Category: Swords and Spaceships

Joan Sands is 16 and a gifted craftswoman, with metal as her chosen medium thanks to her magical ability to control it, a gift from her Head Orisha, Ogun. This has landed her a place with Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, making and maintaining the stage blades for their plays. But thanks to her family’s close ties to the Orisha, they’ve also always kept an eye on the Fae in London, and something is beginning to go wrong. More Fae attacks are occurring, and when Joan rescues the son of a cruel lord from the Fae, she gets dragged into two worlds of political intrigue.

Over a century in the future, teleportation is a reality and so is deep space exploration. But when 17-year-old Jessica Mathers wakes up in a crashed lander on the surface of an alien world where life has long since gone extinct, she realizes that accidents and disasters are not a thing of the distant past. Beyond merely needing to survive, Jessica soon finds that something else has gone terribly, terribly wrong — there are blood handprints all over the crashed lander, and graves marked with names she does not know. If she wants to not only survive but escape, she’ll have to unravel the mystery around her.

Alejandra is a woman pulled in so many directions she no longer knows who she is — and worse, as she despairs about remembering herself, she sees a ghostly apparition of a crying woman in white: La Llorona. What she soon discovers is there is no banishing La Llorona until she follows the ghost on a journey to know the women she never knew in her family, all of whom were connected to the ghost as well.

The Marigold is a condo tower in a near-future Toronto wracked by climate change; it was supposed to offer exclusive luxury suites, but instead sits half empty as a mysterious toxic mold infestation spreads through it and rots it from within. A public health inspector investigates the mold that spreads from a tower; a gig worker making ends meet with ridesharing finds himself in possession of dangerous information related to the tower; a 13-year-old child sees her friend snatched out of a sinkhole by a horrifying creature; and Stanley Marigold, son of the builder of the tower, tries to get the Marigold II build and decides it’s worth tapping into hidden reserves of power no matter the human cost.

Elodie is really a princess in name only, having grown up in the poor and famine-stricken realm of Inophe. But when she’s offered a chance to marry a prince — and get the wealth that comes with it to help her kingdom — she immediately accepts, even though it means being whisked away to a reclusive kingdom that is hiding dark secrets beneath its veneer of perfection. Then she finds out the true reason for her quick betrothal: every harvest season, the kingdom sacrifices its princess to a hungry dragon, and she’s been brought in to be the next on the great wyrm’s plate. Elodie has no intention of going quietly, however, and if no one in her new kingdom is willing to fight, she will do it herself.

Beatrice Bolano lives in Seagate, a town run by a religion that believes abstaining from food brings a person closer to God, and regulates every calorie taken in by its citizens. As the requirements of Seagate become ever more stringent, she is faced with the choice to either give up her passion for cooking or leave the only home she’s known. Far from her, Reiko Rimando is a college student who has lost her funding despite her flawless grades, leaving her with the choice of returning home in shame or suffocating under a mountain of debt. A mysterious, centuries-old cookbook authored by a kitchen maid brings these two women together.

Folkvíand has always been unnaturally close to her brother Áslakr, due to the remoteness of their village — and the fact that their mother is a shaman who has begun to pass her knowledge to her daughter. But when their parents die from illness and Áslakr leaves on his first expedition, Folkvíand’s life is turned on its head. And worse, when her brother returns…he has founds someone else to love. Folkvíand takes her plaint first to the gods, then decides that she will fix her problems herself — before the date her brother is to marry.

Peeraphan Rhattna is an ordinary woman going about her life as a dancer…until one night her rehearsal is interrupted by a violent, supernatural clash and she’s rescued by Bennett Andrews, a brooding (of course) vampire who also claims to represent a secret organization of supernatural beings who protect humans by locating mythical and magical objects. And Peeraphan has stepped into one such object, quite literally: magical red shoes that will make her dance herself to death. Except the shoes do not carry out their death sentence, and it seems Peeraphan has her own secrets, ones buried so deeply she didn’t even know them herself.

Manticores are one of the greatest threats to those who live in the empire; Ester knows this well after one kills her mother and baby brother and leaves her father forever scarred and distant. Her own grief leads her to the King’s Royal Mews, where she dedicates herself to becoming a ruhker, bonded to one of the massive rocs that are used to hunt the manticores. Bound forever to a creature that demands absolute sacrifice while being unable to return her devotion and love, Ester embarks on the most dangerous manticore hunt in the empire, seeking both revenge… and a return to herself.

The majoda destroyed Earth with a reality-shaping weapon called the Wisdom; the survivors of humanity live on Gaea Station, plotting vengeance for their dead world. Kyr has been training for this since she was born, but Command assigns her brother to a certain death mission and consigns her to Nursery to bear sons for humanity until her own death. Thus, she has no choice but to take vengeance into her own hands and escape Command… only to find the universe is far more complicated than she’s been taught.

