The Napoleonic wars have been fertile ground for historical fantasy in recent years. From the draconic aerial combat of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s wry fairy tale of manners, that continent-spanning conflict provides an ideal canvas for fantastical retellings. It’s sweeping in scope, and is easier to romanticize than more recent wars. Hester Fox’s The Book of Thorns, however, is not about magicians single-handedly winning battles. Rather, it is about two women who can hear flowers. Englishwoman Cornelia and Belgian maid Lijsbeth escape their abusive homes and find themselves on opposite sides of the Waterloo battle lines. Neither woman can change the course of the war. All they can hope for is to somehow find safety and joy in a hostile world.
Fox insists on confronting Cornelia and Lijsbeth’s individual traumas head-on. They bear profound scars and are, in their own way, survivors, although both would balk at being called such. Like Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts, The Book of Thorns is fundamentally a war novel dressed up in magical conceits—in this case, talking rosebushes. Its villains are selfish, not self-consciously evil; its heroes are genuinely decent people, but decency alone is not enough for them to prevail.
The Book of Thorns has a happy ending, in its own way: Both Cornelia and Lijsbeth find people they love, who love them back and who would never cause them pain. That is a kind of joy, if hard-won. Fox does not hide from the fact that for all the romance surrounding Bonaparte’s exploits, nobody who fought at Waterloo came out unscathed, whether they were breathing by battle’s end or not. But Fox also reminds us that, even in fields tilled by cavalry charges and fertilized with gunpowder, flowers can grow.
Hester Fox’s The Book of Thorns is a gentle, magical tale of hope and healing in the midst of war.
What’s the difference between witchcraft and a miracle? According to The Familiar, beloved fantasy author Leigh Bardugo’s latest novel, the answer is simple: politics. This distinction is of life-and-death importance for Luzia Cotado, a scullery maid in a less-than-fashionable Madrid household whose milagritos, or little miracles, can lighten a heavy load or make flowers bloom in winter. As a conversa, a descendant of Jews who converted to Catholicism under the threat of death, Luzia is careful to appear devout lest she fall under the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition. That means keeping her milagritos, with their incantations derived from a patois of Hebrew and Spanish, secret. But when her lonely, petty mistress discovers her gifts, Luzia is forced to display her power publicly and thus increase her employers’ standing in society. If she successfully navigates the elite’s whims, a more comfortable life awaits. If she fails, she can only hope the Inquisition will offer her a quick death.
The Familiar is a book where candles cast deep shadows and even sunlit scenes take on an air of unease. At its center is Luzia, a difficult woman to like, both in-world and for a reader. Foolhardy and ambitious without wisdom, she makes decisions that endanger her life for little reward, time and again. Her counterpoint is Guillén Santángel, the eponymous familiar. As with so many of Bardugo’s morally gray (and potentially evil) male characters, Santángel is immediately compelling, even before readers venture into his perspective. The mysterious immortal wraith holds not just Luzia’s attention, but that of the entire city. Through his ancient eyes and almost alien mannerisms, Bardugo adds depth and intrigue, preserving the mystique of the pre-modern world even as the Age of Exploration begins. Full of hidden perils and twisting machinations, The Familiar is Bardugo’s most assured and mature work yet, a remarkable portrait of the magic of exiles and the traumatic echoes of the Spanish Inquisition.
Full of hidden perils and twisting machinations, The Familiar is Leigh Bardugo’s most assured and mature work yet.
When shape-shifting monster Shesheshen is woken from her hibernation by monster hunters, she does what she must: She kills and eats one of them. In retaliation, the nearby townsfolk, scared and desperate to hand over a “wyrm” heart to Baroness Wulfyre, poison Shesheshen with rosemary and hunt her until she toddles over a cliff . . . into the care of a kind human woman.
The sweet and tender Homily thinks Shesheshen is human, and laughs at the things Shesheshen says. She would be the perfect partner if she weren’t a Wulfyre, off to kill the beast who ate her brother. The more Shesheshen learns about Homily, the more she realizes how poorly Homily’s been treated by her family—and how desperately she wants Homily’s love. She’ll need to explain to Homily that the Wulfyres are the real monsters, and she’ll need to do it before they destroy all she holds dear.
