Category: Swords and Spaceships

This gothic fairy tale–inspired tale follows a husband and wife, whose relationship hinges on one promise: that the bridegroom never pries into his wife’s past. But when Indigo finds out her estranged aunt is dying, the two must return to her family home: the House of Dreams. And suddenly, this scholar of myths, this man obsessed with fairy tales, will have to choose between fiction and reality as the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, threatening their marriage — and their lives.

Noir detective mystery meets science fiction in this novel about an alternate United States where Argentina’s development of psychopigments that can be used to create almost any emotion have utterly changed the course of history. Now, an agent from the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency discovers a career-making case that forces her to face down a conspiracy as well as her family and her own emotions.

Lucky St. James is Métis and a millennial who is barely holding on when she gets the bad news that she’s about to be evicted from the tiny apartment in Toronto that she shares with her grandmother. But at night, she hears a strange call that causes her to burrow though a wall to find a tarnished silver spoon that connects her with a network of North American witches who hide behind the front company of VenCo and work to return women to their rightful power. They have an enemy, though: a witch-hunter who is older than he looks and will stop at nothing to keep VenCo from ushering in its new beginning.

Ea is a spinner dolphin only recently come of age, but she’s always felt like an outsider in her pod because she has a type of deafness that prevents her from spinning properly. When catastrophe strikes her family, Ea blames herself and leaves the pod, venturing into the vast, a place full of danger, where creatures are mutating, species of fish are simply disappearing, and demonic noises from above pierce the depths. But when she has just begun to build a new life as a hermit, she encounters a pod of bottlenose dolphins and the course of her destiny changes once again.

Victoria is a Wildblood, someone with magic that allows her to protect other from the natural and supernatural dangers of the Jamaican jungle. She was also kidnapped when she was six by the Exotic Lands Touring Company and manipulated into being a “tour guide” for them, and that’s all she’s known since: guiding tourists and commercial prospectors through danger. But when she gets a client who is kind in a way she’s never experienced, she has to decide was a promotion in the corrupt company that practically owns her is actually worth.

At 16, Dirt has already aged out of Bowing, the Isle’s elite, all-female fighting sport that mixes combat and dance. She spends her days coaching and mentoring the younger girls of Mud Fam and dreading her next birthday, when she will have to fully leave to find the destiny the gods have intended for her. But when a rival Fam attacks and leaves Mud without their top fighter, Dirt is the only one who can possibly step in to that position. She’s old, out of shape, and terribly afraid — but Dirt has never let fear get in the way of protecting her Fam.

The posthuman descendants known as alloys freely roam across the galaxy while humans themselves have been restricted to Earth. But when an Earth-like planet is found, the adopted human child of alloy parents has an opportunity to show what humanity can do — and that we deserve a place in the universe. Her goal of freeing her people from their collective past is noble, but her mission has been set up to fail…

The saints and their disciples rule the city of Ombrazia unchallenged, and there is little recourse for those out of their favor. Rossana’s father was murdered by members of the Ombrazian military, and she will do whatever it takes to dismantle the system, even if that means joining a rebellion, going up against the boy who broke her heart, or leaning fully into her powers as a disciple of Patience. But her father isn’t the only one recently murdered; a killer stalks the streets, and Rossana finds she must team up with the captain of Palazzo security for them to both get what they want.

The lives of vampires are not glamorous like we’ve been led to believe; there’s no murdering, no flying, no turning into a bat, none of that cool stuff. It’s just working night jobs to pay the rent and living off blood bags — and avoiding family, if you’re Louise Chao. What Louise does having going for her is decades of going to punk shows, and she finally might be able to join a band, if she can just keep her vampirism under wraps. But then her long-lost teenaged cousin Ian shows up at her door, and while she connects with him over a love of music, he’s also way too close to discovering all of her secrets.

Destry is a terraformer on the Environmental Rescue Team, the descendant of the terraformers who came to Sask-E and began the long task of building a new environment. She’s never questioned her mission, until she discovers an entire city of people hidden in a volcano.

Qalia is a hidden city where a tea infused with spice magic awakens the magical affinities of any who drink it. Imani at sixteen has an affinity for iron and looks to be the next great warrior to fight the djinn…but her older brother who has tarnished her family name after being caught stealing spice and then fleeing to die beyond the Forbidden Wastes. But when Imani discovers clues indicating that her brother is still alive and may well be betraying Qalia by selling its magic to foreigners, she sets out to cross the wastes herself, to bring him to justice — but what she finds on the other side will be far greater secrets than she could have imagined.