Marjan’s father told her many fantastic fables when she was a little girl, ones about extraordinary, magical beasts. But now Marjan is an adult, and the sudden death of her father leaves her trying to balance schoolwork, friendships, and keeping his veterinary practice afloat. Then she receives a visitor who tells her that her father’s stories were true — he traveled the world to care for magical beasts, and now she needs to take over that part of his practice as well.

The Sunglade is a place of burning sunlight and monsters, populated by the worshippers of the evil sun goddess Ponuriah. Yet Adaris Kavari, a wandering scriber burdened by disgrace, gets herself captured by Ponuriah’s worshippers and is tasked by them with recording their side of the story. Adaris is determined to free herself and her fellow prisoners, and bring back this story she has learned, which might be the key to her personal salvation and stopping a coming war.

Jacklyn Albright is the acting captain of the starship Calysto, shepherding all that remains of a failed colony on a distant planet back to earth on a barely functioning and disaster-plagued ship. There’s already strain enough to break the crew, between starvation and accidents and spreading unrest…and then an unknown intruder begins haunting the ship, hunting and bloodily killing the crew.

On a distant planet ruled by a corporate aristocracy descended from Africa, life is good for the privileged who employ powerful cybernetic technology to ensure their place as nearly immortal rulers of a downtrodden underclass. The Primes have been genetically engineered in a secret underwater lab to lead a rebellion against them, but when the hideout of the cult that made them is attacked, their bodyguards, Proxies Nandipa and Hondo, get their charges to safety in the world above…and find everything they’ve been led to believe is false.

The gods are warring after centuries of being quiet, but 18-year-old junior journalist Iris Winnow is more concerned by her mother’s struggles with addiction and the fact that her older brother has gone missing on the front lines of the god war. Her best hope to helping with either of those problems is getting a promotion to columnist at the paper she works at, the Oath Gazette. But she has a rival, Roman Kitt, also gunning for the job, and somehow the letters she’s been writing to her brother and tucking under her wardrobe door keep ending up in his hands.

Ren Yu lives and breathes swimming and spends all of her time training; if she’s good enough, she’ll get scouted, go to a good school, and finally have the love of her parents and the kindness of her coach. But in her heart of hearts, she dreams of being a mermaid, a beautiful monster that drags humans to their doom and drowns them. And she will do anything to gain that life of freedom, no matter how much blood will end up in the water at the end of it.

Gita Chithra is the captain of The Tempest, an intergalactic ship that specializes in missions of retrieval and assistance. But when she gets a distress call from an AI trapped in an artificial, alien-made solar system known as Loki’s Ring, it becomes very personal and far more dangerous. Because that AI, Ri, is one that Gita trained from her inception — and is the closest Gita has to a daughter. With every organic person in Loki’s Ring dead due to a mysterious contagion, Gita needs all the help she can get, even if it means calling in a favor from an old friend.

Darling Seabreak survived the slaughter of her family by House Dragon; after hiding in the sewers for a time, she was rescued and raised by House Kraken. When her adoptive father is captured in battle, she vows to rescue him, and she will kill any member of House Dragon who stands in her way. But she didn’t reckon with Talon Goldhoard, the War Prince of House Dragon, whom she ambushes. Talon quickly realizes that she’s the girl his brother, whose rule has become increasingly erratic, has been obsessively painting for years.

Ren Monroe is a scholarship kid at Baelmerick University, and she promises to be one of the greatest wizards in her generation. Not that her top marks will mean anything if a major house doesn’t recruit her…a house like Theo Brood’s, who is an unpleasant and rich boy. When he is punished for a failed party trick by being made to use the same portal home as the scholarship students (ugh), his unpleasant presence causes a fight to break out and then the spell to go awry in the chaos. Six of the waiting students, including him and Ren, are whisked away to the middle of nowhere…and only five make it alive. If the rest want to make it out, they’ll have to work together.

In the City of Lies, everyone has their tongue cut out when they are 13 under the orders of the Ajungo Empire — a brutal requirement if they want to continue to receive water from their overlords. Tutu is three days from his 13th birthday, but he knows his mother won’t make it that long. He makes a deal with an oba: if she gives his mother water now, he will leave the city and find water to bring back for everyone.

Lucha is a have-not in Robado, a city where the haves are happy to forget people like her exist. Her drug-addicted mother often leaves her and her beloved younger sister Lis to fend for themselves; it’s up to Lucha to provide for both of them, using her innate abilities to hunt monsters. Left homeless by their mother’s most recent disappearance, the sisters must go on the run to survive…and find themselves in the middle of a feud between two gods.