Come for the body horror, stay for the romance: There’s a little something for everybody in Nebula Award-winner John Wiswell’s genre-blending debut novel, Someone You Can Build A Nest In. Told from the unexpected perspective of our sentient, hungry blob of a protagonist, this innovative gem doesn’t shy away from the sweet or the unsavory. Her penchant for absorbing things into her body to make bones—or to hide bear traps in her chest as future weapons—is inventive and gruesome, the perfect balance of horrific and fun. Wiswell pulls from fairy tales of yore to build an intriguing world, including the unique landscape of the isthmus where the action takes place, herbal science and an adorable big blue bear.
Wiswell is best known for his award-winning short stories, experience which is evident in bite-sized chapters that readers will swiftly devour. But it’s the emotional core, Shesheshen and Homily’s asexual and sapphic bond of solace, that will ultimately hook their hearts. A romp that’s both bloody and sweet, Someone You Can Build a Nest In will delight readers who loved Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Alix E. Harrow’s ASpindle Splintered.
Horrific and fun, bloody and sweet, Someone You Can Build a Nest In is a deliciously dark fantasy romance starring a shape-shifting monster.
In Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell takes a fractured fairy-tale setup—What’s the monster’s side of the story?—and cracks it open, using the love story of Shesheshen and Homily, a kind woman from a monster-hunting family, to launch a rollicking exploration of queerness and asexuality, disability and how society shapes what is monstrous, in addition to a whole heap of dysfunctional family relations.
Your unique take on a shape-shifting monster—in this case, a sentient blob who must actively and constantly work to form limbs and organs—is charming and innovative. What drew you to a shape-shifting main character? Feeling like a blob that has to perform and pass as human is a regular feeling for me, as it is for many other disabled people. There have been so many times when I’ve fought with my body to make it walk correctly, or let me socialize in a normal way. Sometimes I feel like an outsider among healthy people. Shesheshen’s shape-shifting nature started there.
But she also started with Homily. Before there was a book, there was the idea of the two of them, and their series of miscommunications that leads them to both fall in love and hunt each other. The central humor is Shesheshen trying so hard to pass for human, and then she finds love in the one person who mistook her for someone worthy of love when she wasn’t trying. It speaks to how caring Homily is, which is the spark for their relationship. Shesheshen goes to great lengths to hide her blob nature from her girlfriend, while trying to figure out how to break the truth.
After writing a few scenes of that, I was in love with Shesheshen’s nature. She couldn’t be anything other than a shape-shifter who built her own DIY body out of chains and discarded bones. And how fun was it, as a disabled writer, to have a monster who treated bones as assistive devices?
“Family leaves its mark on us, even if it’s by absence.”
Shesheshen’s best friend is a bear named Blueberry. Tell us about her. As soon as Blueberry waddled onto the page, I knew she was here to stay! Despite her reputation, Shesheshen can coexist with other creatures, and Blueberry is proof of that. Early on, I wondered what sort of critter Shesheshen might keep as a pet, as she’s not exactly an orange cat person. Her destined buddy was a huge predator. There are implications (that I don’t want to spoil) about where Shesheshen got her favorite set of false teeth, that point to how the two of them met.
Blueberry also reflects a truth about predators: They aren’t inherently monstrous. Most bears would rather eat your garbage than eat you. It was nice to shed a little sympathy on a real animal that often gets vilified, alongside the mythological Shesheshen. Wouldn’t you give Blueberry a hug? I mean, if she wasn’t too hungry?
Shesheshen never knew her mother. Homily has a complicated relationship with her abusive mother, who Shesheshen wants to eat “for the common good.” You pay tribute to your mother in your acknowledgements. Mothers, including stepmothers and the consumption by and of mothers, are a huge throughline in fantasy and horror stemming all the way back to fairy tales. Why do you think that is? Family leaves its mark on us, even if it’s by absence. So Shesheshen lives under the image she has of her mother, that great apex predator who went down swinging. Homily has a very different family, like you mentioned. Several readers have compared them to a fairy-tale couple, in the Brothers Grimm sense of the phrase. When you think about the Grimms’ fairy tales, family is often the cause of the dramatic conflicts. Some father ditches his kids in the woods to starve, so that he won’t. A single parent needs somebody else to help look after their child, and so they beseech god, the devil and death itself to be godfather. We all feel that profound emotional charge of connection with our loved ones, or the ones who should love us and don’t. They can make us question what we really are. So from fairy tales and legends up through contemporary fantasy, you often see that charge explored. And, in my favorite stories, we see the effects of that charge on us explored. How do we deal with what our families made us into? Do we decide to stay that way?
