Category: Swords and Spaceships

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.

After years of being legends in the real world, superheroines Aveda Jupiter and Evie Tanaka are about to take the world by storm in their own TV show. But Aveda has a hard time getting excited; there’s Otherworld activity outside the Bay Area, and she still has to worry about the fate of the world. When on-set drama goes supernatural, Aveda and Evie must swing in to save the day again.

The second Civil War left behind an America that’s no longer the United States, riven with sickness and radiation and divided into factions. One of these factions, the Homestead Territories, has restarted the slave trade, and the other factions let it. Ji-ji was born enslaved in one of the plantations in the Homestead Territories; her possible way out is the annual Freedom Race. She also unknowingly holds the key to breaking the power of the Homestead Territories. To do so, she must unravel the voices of the dead.

Partners in crime-solving Buc and Eld have taken a place on the board of the Kanados Trading Company with the intention of destroying the nobility from within and trying to force a little more equality into the island nation of Servenza. But boardroom politics and mages keep progress slow, and the two reach out to a potential patron — the Doga who rules the nation. If they figure out who is trying to assassinate her, they’ll gain her support; if they fail their deadline, they’ll be exiled to to the ends of the world. (Full disclosure: Ryan and I have the same agent.)

In 1993, small-town high school seniors (and total geeks) Jay and Colin discover a disk that contains a computer program that’s a pixel-perfect replica of their entire town. And then they discover that if they alter the program, they alter reality. They react to this knowledge with all the calm thoughtfulness one can expect from two teenage boys. But someone is watching what they do, and that someone has their own way of warping reality.

The planet Jai has now become a chaotic, galactic no-go zone; its laws of physics are forever altered and its inhabitants have all changed. The AI gods that once ruled the galaxy have become Jai’s jailers, and Tiv, who once believed utterly in these gods, turns to helping the survivors and fighting for freedom. Her girlfriend, Yasira, debilitatingly ill, cannot lead the necessary revolution. But somehow together, they must solve the mysteries that fractured their planet — and save it.

Bored with quasi-European epic fantasy? This is the start of a series that’s got it all–magic, gods, tons of politics, family drama, giant animals that people ride around on, and a deep history that unfolds without requiring infodumps… and it’s all set in a fantasy Mesoamerica.

(Also check out The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter, which is African-inspired epic fantasy with dragons.)

Bored with fated lovers who always seem to be a heterosexual couple? Here’s Barsalayaa Shefali, a horse-riding female warrior, and O Shizuka, a divine empress, and they have a big destiny together that may be leading them to either their deaths or the godhood they must attain to save the world.

Bored with fantasy that front and centers fighters? This one’s about a scholar and a politician trying to maintain their places in a crumbling empire… then you throw a mage who shouldn’t exist into the mix, and they’re all sent on dark journey through some even darker history–and deadly secrets.

Bored with the AI always being the bad guy? This starts a series about an embodied AI who takes on an empire in her quest for revenge–and then justice.

Also, Martha Wells’s Murderbot series, starting with All Systems Red, scratches this itch nicely as well… and gives us an AI with some severe social anxiety.

Bored with dystopias? Much of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work is quasi-utopic, though in a way that’s very uniquely his. Rather than trying to imagine a future where technology runs everything and resources are abundant, he looks for the ways people can aim for utopia with work and managing scarce resources.

Bored with chosen ones? Here’s a thief who finds out that he might be the missing son of a prince, but rather than being swept into an epic quest, he’s drafted into his ruthless family’s political machinations. Worse, if he’s got a great destiny at all, it’s not that he’ll save the world — he’s going to be the one to destroy it.

The Deucalion, a survey ship crewed by human specialists and androids, is sent to the ice planet Eos to assess its potential as a colony world. Dr. Grace Park, a misanthropic psychologist, has been assigned to monitor the crew, but finds herself befriending the androids instead. After arriving at Eos, the crew is trapped aboard the ship by a radiation storm. The androids start behaving strangely, the humans start having waking nightmares, and as the paranoia ratchets ever upward, Grace begins to realize that nothing around her is as it seems.

Gemma only appears to be a pampered, vacuous princess; under the carefully crafted persona, she’s a spy and a powerful mind magier. Her current mission: figure out who is stealing tearstone from one of the royal mines. There she encounters Prince Leonidas, her mortal enemy… and of course she promptly gets herself into a bind where she has to join forces with him if she wants to finish her mission and survive all the plots she’s uncovering.

