The gas-lit glamour of the Victorian age is a frequent backdrop for stories of women struggling against oppression. But what if a woman had supernatural abilities, or the chance to acquire them? Two new works of historical fantasy answer that question, weaving compelling tales of empowerment—literal and otherwise. 

Set in the fictional country of Levrene, which resembles belle epoque France save for a small portion of the population has telekinetic abilities, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Beautiful Ones is an elegantly paced novel that moves its characters into place with ease, with careful attention paid to ways a word or a moment can change an entire life.

Drenched in beautiful imagery that brings to mind the dreamy aesthetic of art nouveau, The Beautiful Ones begins as Antonina Beaulieu arrives in the capital city of Loisail for her first debutante season. She’d much rather be back home in the country, where she can pursue her interests in the natural world and use her telekinetic powers without fear of judgment. But Nina is dutiful and dreams of romance, so she submits to her cousin’s glamorous wife Valérie and tries to transform herself into a lady. When the successful telekinetic entertainer Hector Auvray begins to court her, his wealth and good breeding is enough to overwhelm her family’s reservations about his common birth, and Nina is quickly enamored of him. But unbeknownst to Nina or anyone else, Hector and Valérie were once engaged.

Relentless and ferociously intelligent, Valérie is sympathetic even as her actions grow monstrous. Groomed from birth to marry for money in order to restore her family’s faded status, Valérie has rejected every part of her self that cannot be used in service to that goal. Moreno-Garcia takes care to illustrate the ways in which Nina is only free to do as she pleases due to her money and her indulgent relatives, leaving the reader with no choice but to acknowledge that Valérie’s hatred of the younger woman stems from both a legitimate grievance and psychological self-preservation. She loathes Nina and often Hector as well, because acknowledging that she carved any trace of innocence and hope out of herself is just too daunting, and damning, to contemplate.

As a foil to Valérie, Nina initially seems more concept than character, a naïve and good-hearted girl doomed to serve as a pawn between Hector and Valérie. But as her youthful passion and curiosity bloom into hard-won wisdom and self-possession, Moreno-Garcia’s narration from her perspective grows more complex, more layered with memory and forethought. The Beautiful Ones captures a young woman in the process of self-creation, looking down on herself from above for the first time, deciding which aspects of her society she will accept, and which she will quietly refuse. Nina’s embrace of and increasing skill with her telekinetic abilities, despite the censure of upper-class society, is a perfect encapsulation of her growth as a character. She’s literally becoming empowered. Moreno-Garcia carefully tracks each participant in the love triangle with this same attention to detail. As the three step toward and away from each other, she roots each movement in individual character development. For each of them, the choice of who they will love is a question of who they will allow themselves to love—whether they will be what society believes they should be, or who they, desperately, hope to be.

Questions of identity and the price of conformity also haunt Creatures of Will and Temper, Molly Tanzer’s urban fantasy set in Victorian London. Tanzer takes the iconic characters of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, gender swaps a few of them and then throws in a fencing school and demonology for good measure. The execution isn’t as pulpy as one would immediately assume, which does lead to a few unanswered questions about the exact nature of the supernatural elements at play. However, Tanzer draws her characters so precisely, and has such fun playing with the themes of Dorian Gray and other novels of the era, that any quibbles are easily waved away.

The decadent Lord Henry becomes Lady Henry (short for Henrietta), a glamorous aesthete in perfectly tailored men’s suits. When introduced to Dorina Gray on the young girl’s first trip to London, Henry is charmed by her enthusiasm and intelligence but resolves not to act on their mutual attraction, or tell Dorina anything about her more unorthodox pursuits—namely that she and a number of her friends host a demon in their bodies. Demon is a bit of a misnomer, as the beings in Tanzer’s novel are from an alternate world, rather than a Judeo-Christian hell. The specific demon that resides within Henry is devoted to sensory experiences above all else, making it the perfect match for Wilde’s decadent philosophy, represented here (as in Dorian Gray) by Henry. By creating and appreciating beauty in all its forms, Henry and her cadre are actually and truly communing with the eternal, literalizing the aim of aestheticism in a canny bit of genre translation.

A swaggering lady demonologist, who is rightfully viewed with utter adoration by her decades-younger love interest, is obviously a delight to come across. But Tanzer’s most intriguing character may be the determinedly conventional Evadne Gray, Dorina’s older sister. Evadne insists on proper behavior despite her very improper devotion to fencing, and immediately disapproves of Henry and Dorina’s friendship.

