stories.

What if the Civil War ended when the dead began to rise from the killing fields of Gettysburg? This new America is a place where certain children (those governed by the Native and Negro Education Act) are forced to attend combat schools where they learn to put down the hungry dead. Jane is one such Attendant who, after graduating, returns to her home in Kentucky to ignore politics as much as possible… until families around her county start going missing.

What if Nazi experimentation had unlocked an even more horrifying weapon to be used in World War II: supernatural abilities? A British secret agent named Raybould Marsh discovers the Reich’s terrifying weapons and realizes he saw them tested before, during the Spanish Civil War. How to eliminated them and the research that created them is a mission of utmost importance to the Allies, barely clinging to survival. But the weapons are not mindless by a long shot. They have their own twisted plans: for the war — and for Raybould.

What if, due to someone piercing the veil, Cairo became the center of the world in 1912 instead of London? The Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities’s youngest agent, Fatma el-Sha’arawi is called in on a case of the utmost import: the murder of an entire secret brotherhood dedicated to the man who opened the veil forty years ago. The twist? The murderer claims to be that man himself; true or not, the mere rumor sets Cairo into severe unrest. Fatma must restore peace to the city and unravel the imposter’s identity — at least she hopes he’s an imposter. Also check out The Haunting of Tram Car 015 for another book in this universe!

What if three enslaved women on the island of Saint Domingue summon the goddess Ezili into the physical world? The three women work their magic when burying a still born baby, summoning the goddess with the unused life. After traveling across space and time, Ezili turns her attention to her summoners and their suffering and plants in them the seeds of uprising.

What if a US senator’s bizarre plan to introduce hippos to the Mississippi River in the later 19th century had actually happened? You get mean-spirited, murderous mammals infesting the bayous of Louisiana, and an entire profession dedicated to wrangling them. This book tells the story of one such crew that braves the wrath of the hippos, and their pursuit of both wealth and revenge. (Full disclosure: Sarah Gailey and I share an agent.)

What if the War in Heaven descended to Paris for its final, bloody chapters? The grand ruin of the city is still filled with magic and mayhem, with the houses of the fallen and the not making alliances and vying for survival while House Silverspires, ailing due to its long-missing founder Morningstar, may teeter over the edge and take the whole glorious wreck with it.

Dawson, Colorado, is a sleepy town where nothing happens, until Cassidy’s mom check’s into a “wellness center” for apparently no reason. And everyone continues to insist that nothing is happening when mysterious lights appear in the sky and people find themselves missing chunks of time. And the new boy in school, Hayden, starts to notice Cassidy… while she notices that everything weird going on seems to lead right back to him.

A group of former heroes known as the Starbreakers have long since gone their separate ways and built their own lives after the destruction of a city left them all blaming each other. But now bounty hunters are tracking them down and they have little choice to reunite if they want to protect what little they have left. After seven years, getting back together is even harder than breaking up, and they need to mend old wounds if they want to survive.

Now that the Good Luck Girls are free, most have crossed the border to pursue new lives, while Aster tries to help more girls escape. But when she finds out about a new welcome house opening, she decides that helping individuals isn’t enough. She hatches an ambitious and dangerous plan to free all dustbloods, and calls upon her friends to make it a reality.

Alice Wyndham has discovered within herself a magical ability–she can see souls. Now, she wishes to return to the Rookery, learn to use her magic, and discover the truth behind who she is. But barely-remembered secrets from her past threaten her plans and the Rookery is on the brink of destruction. To save her city and her people, there are more sacrifices she must make.

A new drug, Memoroxin, is undergoing testing as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. Unsurprisingly, this drug has also seen far more recreational use throughout Hollywood, with those who have abused it finding their memories deeply affected if not completely erased. Lucien, whose mother has Alzheimer’s, and Sophie, a ballerina who makes ends meet with waitressing, meet at a treatment facility for heavy users of Memoroxin. Inexplicably drawn to each other, they cannot remember anything that came before… such as how they might actually know each other.

Kobo is a scout for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, scoping out the latest genetically-augmented players… but he’s barely scraping by and doesn’t have the money to update his own cybernetics while loan sharks are closing in. Then his brother gets murdered, and Kobo must level up to searching through an entirely new stratum of corruption and risk both his safety and sanity.