Iph has always protected her younger brother, Orr. Unfortunately, their father doesn’t agree; he takes Iph to a gala in downtown Portland as a distraction while Orr is taken away to a wilderness survival bootcamp to be toughened up. Iph storms out of the gala and meets up with George, a bicycle-riding queer Robin Hood, who offers her a place to hide while she tracks down Orr. And Orr, in the meantime, has escaped camp and hooked up with an all-girl punk band. Separately, they must navigate their new environs and find each other again.

The Annurian Empire is falling to ruin, its magical gates becoming defunct and its other advantages falling to pieces. Even the Kettral have been decimated from within, but one of the survivors has a chance to save it all. They must travel beyond the known world to find where the war hawks nest. But the empire’s time is almost up, with an ancient race of god-like beings beginning to stir.

Shiori’anma is a princess, and one with forbidden magic. Her determination to keep it a secret ends on the morning of her wedding day when she loses control of her magic. She’s not sorry to miss out on the wedding, but her stepmother Raikama, also secretly a sorceress, banishes her and turns her brothers into cranes with a special curse. If Shiori ever speaks of it, with each word, one of her brothers will die. Destitute and voiceless, Shiori must save both her brothers and her kingdom before it’s too late.

At the end of a war that the goblins won against the fae, they built the Iron City as both prison and industrial blight. But life still struggles to break free there, where a multitude of stories tangle together around one bag of Dust, the only drug that can still give the fae magic. And that collision of lives will change the Iron City for all time.

This is the story of two soulmates who live in Jamaica, starting just four years before the end of colonial rule. Moshe was born without skin; his strange appearance makes it impossible to tell what race he is. Arienne is his soulmate and does her best to protect him from the social and emotional burden of looking like he does.

A translator named Thaniel and a watchmaker who can remember the future named Mori travel to Japan together on separate business. While there, they begin to experience ghostly apparitions together–and then Mori vanishes. As the ghosts begin to haunt more of the country, Thaniel concludes that this has something to do with Mori–and that his friend is in danger.

Jai is a boy who lives at the end of the Purple metro line in a tin-roofed home, so far removed from the high-rises of the city that they might as well be a different planet. When a classmate goes missing, he decides to put all of the skills he’s learned by watching far too many reality police shows to use in solving the disappearance. It seems like a game at first… until other children start disappearing and rumors of soul-snatching djinn begin circulating around.

Jean is a foul-mouthed, no-nonsense grandmother who works as a guide in an outback wildlife park. Then a pandemic begins sweeping across the country, with its main symptom that its victims can understand the language of animals until the rising tide of unstoppable voices drives them mad. When Jean’s son, Lee, goes missing in this madness, she sets off to find him, with a dingo named Sue riding shotgun.

As a seven-year-old, Nainoa fell overboard from a cruise ship, only to be rescued and delivered back to his mother by a shark. This miracle marks the beginning of strange powers for Nainoa, ones that eventually drive his family apart and leaves him struggling to understand himself as he works as a paramedic in Portland. More supernatural events push his scattered family back together in Hawai’i, where they must reckon with the cost of survival and what heritage means.

Okay yes, you got me, I have mentioned this book a zillion times before, so I should have put the link in the opening paragraph. TOO BAD, MY NEWSLETTER, MY RULES. I will take every opportunity to tell you how freaking amazing this book is if you haven’t read it yet. Beautiful prose! A different take on parallel worlds! Complex and conflicted characters! This was my favorite book of 2020, dangit.

Godolia warlords are tightening their tyrannical rule on the Badlands using mechanized weapons called Windups. Eris is a gearbreaker who specializes in destroying Windups, but she ends up in a Godolia prison when a misson goes awry. There she meets Sona, a Windup pilot. While at first they seem to be enemies, they soon learn they’re fighting the same enemy… and maybe falling in love.

Agent South works just hard enough to make no enemies in the Caspian Republic, the last bastion of humanity that’s run by an artificial intelligence that allows no deviation. Then a Party official is killed and discovered to be a “machine” and South is given the task of chaperoning his widow–also a “machine,” and someone who bears a strange resemblance to South’s deceased wife.

Yalxi was the Supreme Mistress of the Guild of Sorcerers until her love took both her throne and the diamond heart, which gave Yalxi her magical powers. Now Yalxi is on a mission to get her power and her place back, but making allies isn’t easy; she forged her path to power in blood, and the consequences are coming home to her now as well.

In the desert of the American Southwest, a cult prays that the “Visitors” will return, vigilant for signs of the “Duad” that will stand in their way. A woman named Daley wakes to find an alien consciousness in her mind that gives her the gift of healing–and won’t shut up. Daley tries to hide her new power, but when the cult discovers her, they decide that she must be the Duad they have to defeat.