Tanzer sketches the complicated relationship between the Gray sisters with remarkable empathy and equanimity. Evadne is shy and not conventionally beautiful, unlike the gregarious Dorina, and Tanzer establishes in deft strokes how Evadne’s insecurity has calcified into snobbery and standoffishness. Dorina reacts with scorn whenever Evadne tries to control her behavior, as she cannot help but see it as judgment and rejection. Yet for all her snobbery, Evadne has a forthright, charming Victorian nobility to her, and protects Dorina with all the fervor of a medieval knight. Tanzer wisely ensures that the love between the two sister is never in doubt—rather, they’re unable to honestly communicate with each other due to years of unintended and imagined slights. This central bond between sisters is the backbone of Creatures of Will and Temper, and woven all throughout are poignant observations on love, art and the cost of freedom. With an attention to descriptive detail and an emphasis on seizing the pleasures of life, Creatures of Will and Temper is a twist on a classic tale that would have made Wilde proud.

One day soon, we may develop technology that integrates with biological systems, that becomes so much a part of you that it isn’t clear where you end and the science begins. This potential paradigm shift lies near the center of two new science fiction thrillers. Both books start with integrated tech as a given, pulling readers through adventures as existentially stressful as they are fascinating.

In Emma Newman’s Before Mars, a standalone novel set in her Planetfall universe, geologist and artist Anna Kubrick finds a disturbing note in her room when she arrives at a Martian base. The note is in her handwriting, and warns her not to trust the base’s psychologist. More anomalies become apparent as she examines the world around her: she is missing canvases and sketchbooks, her messages home to her family aren’t answered in a way that makes sense and the base’s doctor feels too familiar to be a man she has just met. At risk of developing psychosis from prolonged exposure to immersive memory technology, and probably suffering from postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Anna struggles to settle in. Are her suspicions about the psychologist, the base’s AI and the motives of the corporation that sent her to Mars justified, or are they just an outgrowth of her own supposed paranoia?

Newman gives us a look at the near future that is both grim and thoughtful. AI implants within characters’ minds blur the line between what is real and what is imagined, to the point that entire psychoses are associated with not being able to tell brain-generated holograms from reality. Corporations have taken control of not just world governments, but entire planets. But even with all these changes, people, at their core, don’t change. They still suffer from depression and have bad relationships. They are paranoid and jealous. This contrast—the fantastical artificial intelligence and brain-bending technology against the mundane flaws of humanity—is what makes Before Mars brilliant. Newman’s latest novel is well worth the read for anyone who loves a twisty thriller, or who is interested in how our future as a species could unfold.

While Newman’s novel is a psychological playground of paranoia and suspicion, Emily Devenport’s Medusa Uploaded, the first in her Medusa Cycle, is half revenge thriller, half spy novel. Oichi Angelis is a servant—called a worm—on a generation ship hurtling through space. Shortly before her parents die in the destruction of their ship, they give her an implant ostensibly meant to give her access to the great music of human history. But as Oichi learns shortly before their deaths, the implant is more than it seems. It gives her not just access to music, but also to the ship’s communications systems and to a Medusa unit, a biotech fusion suit with its own AI, that can be only be paired people who have the implant. When the ship’s Executives suspect Oichi of being an insurgent, she fakes her death and joins her Medusa in a quest for revenge and the truth about what happened to her parents’ ship.

Medusa Uploaded is pure adrenaline, hurtling from intrigue to murder to impersonation. All the while, it challenges readers to think not just about the place of technology alongside—and even within—the human race, but also about what that means for human evolution. And despite its deliciously dark undertones (the first chapter, for example, asks readers to consider what sort of killer our main character is—serial? Mass murderer?), it is a book that is unshakably hopeful, for all its mayhem and scheming. Oichi and Medusa's partnership has the potential to fix the injustices of their world, which makes them a team worth rooting for. Albeit one with a very high body count.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

No doubt there are a multitude of mystery readers out there who love digging into classic spy stories from the golden age of espionage. Filled with ritzy postwar ballrooms, foggy alleyways and the smell of gunpowder, these stories conjure up boatloads of thrilling nostalgia, one swishing trench coat at a time. But have you ever imagined a Cold War that plays out in both this life and the afterlife? Or contemplated world powers vying for demonic runes in their quest for influence? Both of these supernatural mysteries excel at taking a familiar genre and time period and augmenting them with just enough otherworldly elements to make each page feel new and exciting.

In Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland, it’s 1938, and England and Russia are poised at the brink of war. Each has deployed a large number of spies to survey and counter the other’s covert operations around the world. Rachel White, an English operative, learns from a Russian asset that there’s a mole in British intelligence. After clashing with her superiors and being thrown back to a desk job, she takes it upon herself to bring him to justice, even if it’s off the record. But there’s a problem. Peter Bloom, the Russian traitor, doesn’t live on Earth. In fact, he doesn’t “live” at all. Peter is already dead and working as a spy in Summerland, an ethereal city filled with recently deceased souls. How do you expose a mole who isn’t even alive?