The fictional Chinese city of Yong’an is occupied by both humans and an astounding array of cryptids who live alongside them, mostly hidden. An amateur cryptozoologist sets out to document each one of these beasts, and along that journey is drawn into a deeper mystery that asks her to question her very self.

An anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction short stories in translation, translated by the inimitable Ken Liu. It’s got three essays within as well, examining the state of Chinese sci-fi and the fandom that’s grown up around it.

I have seen Jin Yong called “the Brandon Sanderson of China” which I think honestly downplays his reach a little bit. This is the first volume of an excellent and very famous wuxia series — one that involves Genghis-freaking-Khan — and to the best of my knowledge, a completely excellent translation.

A collection of SFF short stories by Xia Jia, launched using a Kickstarter by Clarkesworld, which has featured some of her stories before. You can read five of her stories over at Clarkesworld for free, actually, to get a taste for why this is a must-have collection.

A science fiction collection from Kim Bo-Young, but it’s not quite the typical set of separate stories. Rather, it’s four stories in one volume — two pairs of linked stories. One set is about an engaged couple trying to coordinate their relationship and wedding through space and time. The other is about godlike alien beings for whom humans are mere extensions of their will — and a rebellion against that order is coming.

This is actually the first of a new omnibus that contains the first three of the Vampire Hunter D novels. (And there are a lot of these novels.) It’s a bonkers post-apocalyptic far future with vampire lords and a gothic sensibility, where D is an incredibly hot guy who hunts vampires and solves mysteries. I love this whole series.

When Yuriko’s brother gets in a fight with bullies, that’s bad enough. But then he disappears, and she finds a magical book in his room in his place — The Book of Heroes, which has possessed him. She must unravel the mystery of the book in order to save her brother and defeat the evil King in Yellow.

The way-better-than-its-tepid-title-suggests film Edge of Tomorrow was based on this book, which is an excellent time loop action story about an alien invasion that the humans are fighting a losing battle against. And one of the new recruits, Keiji Kriya, gets sent back to the dawn of his final day alive every time he’s killed.

Maya McQueen is a barista, activist, and… were-monkey, and she’s just trying to figure herself out in modern San Francisco. But with Occupy Wall Street coming home to roost in the Bay Area and disappearances of supernatural people and murders of shapeshifter shaking up her world, she needs to prioritize her most urgent problems and get them solved. Now. Before it’s too late. The good news is, solutions don’t have to be neat, which suits a monkey just fine.

Wen Alder is torn between two legacies. On his father’s side, he’s expected to pass the Imperial exams, learn magic, and serve the Sienese Emperor by rising to become the Hand of the Emperor. On his mother’s side, there’s wild, uncontrolled magic and resistance to the empire, and his introduction comes from his rebellious grandmother. Faced with the choice between rebellion and obedience, he soon comes to realize that this war is not just for the humans, but the heavens as well, and he may be the key to victory.

Jo Linden lives in an alternate world where the nuclear bomb was never invented — and now wars are decided by giant, mechanical soldiers. The Cold War rages, and the USSR and US posture at each other at the Pax Games, which pits young mecha pilots against each other. After losing every competition since 1963, the US is desperate for a win, and this is the year to do it, with the President of the United States and the Premier of the USSR about to meet in peace talks. Jo, the child of a mecha mechanic, didn’t ever expect to compete at this level, but when she’s recruited at the last moment, she can’t say no. When the Pax Games turn deadly, she must unravel a political plot if she wants to save herself — and stave off world-ending war.

Model astronaut Walli Beckwith mystifies her colleagues and infuriates ground control when she refuses to leave the International Space Station in the wake of an accident that forces the evacuation of all her colleagues. But this is a matter too important for her to worry about the risk to her career; she sees the incident for what it is, and knows only she can save both a forgotten part of Earth and the person she loves most.

In 2072, Earth finally receives the signal that SETI has been searching for — a broadcast from Proxima Centauri. While nations across Earth debate how to go about first contact — if they respond at all — humanity learns that the Proximans are about to be killed by an extinction-level event. With an entire alien civilization at stake, humanity must figure out how to send help — and how to get there in time.

The Wild Ones are girls who have seen the words of the world, girls who have gained access to the place of pure magic called the Between, girls who refuse to be silenced. Together, they will rescue Taraana, a boy with stars in his eyes who helped them gain their magic.