Briseis has an unusual gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to maturity with just a touch of her hand. Which sounds like a great power… if she could control it. When her aunt in rural New York dies, Bri and her parents head to the woman’s dilapidated estate for the summer to get a little breathing room. What they find there is a mystery that centers on a walled garden filled with deadly plants, a place only Bri can enter. Soon strangers are arriving, asking for medicines and potions, and Bri discovers she has a talent for making those, too. But the community has its own dark secrets, and there are those who would harness Bri’s power to make an elixir for mortality, whether she’s willing or not.

A massive beast is devouring stars one by one as war rages through the galaxy. An exiled prince must face the consequences of his mistakes while a princess has vanished without a trace… and a sleeping god stirs on a hidden planet.

Two unlikely friends meet on the pirate ship Dove. Flora becomes Florian in the brutal life of a pirate, which is still better than being a starving street urchin. Lady Hasegawa is en route to an arranged marriage she doesn’t want, carrying her own casket with her. Soon they go on a series of wild adventures, including freeing a captured mermaid, finding an opportunistic witch, and going up against the Pirate Supreme.

A collection of short stories with trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid characters that fulfill–and subvert–gendered prophecies.

Sallot is a genderfluid thief who wants to use the skills they’ve developed in highway robbery to get closer to the nobles that destroyed their life. Their chance comes in the form of a chance to join the Queen’s personal assassins, but the audition is more than Sal bargained for. Their common criminal childhood didn’t prepare them for circus acrobats, apothecaries, and ex-soldiers, but they have to figure it out if they want to survive–and win the heart of the scribe they’ve fallen in love with.

Dev and Noam have lived a good life together for years, practicing magecraft together, caring for each other when their disabilities flare up, with Noam acting as Dev’s service submissive. But when Dev’s arthritis worsens, xe is unable to shield properly, which means xe can’t touch Noam without transferring too much of their pain via xyr empathy. Together, Dev and Noam must navigate this change in their relationship, with the help of a timely tarot reading.

Young Vigilantes across the world keep watch over cities. A new enemy comes onto the scene, identity and motive unclear, but one thing’s for certain: they’re killing Vigilantes. When someone wants to disturb the peace in a city where the gifted make the rules, who will stop them?

Layla and Nat have nothing in common except a deep, mutual dislike–and a boyfriend named Meraud. But when Meraud vanishes during a magical experiment, they must work together to follow the cryptic clues and deadly obstacles that will lead them to him… and then possible let him get back home. Worse, their time is growing short–if they don’t get him home by the winter solstice, Meraud will be lost forever.

Elfreda is part of the Sisterhood of Aytrium; to go with her gruesome daily duties, another hangs over her–she’s to get pregnant and preserve the Sisterhood’s magical bloodline. Willing to do anything to escape that fate, she leaps at the chance to become a spy for a shadow faction. Her new job puts her into the highest reaches of the Sisterhood, filled with opulent parties, danger, and blood.

After helping the young emperor Maia solve the mystery of the bombings that killed his father and half-brothers, Thara Celehar chose to leave the court and go to Amalo, where he could serve the common people of that city. Still acting as a Witness for the Dead, one who can speak to the recently deceased, his skills lead him into a tangle of murder, injustice, and treachery that he must untangle as he seeks to stand with those in greatest need.

Gul and Cavas have had their victory; King Lohar is dead, and they had no small part in his demise. But the usurper queen that takes the throne after is just as bad, and she won’t stop until she sees them killed. Because Gul and Cavas have a connection that runs strong with magic, and they may well have the power to end her reign. When Cavas is captured, Gul must continue the fight alone, not only to defeat the queen and save Cavas, but to build a just world as well.

In a near-future London, Signy and Matthew are a couple staying together only for their six-year-old son and quietly miserable about it. Then one day, all the electricity and gas cuts off in the city. There’s no more running water. The pollination drones that have replaced the now-extinct honey bees are acting strangely. With soldiers in the streets and people going missing, the couple flees the city with their son, but they have no idea if things are worse outside…

Greatships are the lifeblood of human space, transporting incalculable volumes of goods in their massive, city-sized holds from station to station to world. Their ultimate destination is Tradepoint, where an unknowable alien species waits to exchange trade with them. Marca has just achieved her dream of joining the crew of the Greatship Athens and escaping her world and her upbringing. But leaving her old life and scandals behind won’t be so easy, and there’s a whole new set of perils waiting for her out in the black.