What’s so great about Rajeniemi’s writing is how much sympathy he engenders for both Rachel and Peter. This split-perspective novel had me nonplussed at first, as I assumed there would be a “right” and “wrong” spelled out for the reader. This wasn’t the case at all. Peter’s painful past and his dedication to the mission of communism make him a sympathetic figure. Rachel has a great deal of pain, too, as a woman in a man’s world, as wife to a husband with PTSD and as someone who just wants justice. Summerland also poses questions about the cost of knowing the afterlife exists. What is a life really worth if we knew there is somewhere else to go? Contemplative, exciting and utterly imaginative, it’s a wild ride for readers who want some sci-fi twists in their thrillers.

In Nick Setchfield’s dark, lightning-quick The War in the Dark, an English spy named Christopher Winter encounters a demon living inside a human. After battling the monster, being attacked by his dead partner and betrayed by his wife, he goes rogue, trying to understand what his colleague Malcolm tells him—there’s an entirely other war being fought here. The world powers are waging an occult war over the runes of power, which are ancient words that drive these supernatural beings. With the tenuous aid of a Russian KGB agent named Karina, Winter must try to navigate Cold War politics and avert the destruction caused by unholy, recently awakened forces.

The War in the Dark is a tight, high-intensity spook-fest that never wavers from its vision. Setchfield is a master at choosing just the right word to remind us where we are and how we should feel. The reader may rarely get a chance to breathe, but this breathlessness is invigorating. Set in 1963, The War in the Dark uses a more traditional noir aesthetic than the post-WWI Summerland as a foundation for its supernatural elements. And these elements are unequivocally creepy. Exploding demons, sacrificial bleeding wheels and faceless visions feel right at home in the fantasy genre. But Winter’s perspective grounds us with his dry wit and spy’s tenacity. Seekers of supernatural thrillers will find both familiar and entirely new elements in Setchfield’s deftly written, atmospheric spy caper.

There are plenty of science fiction books that tell stories of people voyaging to a new beginning, filled with intrigue, dystopias and subjugation. Relic and Record of a Spaceborn Few don’t tell those stories. Perfect for fans of both science and literary fiction, both books deal with what comes after humans have found their place in the stars.

Alan Dean Foster’s Relic tells a thoughtful story of survival. Once a midlevel administrator on the planet of Sebaroth, Ruslan is now the last of his kind. Homo sapiens—a species that had once settled countless worlds—has been destroyed by a disease of its own making, the Aura Malignance. Alone and miraculously disease-free, Ruslan has been given a new home by the Myssari, tripedal aliens whose enthusiasm for “human studies” is only outweighed by their politeness. When Myssari scientists decide they wish to clone Ruslan to reestablish his species, Ruslan is given a choice. While the aliens will not stop the cloning program out of deference for Ruslan’s feelings, they do want his willing cooperation. In exchange for the willing donation of his genetic material, the Myssari agree to look for humans’ ancient home world, a place called Earth.

Foster’s book reads like a slow, methodical mystery, building to something that isn’t quite clear until the last pages. While the discussions of Ruslan’s continued existence and the intricacies of his relationships with the blunt, three-gendered Myssari could have been tedious, Relic is anything but. It is nuanced, with a surprise lurking behind every shadow, making it impossible to put down. Foster’s story also strikingly echoes our own world, where we fight tooth and nail to avoid losing species, even if it means those species live out the rest of their days in dreary captivity. Ruslan’s experience asks, if it were us, would we want the same? Relic will not just keep you entertained. It will keep you thinking.

Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third installment in her Wayfarers universe, tells the story of an entire fleet, as opposed to Relic’s solitary survivor. Hundreds of years after humans left Earth to find a better home, the Exodus Fleet has settled in a new solar system, locked into orbit around a new star and been accepted into the greater galactic community. Most Exodans have left the Fleet, determined to make their homes planetside. Record of a Spaceborn Few tells the stories of a few people who chose to stay in the Fleet, torn between integrating into greater galactic life and preserving the only way of life they have ever known. When an accident destroys one of the Fleet’s homesteader ships, its remaining residents are forced to struggle with what it means to still be an Exodan now that the Exodus is over.

Chambers’ characters are beautifully drawn, and they seem like they could be people next door as much as they could be people from a galaxy away. Her writing allows the reader to inhabit those nuacned characters with feeling, but without maudlin sentimentality or forced emotion. The result is an experience that will leave lovers of both science and literary fiction wishing they had just one more chapter to go back to.