Toni leaves behind her failing gallery in New Mexico to come to England and inherit a manor house from a mysterious relative she never knew she had. Surrounded by overgrown gardens and a crumbling house, she submerges herself in the history of the house, learning about all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries. Soon she can see the ghosts in the changing garden and begins to understand the past that echos into her modern life from deep in the past.

When the 19th is about to turn into the 20th century, there is no room for witches, and hasn’t been for quite some time. All the witches have been long since burned, and if a woman wants power now, she needs to fight for her suffrage. When the three Eastwood sisters join the suffrage movement in New Salem, they want not only this new power, but to reclaim what is old and forgotten. But their enemies aren’t just the misogynists that believe women have no place outside the home, but also those who will not suffer a witch to live… let alone vote.

A story of two mothers, 8000 years apart, struggling to save their children from the destructive future they see coming. In Doggerland, Shaye takes her family to a sacred oak grove to perform a ritual that she hopes will save them all–but what she discovers will cut her deeply. Shante flees a London threatened by climate change, trying to reach the north and the new opportunities is presents–but first she must survive a dangerous wilderness.

The emperor’s mastery of bone shard magic has allowed him to rule for many decades, creating bone constructs to maintain his power. His daughter Lin vows to prove her worth when he refuses to recognize her as heir, and the path she sees to that is through mastering the bone shard magic of her father. When the revolution her father has been trying to suppress reaches the gates of the palace, it’s for Lin to decide what she will do to claim the throne–and save her people.

A new telling of the Arthurian legend, where nothing you know is true. Arthur is an egotistical gangster promoted above his ability. Merlin is an otherworldly parasite. Excalibur is not a sword, but a shady arms deal with an even shadier dealer. And Britain? A garbage heap that Rome got out of as soon as it could.

…all right, maybe that last one is true, from a certain point of view.

This is not the first time that girls have gone missing in the woods, but Natasha is determined that her sister will be the last. Following rumors of supposed witchcraft, she asks Della for magical help to bring her sister home. But Della has her own fears that center on the woods, ones she keeps carefully secret–she believes the beast that takes the girls might in fact be her own mother, transformed by a spell gone wrong. With little to lose, they are each other’s only hope.

An anthology of science fiction and fantasy short stories from the last decade that includes a wide spectrum of queer identities and voices. Authors include Sam J. Miller, Amal El-Mohtar, Neon Yang, Charlie Jane Anders, and many more!

Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus thought he was going to take down a drug ring; instead, when he storms a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, he discovers his own corpse and a woman named Daisy-May who has some bad news and some good news for him. The bad news: yes, he’s dead, and she’s a spirit guide. The good news? She’s there to recruit him into the Dying Squad, a detective force of the recently dead, so at least his afterlife won’t be boring. His first mission: solve his own murder, and do it before his memories fade away to nothing.

The crew of Zuma’s Ghost, one of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard ships, has won the Boarding Games for their second year in a row, cementing their reputation as an absolutely unstoppable team. But in the wake of this victory, they find out their commander and their Master Chief are both retiring, so a change in dynamic is inevitable–but they get more disruption than they counted on in the form of Spacer Chae Ho-Ki, who has a dark past as a convict and an even darker secret. As the crew of Zuma’s Ghost struggles to find its equilibrium again, the Trappist colonies start a war, and the ship is directly in their sights.

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.

This book is in the cosmic horror genre, and it’s got all the Lovecraftian beasties you could want coming in from the outer worlds. It’s very self aware of what that’s all about. But rather than the horror of man’s insignificance in the face of the unending night, the real horror of this book is a really awful, twisted relationship… and it’s working through a realization of that which almost drives someone mad.

This is a book that’s very acquainted with the tropes of epic fantasy, and is interested in turning as many as possible upside-down with thorough examination through a class-analysis lens. The savage armies of the invading force? Conscripts pulled off the streets of the empire and ready to rebel against the system that’s given them the worst end of the stick. Wise leaders making difficult choices? An entire bureaucratic department of them that tries to make a new recruit and gets more than they bargained for.

This starts out extremely fairy tale (in this case, The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd) then adds in a feminist twist with a girl taking her brother’s place and then also ending up in “The Quest for the Lost Husband” rather than “The Quest for the Lost Wife.” And more than halfway through the book, the main character changes her ambitions completely. It’s a delight.

