Category: Swords and Spaceships

A reimagining of Dracula’s voyage to England, which is from the point of view of the ship’s captain. And it is very, very gay, though his normal dreams of queer desire are intercut with nightmares and unsettling omens because… there’s that whole vampire thing happening on his ship.

A historical fantasy about a lordling exiled to China who has had to come back to an estate he hates after the mysterious death of his father and brother. He hires a magician who happens to loathe his family almost as much as he does to protect him from his enemies… and as you might expect in an SFF romance novel, the I hate you, you hate me relationship gets quickly complicated.

In a gaslamp fantasy world of bicycles and witches, Miles Singer faces a horrible choice — he either has to be bound to his sister as a magic battery of sorts, or condemned to a witches’ asylum — the place where common witches go, rather than the powerful ones of noble blood that secretly serve the throne. But then he meets a gorgeous, mysterious man, and that event turns his life and the world around him upside-down.

A retelling of the Green Man mythos, where a scholar comes to the woods to investigate the legend and discovers that the Green Man not only exists, but is very gay for him.

Hazel and Ben are siblings who live in a strange town where humans and fae exist together. In the woods near their home exists a glass coffin, in which sleeps a fae prince, who after generations unmoving, abruptly awakens. Hazel, who spent her childhood pretending to be a knight, know this is her calling — but it may well be her brother who gets the prince.

A delegation of gods and diplomats has come to the empire Olorum to negotiate trade deals and arcane assistance. But Aqib, a distant royal cousin, has his heart captured by a foreign soldier named Lucrio, and in defiance of all, throws himself into a whirlwind romance that cannot hope to survive the hardships of his world.

Uztar is a land where birds are honored and falconers sought for their power. Twins Brysen and Kylee approach their falconer heritage differently, with Kylee rejecting her ancient gifts and Brysen determined to be the best falconer he can be. When war threatens their home, they must journey into the mountains to catch the Ghost Eagle, with Brysen hoping to save the boy he loves and Kylee hoping to protect her brother.

Katrell has been trying to keep herself and her unemployed mother afloat with her ability to talk to the dead, but it doesn’t pay as much as you’d think. And a new problem soon presents itself–she’s attracting attention from the dead side of the equation, and is being warned under no uncertain terms to stop. While she’s willing to play chicken with ghosts, when she accidentally raises someone from the dead, she realizes she might have a new business model — but it’s coming withe a price tag she doesn’t yet realize.

After losing the competition between magicians, Daron’s less concerned with his fall being town gossip and far more with the disappearance of Kallia, whom he’s fallen in love with — and is now quite probably in the hands of a dangerous rival magician. As he tries to find his way to her, Kallia has found herself in a world of mirrors, memories, and illusions, where she’s about to get offered more power than she can imagine, but at a devastating cost.

General Floré has sacrificed much as a warrior of the Stormguard Commandos, perpetrated horrors in the rotstorm that covers the ruins of the Empire she swore to defeat. But now she’s out and done fighting… until her daughter is kidnapped and taken across a land of monsters and ancient gods. If she’s to save her daughter and all her people, she’ll have to take up the Stormguard mantle again.

Astrid, now with her name remembered and her voice reclaimed, has dedicated herself to taking down the Sisterhood and destroying the aunts of the Gean religion. Hiro and Lito take up their own roles in the rebellion, searching for allies and separately undertaking dangerous missions. And back on Venus, Lito’s sister Luciana must try to survive under the thumb of Hiro’s father until her own opportunity to join the fight presents itself.

Alwyn was raised as an outlaw and was content to live freely in the woods with his fellow thieves… until a betrayal shatters his peace and sends him seeking vengeance as a soldier. Soon he finds himself under the command of Lady Courlain, a noblewoman who has visions of a coming demonic apocalypse — and as darkness gathers to oppose her, it becomes more of a question of how true these visions might be.

A book of Lovecraft-inspired poetic nightmares both cosmic and comic that explore monsters known by that name, and those hiding within racism, sexism, and violence.

2020

This was the easiest pick of the entire list, because this book is definitely my favorite of the the last decade, hands down, no contest. I still cannot get over what a beautiful read this book is, and that’s not even getting into the twists and turns of the parallel worlds and the people in them.

2019

A year that made my choice very difficult because it was one hell of a time for SFF. Ultimately, this book won out because I am a sucker for time loop stories, and this takes what made All You Need Is Kill interesting and then gave it a twist by doing everything out of order, and it’s also such a scream of rage at systemic oppression. Beautiful.

2018

This is my favorite of the Wayfarers series, and I think it’s one that stands on its own to be read. It’s about people finding their place in a changing society, and traditions, and it made me cry — not because I was sad, but because it was just beautiful.

2017

Another tough choice, considering this is also the year of All Systems Red by Martha Wells. But what Neon did with gender in this book and its companion volume (The Red Threads of Fortune) and the absolutely bonkers world they built has imprinted this book indelibly on me. And the rest of the series is great, too.

2016

I did not expect to like this book as much as I did when I read it, and it’s one I just devoured in about two days because I couldn’t put it down. The structure of the story is what makes it work so well, I think: they’re interconnected, self-referential standalone stories that give Lovecraft’s work another twist.

2015

I just want you to know how hard this choice was, coming in from the year that also gave us The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Ultimately, this book won out because I’ve reread it more times. Is that fair for criteria? This is my personal challenge, so yes.

2014

The only surprise about this selection, considering the number of times y’all have heard me go on about this book (and the number of times I’ve listened to the audio), is that it came out when? How has it been seven years? HOW?

2013

This is some Le Guin level storytelling, an intense look at a post-genocide refugee alien race coming to Earth and trying to make a new home, and told with some incredibly compelling characters in a great love story. Still not over it.

2012

Ancient Egyptian fantasy! A fairly rare sub-genre to begin with, but this is just such a rich book in character and description. It’s one of N.K. Jemisin’s earliest works, and her absolute writing talent still shines through.

2011

While putting the third book of a trilogy on a list is kind of a jerk move, I love every book in this trilogy to pieces, and the other two were published before 2011, so this is what you get. Start out with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and you can thank me later.

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.