Neither Homily nor Shesheshen are interested in sex, but between Laurent’s love of threats and Epigram’s various lovers, the presence of kink and sex still play a role in the lore of this world. What was it like to develop a visceral yet asexual sapphic relationship while still creating an actively sexual, queer setting? Shesheshen is less of a sexual creature than she thought she was, because she grew up with beliefs about what she had to be. Her feelings for Homily challenge her ideas of what she wants in life. That’s an existential problem for her, but a familiar one. Many asexual people (myself included) grow up expecting to want to participate with the same drive as those around us, and then get woefully disoriented. We aren’t what the world convinced us we were. So where do we fit? Do we belong in our world? Stories can help us understand that we belong everywhere. One reason readers love Shesheshen is she refuses to give in. If the narratives are wrong, she’ll grab them and change them herself. Especially if it means helping someone she loves.
That said, I tried to write a world with robust queerness. Just because my main characters are asexual-curious doesn’t mean allosexual people don’t exist or have meaningful struggles. We meet parents, couples and people with fetishes. It is a little fun to see Shesheshen look down on some of them the very same way they look down on “poor, confused” asexual people. Shesheshen is an opinionated monster. And good for her!
Someone You Can Build a Nest In takes place on an isthmus, an in-between place, and many of the struggles of the book are reflected in not just the in-between nature of its setting but the in-between nature of its characters, torn between what they should be and what they want to be. What drew you to working with such a setting? What are some of your favorite parts of the strange little world you have built? You caught that! Yes, it was deliberate to have a monster at odds with what the locals let her be, contrasted with a small town that lives at the behest of these enormous outside forces, all living out their life-and-death context on a small strip of land that is tiny compared to the empires outside its borders. Their whole struggle with each other is minor in the eyes of the L’Étatters, Engmars and Wulfyres. The isthmus never participated in the historic war of outside powers, yet because they are at the mercy of those countries, their whole history shaped by it.
I love a great epic fantasy about a clash of cultures, like Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty and C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken and The Faithless. But not everybody affected by a war is fighting it, or is even part of the nations involved. We don’t hear enough stories of people stuck in between powers. It felt right to show the fallout of these terrifying forces that could, on any single wrong day, destroy the isthmus. It’s another kind of estrangement. One that Shesheshen has taken very personally.
I’d love some edition of the book to someday include a whole map of this world, to show just how tiny and vulnerable Shesheshen’s whole world is. The isthmus would be tiny! And, nevertheless, at the center.
“Stories can help us understand that we belong everywhere.”
Homily’s family believes they are cursed by a local monster, but Shesheshen disputes that, mostly as she doesn’t remember cursing anybody. Do you think curses are cosmically real or things we create ourselves? Are you suggesting I’m under a curse right now? Please tell me a phantom isn’t hovering overhead. What’s fascinating to me about omens and curses and spells is how they make us question what our actions mean. Did I do this on purpose? Is it a habit, or addiction? Is an outside source influencing me in ways I don’t understand? Those are eternal questions, whether you were a ninth-century hermit, or somebody who can’t stop checking their phone because your apps have trained you.
So now this family thinks they’re being killed off by Shesheshen. And Shesheshen thinks she’s innocent of casting the curse on them, but she isn’t exactly innocent in some of their demises, is she? Maybe there’s more going on than she thinks. When somebody accuses you from out of nowhere, it’s natural to wonder where they got this idea. Especially if that idea threatens you.
In your acknowledgements, you pay tribute to the monsters and villains that you grew up rooting for. Queerness and monstrosity, as well as disability and monstrosity, have been tied together in fiction in a way that both communities have embraced rather than rejected. What draws you to the monstrous, and why do you think our communities are drawn to them? Let me start here: Monsters are often the character a story says we don’t have to sympathize with. The characters that are said to be evil for evil’s sake. They are supposed to have no depth. But the moment you find monsters interesting, you question: What depth might they have that a storyteller might deny is there? What is it like to live as this creature? Those questions always wake up the part of me that wants to run to the keyboard and find out.
Back before I became disabled, and before I knew I was queer, I still loved monsters. There’s a fascination with what scares us, especially when what scares us is a person. What’s it like to live as Dracula? Not for one book, but for centuries of that existence? If you can be a monster, then you’ll be the one doing violence. And many of us are taught this corrosive lie that if you are the one doing violence, then you’ll be safe.
Then you grow up, and you realize how many of our fantastical monsters are coded to be like so-called “undesirable” people. The cloying line between zombies and the fear of unwashed masses of outsiders. How many monstrous body parts look like “disfigured” people, and that such stories basically validate the irrational disgust for people who just look different. That vampires were coded as queer to some extent because audiences would fear them more and saw queer people as predators. Just the cultural tonnage of media saying mentally ill people are monsters who must be killed for your own safety is crushing, especially if you’ve ever known a mentally ill person and what they have to survive just to live a life.