Tropes employed include those associated with corporate dystopias, military sci-fi, and time loop stories. And yet wherever I thought this book was going, I was wrong at every turn. Now, I can’t even tell you if this amounts to trope subversion or just being really freaking good at writing them. Maybe that’s part of the magic. It’s both. It’s neither. It’s just a really good book.

Nominally a science fiction novel, it’s more on the horror side as far as I’m concerned. You never quite know where this book is going; it seems to start with a female serial killer, and then it keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder, before diving into a new set of tropes that I’m not going to tell you because it’s a massive spoiler. I will say that the 2013 film of the same name is also very good (maybe even better than the book, sorry) and left me so wound up and disturbed that I couldn’t sleep for the entire night after watching it.

This is another extremely genre-savvy fantasy book, though it’s more on the side of “I’ve definitely played this D&D campaign.” It plays with other worlds and portals in a really smart way, and the fact that the main character is a very smart orc lady who becomes an assassin and then gets to have an unexpected but adorable sapphic romance is an object lesson in the subversion of everything the genre ever tried to tell us about orcs.

When a bandit attack leaves an eighth-born son destined for greatness and his second-born sister destined for nothing orphaned, it’s another trick of fate that the son dies. The daughter takes on her brother’s name, Zhu, and in an attempt to escape her own fate, enters a monastery masquerading as a male novice. But when the monastery, too, is destroyed, Zhu must fully take her brother’s fate of greatness and make it her own.

The planet Ileri is about to join the Commonwealth when a government minister is assassinated, threatening to spark an interstellar war. A disparate team must come together to solve this mystery and avert the possible destruction of their planet: a private investigator named Noo Okereke, a spy named Meiko Ogawa, and a police chief named Toiwa.

The angel Prapura kicks a formless soul into the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just died by suicide. This is the soul’s second and last chance if he doesn’t want to be entirely removed from the cycle of rebirth. He needs to remember the worst mistake of his past life while living Makoto’s life and understanding the circumstances of his death.

The Savages that the empire culls from its cities and uses as shock troops have risen in rebellion and started their own war. Leading the legion is Evie, called the Sparrow General. Along with Dyeawan, a strategist operating in the shadows of imperial government; Lexi, the head of a guild who finds herself at the center of a political power play; and Taru, who has just been conscripted into a new legion of Savages, she will decide the fate of an empire and a world. (Full disclosure: Matt and I have the same agent.)

Bréone Hemmerli is a diplomat negotiating what might be humanity’s most important alliance if we wish to survive a world devastated by climate change: peace with an alien race represented by a being named Tura. But Bréone’s memory is failing badly with age, and humanity’s time grows short.

I will say up front that this book comes with big trigger warnings for sexual assault and, to a lesser extent, bullying. It is an easy book to read because Anna-Marie McLemore’s prose is gorgeous and rich while still being sleek and light. It’s an incredibly hard book to read because of what it’s about, which is two teenagers who start out as strangers meeting on the worst night of their lives, during which they are both sexually assaulted. It follows them through the stutter-step process of reaching a full understanding of what happened to them and how it affects them and their friendships and their relationship to each other. It’s unflinching in its depiction of healing as an uneven, nonlinear process that takes time and is never entirely finished.

The Mirror Season isn’t a plot-heavy book because it’s so much about what’s going on with the characters, and it gives them space to process and interact and think and breathe, which is something I feel like I find only rarely in genre books. There’s a lot of push for things to be pacy in SFF, which makes it really stand out to me when I find a book that’s so completely focused on character.

Also, if you are even a tiny bit into baking, this book is an absolute feast. Which feels like a strange thing to say about a book built around recovery from sexual assault, but there’s very consciously a lot of joy in the pages of The Mirror Season to balance out the pain and anxiety. The main character, Graciela, works at a pasteleria and has a magical ability to tell exactly what kind of pan dulce every customer wants. In the immediate aftermath of the assault, she loses her power, but then slowly recovers it as part of her own healing. And the baked goods she describes! I spent a lot of this book absolutely desperate for a concha.

I’ll be thinking about The Mirror Season for a long time. Difficult, beautiful, and necessary.