In Coventry, Massacheusetts, Halloween night in 1984 is not a happy time for two families that are falling apart. But while that domestic drama plays out, something more sinister is going on. Four eerie children who do not belong on that street or in this time or in this world are going door to door and begging the neighborhood kids to hide them from The Cunning Man.

Blackthorn, Massachusetts is an uncommonly magical place, but it has only one hedge witch: Aziza El-Amin, whose job is to manage all of the magical problems, large and small. But when the boundary between the human and fairy worlds begins to erode thanks to the machinations of a dark entity, things begin to get dangerous, and Aziza needs help. Who she gets is Leo Merritt, who has been miserably wandering America for the last year since a curse destroyed all the memories of his true love and left him feeling nothing but a nameless absence; he’s more than happy to run patrols with Aziza if she’ll help him figure out this problem. Soon it’s too much for the both of them, though, and they need the aid of a mysterious necromancer that neither of them trust, but both of them need.

The planet Jai stands on the brink of destruction after the artificially intelligent Gods of the galaxy stop protecting it in the face of an ancient enemy. Yasira Shien, devoted to saving Jai, would give her life to save it — and she might have to, since Dr. Evianna Talirr, who began Jai’s rebellion and caused its decimation, returns with a prophecy that the only way to save the world is with Yasira’s death. Yasira is certain it cannot be that simple, but time is running out, and her only road to salvation will lie with destroying everything she knows about the galaxy, the Gods, and herself.

Neve is the youngest daughter of the kingdom of Eire, where banshee and water-wights are but a few of the threats its people face. Any magic the people might use to defend themselves has been outlawed by her father, and what remains is the purview of his Druid priests. Neve grew up hating these Druids; a Druid’s apprentice-turned-thief named Ronan is thus an unlikely ally for her, but they’ve been brought together by the mark of dark magics. When a power struggle threatens the kingdom, Neve must rely on Ronan and a group of dangerous outcasts to take the throne of Eire and save the kingdom — and her people.

Song Yan is a former concert pianist who gave up her career because she wishes to have a child, something her husband has refused to consider for the last three years — and continues to do so after Song Yan’s mother arrives to campaign for a grandchild. Also haunted by dreams of being trapped in a room with no doors occupied by a strange orange mushroom, her life becomes even stranger when packages of mushrooms begin to arrive at her house. When she finally receives a letter from the sender of the mushrooms, it summons her to a seemingly ageless house incongruously occupying the center of a busy city, where she finds a fellow pianist who disappeared ten years ago.

After six cataclysms that have heralded a nuclear winter, humanity’s few survivors live on the Tibetan plateau, haunted by spirits and terrorized by warlords. The seventh and final cataclysm is prophesied to happen soon, but nonetheless young Karma searches for his father, presumed dead after disappearing ten years earlier. Led by the eerie call of a horn that only he can hear, Karma journeys into the Himalayas and discovers the answer to his father’s disappearance might be a mystical mountain that connects the physical and spirit worlds, which also might be the answer to saving humankind.

Esther, an older mother with adult children, has not spoken to her Hex, her magical traveling party, since they were all banned from the alien space of the Beyond for ten years. But when her grown son’s cry for help wakes her in the middle of the night, her Hex are the only people she can trust to go undercover with her, brave the Beyond, and find him.

Katrina’s life is spiraling out of control; she’s the black sheep of her family, utterly broke, and more than a little unhinged, but the one thing she’s certain she’s not is a stalker. Her surveillance of her coworker Kurt is a coping mechanism, like the other rituals she does. But when Katrina receives a message from Kurt that implies he knows she’s watching her, she goes to the Cayatoga Bridge to perform the most powerful ritual she can to take back control of her life — and arrives just in time to witness Kurt’s suicide, one which he tells her is her fault in the moment. Katrina has no choice but to study every detail she’s collected about Kurt to find answers, and what she does find disquiets her utterly. Because as much as she’s been watching him, he’s been watching her.

Antoinette, also known as Antsy, has lost her father… metaphorically. He’s gone missing from the Shop of Where Lost Things Go, and she’s certain she’ll never see him again. But when she loses herself quite literally, she must leave the Shop for good, and that’s not as simple an endeavor as it sounds.