So at some point you say to yourself, “If all of these stories say I’m a monster because I’m chronically ill, or because I’m queer, or I’m the wrong religion? Then I’m going to be a monster and proud.” The draw is adopting these fictional critters into our real psyches. Making them avatars of refusing to conform. Because werewolves aren’t the only ones uncomfortable in their skin.
Up until now, you’ve been working in the realm of short stories, having won a Nebula Award and been published in Tordotcom, Apex, Uncanny and, honestly, nearly every established genre fiction magazine. What drew you to writing a novel-length work? What are some of the biggest differences between writing short stories and writing a novel? I’ve actually been writing novels since before I started blogging in 2007. Novels just take longer! I fell in love with writing because it lets me explore the wholeness of characters. To do justice to a story that captures who they are. Some characters are simpler, or have shorter journeys to express themselves. Others, like Shesheshen and Homily, require a lot of gory room to get their truth out. That’s honestly the big difference between writing shorts and novels for me, too: How much does a character need to share with us in order to be heard?
Which means going forward I want to write more novels, but also more shorts. Characters come in all sizes. And I love meeting new characters.
How has genre fiction changed since you first began sharing snippets of your writing on your website back in 2007? Oh, wow. Since the mid-2000s? You’re talking about A Song of Ice and Fire growing into a global phenomenon, and “grimdark” going from a pejorative term to thousands of people’s favorite thing to read. The boom of young adult dystopias. BIPOC creators getting way more equity—the breakouts of modern greats like Ken Liu, N.K. Jemisin, Fonda Lee, Shannon Chakraborty, P. Djeli Clark, C.L. Polk, Shelley Parker-Chan, Tasha Suri and so on. LGBTQ+ authors and characters appearing far more frequently.
If I had to simplify it to my own experience? Back when I started writing, I wouldn’t have expected a short story like “Open House on Haunted Hill” or a novel like Someone You Can Build a Nest In to be publishable. It felt like the only place for disabled characters was as an object of pity or as a grotesque villain. Now, did I want to read stories like these back then? Badly. Desperately. But I wouldn’t have even tried to write them, because I would have been sure they weren’t allowed. What’s changed is many brave authors and editors and agents, and readers and critics, have demanded better. Feeling like more people would give me the time of day if I was myself. You can’t get a greater gift than that. I try to pass it on, when I can.
Ultimately the greatest change, from flash fiction all the way to multibook series, is that more kinds of stories are getting published. More perspectives are getting shared. Horizons broaden. It makes me glad to be alive and writing now, among so many great peers.
Photo of John Wiswell by Nicholas Sabin.
Meet Shesheshen, a carnivorous shape-shifting blob who might eat her girlfriend’s mom. She’s the best.
Found family is a special weakness of mine: From Lord of the Rings to “Stargate SG-1,” I often find myself tearing up as brothers- and sisters-in-arms share their lives and hurts with one another. Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas and Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis are both about struggling, scrappy people making their way through a sci-fi world—and both have enough emotional heft to move even less susceptible readers. Cascade Failure makes a deep, rich investment in five characters and their adventure to save the galaxy. Floating Hotel, on the other hand, drifts from one perspective to another, almost never repeating the same viewpoint, to paint a beautiful portrait of a community.
In Cascade Failure, debut author Sagas kicks off a new sci-fi series with aplomb. A disgraced himbo of a soldier named Jal finds himself captured by the crew of the Ambit, which consists of his old lieutenant, an AI ship captain and a foulmouthed engineer. They try to take Jal in to be court-martialed, but are distracted by a distress signal that leads to a chattery, terrified programmer and a conspiracy that threatens millions across the galaxy. From there, the crew of the Ambit go on a rollicking journey, but the real draw is how the relationships between the characters unfold. Each person has a long history rife with post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse and abandonment. Sagas avoids making the party’s communication difficulties frustrating for the reader, using their inner monologues to illustrate the complicated emotions and memories that stand in the way of healing. At first, the five people aboard the Ambit are tense and uncomfortable around one another. By the end, they are inseparable.
