A refreshing take on what it means to be a robot, Silvia Park’s Luminous characterizes androids and bots as expressions of human weakness and desire.
Constance Fay’s Chaos is a sci-fi romance featuring a prison break, super soldiers and a reformed almost-evil scientist.
With beautifully flowing prose and countless twists, Kell Woods’ Upon a Starlit Tide combines “The Little Mermaid” and “Cinderella” to enchanting effect.
The Radiant King may have a familiar epic fantasy framework, but it achieves great heights thanks to its complex perspective on immortality.
Poet and novelist Andrea Eames pays homage to Uprooted and the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle with A Harvest of Hearts.
Laura Brooke Robson’s debut fantasy romance is both second-chance love story and devoted character study, all written with simple elegance.
Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Victorian Psycho is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities.
Lucy Rose’s horror-folktale hybrid, The Lamb, is hypnotic, grotesque and beautiful all at once.
With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice, Neena Viel uses well-worn horror tropes in deliciously terrifying ways in her debut, Listen to Your Sister.
Camilla Bruce’s cathartic At the Bottom of the Garden uses the trappings of gothic horror to wrestle with the meaning of death.
Readers are enamored with the bookish, blunt Miss Wilde and her dashing fiancé, fellow academic and secret Faerie prince Wendell Barnaby. The pair’s latest adventure sees them taking the throne of Wendell’s kingdom, only to find out that his evil stepmother has placed a curse on the realm.
The book world can be a bit like a pendulum when it comes to trends: For every rom-com revival, there’s a rise in dark romance. Hopepunk and cozy fantasy have reigned supreme for the last few years in SFF, so does that mean we’ll see grimdark rise again? Joe Abercrombie, one of the original purveyors of that gritty, ruthless approach to high fantasy, may kickstart a new wave with The Devils. Set in an alternate version of medieval Europe, The Devils sounds, honest to god, like a fantasy take on The Suicide Squad: The team is made up of a werewolf, a vampire, an elf, an immortal warrior and a monk, and according to Abercrombie, they’ve been tasked with solving “problems the righteous are not equipped to tackle.”
Silliness abounds in the sci-fi novels of John Scalzi lately, and honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve had kaiju, we’ve had supervillains with all-cat staffs and now we have a whole book dedicated to what would happen if the moon suddenly turned into an enormous orb of cheese. We haven’t a clue how seriously Scalzi will take this premise, but we can’t wait to find out.
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