A beautiful luxury ship that travels the galaxy, the Grand Abeona Hotel is slowly falling into disrepair. Its manager, Carl, has a penchant for taking in strays and finding them jobs. The staff is thus a group of people who happened upon one another, rather than actively chose one another. As a result, their familial relationships encompass both long-suffering irritations and radical, immediate support when needed. More than anything else, they each have a special affection for the Grand Abeona Hotel and the safety, unity and new start it provided each of them. A political mystery provides a spine of sorts—a rebellious writer has been criticizing the emperor, and various figures are hunting for the satirist—but Curtis focuses on small redemptions and triumphs. The musician finds her song, the stuttering aide finds her confidence and the bonds between a group of broken people shift from necessary tolerance into something like love (which should be familiar to anyone who has worked in the service industry for any amount of time). Melancholic and nostalgic, Floating Hotel is an ode to circumstantial companions that left this reviewer pondering old friends who now live miles away, off in their own stories.
The crews of a galactic hotel and a shambly spaceship bond in spite of themselves in these emotional sci-fi novels.
In Valerie Martin’s captivating Mrs. Gulliver, she lifts the star-crossed dramatics of Romeo and Juliet but eschews tragedy, offering us instead an idyll.
Natalia Shaloshvili’s finely tuned visual humor in Pavlo Gets the Grumps dovetails nicely with her comforting, uplifting message to any reader who’s ever been a bit cranky (aka all of us).
Read by Cynthia Nixon, Anna Montague’s moving and surprisingly humorous debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? shows grief’s potential to lead to reconciliation and hope.
Nuanced, hopeful and insightful, Ava Robinson’s Definitely Better Now is an endearing portrayal of a young woman redefining herself after one year of sobriety.
Tiankawi may be a city half-submerged in water, but like so many cities, it is divided between the haves and the have-nots. The haves, who inhabit Tiankawi’s sweeping spires, are nearly all human. Some of the have-nots are too, but the majority of the city’s dispossessed are of the fathomfolk diaspora: people of the sea who have been forced out of their underwater havens by pollution and human-mediated destruction. Mira straddles both worlds. The first half-siren captain in the border guard, she wants to make a difference in the lives of those who she grew up with—if anyone will let her. Mira’s way of making change is slow and methodical, often relying on her well-connected water dragon boyfriend to help push for better legislation and provide an image of a model minority. Her boyfriend’s sister, Nami, has other plans. Banished to Tiankawi for her rebellious ways, she begins to associate with groups who view violence as necessary for revolution. As she bonds with these new friends, she begins to realize that their methods may be questionable, and soon both Nami and Mira will be forced to grapple with the fallout.
A modern urban fairy tale, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs futuristic cityscapes with fantastical races and real-world politics. The folk are in many ways climate refugees, feared by their hosts and forced to wear bracelets that suppress their powers and prevent them from harming humans, even in self-defense. While it is tempting to draw parallels between the central struggle for the rights of fathomfolk and the rights of refugees in general, Chan’s focus on the intersectionality of issues within Tiankawi makes it satisfyingly difficult to draw a straight line between our world and hers. Chan shows the divisions among the folk, from species-based class divisions among the sea dragons, kappa and kelpies to a distaste for families of mixed heritage. But she also shows that a society bent on oppressing one group will surely not stop there: Tiankawi’s slums are as full of humans as they are full of folk, and its draconian policies harm everyone. This message, both obscured and amplified by the fantasy elements of the story, makes Fathomfolk a nuanced, powerful and complex parable, one that raises questions that linger far after the novel reaches its conclusion.
Set in a city that’s half aboveground and half underwater, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs fantastical races and real-world politics.
Mackerel Sky hasn’t had a good fishing season in centuries. Not since its founder betrayed the mermaid who captured his heart, and she cursed the Maine fishing village in retaliation. That grand tragedy begat many others, but no curse is absolute, even one cast by the most vengeful scion of the relentless ocean. And as young Leo Beale’s alcohol-fueled rebellion against his opiate-dependent mother leads him to the shelter of town elder Myra Kelley; Manon Perle quilts her way out of the miasma of grief over her daughter, born with her legs fused together like a mermaid’s tail and dead far too young; and the local high school’s star pitcher, Derrick Stowe, falls clandestinely in love, the mermaid’s magic may finally be at an ebb.
The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a book to submerge yourself in. Debut novelist MZ’s storytelling does not flow in straight lines. Rather, it eddies, lingering in tiny moments in the present before transporting readers back to the story’s headwaters, hundreds of years ago. She explores the past in loving detail, filling every page with lushly crafted, often poetic prose. The backstory seems, at times, irrelevant to the modern-day plotline, inserted more for world building than narrative necessity. However, MZ does nothing without purpose. Every half-finished historical anecdote and ancillary encounter contributes to the larger story, like a school of fish following an insistent current.This nonlinear structure is unified by an underlying theme of foreignness. Humans are creatures of the land, whose trespasses on water are tolerated at the mermaids’ whim, while the mermaids themselves are antithetical to land. At its core, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is both a tragedy and a romance, a tale of humans and merfolk struggling to live and love in each other’s domains, and how they all end up moored to the liminal space of the shore.
A lushly crafted tale of a Maine fishing village cursed by a mermaid, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a debut to submerge yourself in.
Without any career prospects after grad school, Alicia finds her dead-end retail job tolerable only because of two co-workers she sort-of calls friends: bright, bubbly Heaven and jaded, focused Mars. After a rare appearance at one of Heaven’s parties, Alicia tries to return to the Toronto apartment she shares with her mother only to be waylaid by River Mumma, the ethereal Jamaican spirit of the water. Somebody has stolen her comb, and if Alicia doesn’t return it to her in 24 hours, River Mumma will leave this world and take all her waters with her.
Unmoored by the request, Alicia sets off to find the thief. But as visions from her ancestors begin to overwhelm her, and wicked spirits called duppies start to chase down her and her friends, Alicia will need to choose a path, step into her family legacy and go where the river takes her.
Millennial ennui and Jamaican legend intertwine in Zalika Reid-Benta’s propulsive debut novel, River Mumma. Alicia’s quest rests on folk medicine and the oft-buried spirituality of diasporic communities, which Reid-Benta juxtaposes against modern issues of social media and poorly organized subway lines, but also uses to lend a mythic tone to her tale of young people struggling to find their purpose in a big city.
The robust cast of characters, from Heaven’s spiritualist friend, Oni, to the creepy Whooping Boy duppy, keep the story feeling fresh as Alicia catapults between past and present, though River Mumma rightfully takes center stage with each appearance. “Water heals, water nourishes, water has power,” as Heaven declares, and Alicia’s family ties to the water spirit offer her a guiding light through the choppy seas of her late 20s. Ultimately, Alicia, Heaven and Mars learn to embrace the fullness of life over the apathy that helped them survive a mundane day to day. While these themes get lost on occasion, especially in the chaos of duppy attacks, the adventure along the way is worth a sometimes bumpy ride.
For those entranced by folkloric fantasy, and for fans of N.K. Jemisin and Kat Howard, River Mumma will be a must-read.
Millennial ennui and Jamaican legend intertwine in Zalika Reid-Benta's propulsive debut novel, River Mumma.
Get BookPage in your inbox
Sign up to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday.
Ever since the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of her aunt and childhood guardian, Hester, Ellie has been determined to be as unremarkable as possible. Interesting people, she thinks, go missing. She’s content with her life working as a librarian and taking care of her aging aunt—with the occasional trip to Pittsburgh for dates with women she rarely sees twice. But when an impeccably dressed, impossibly handsome woman appears in the library sipping a cup of tea, Ellie’s world is set off its carefully controlled tracks. After a near-death experience involving an unfortunately placed cow, Ellie learns that she has magical powers and is teleported to the city-state of Crenshaw, where the strong are required to stay and learn to control their abilities, and the weak are often stripped of their magic and cast out. Despite the draw of Prospero, the mysterious witch in the library, Ellie wants nothing more than to go back to her ordinary life. There’s just one problem: She’s also the solution to a prophecy concerning the salvation—or destruction—of Crenshaw itself.
Melissa Marr’s Remedial Magic is a satisfying addition to the magic school subgenre. Crenshaw is a witchy community college-cum-commune that exists somewhere outside of normal existence. It’s equal parts melting pot and pressure cooker, where people with disparate goals and fears collide with sometimes electric effects. Marr highlights the friction by hopping among the perspectives of Ellie and a variety of other Crenshaw inhabitants, like Maggie, a lawyer and mother desperate to get back to her son, and Dan, for whom magic provides an escape from cancer. While Marr’s shifting points of view does mean that Remedial Magic unfolds slowly, the variety keeps the novel from feeling like it has leaned too far into the “chosen one” trope. From the twists and turns of its sapphic romance to Crenshaw’s internal politicking, Remedial Magic is an excellent series starter that combines the aesthetics of a classic fish-out-of-water story with the sensibilities of a book for and about adults.
Melissa Marr’s Remedial Magic is a satisfying addition to the magic school subgenre—written for and about adults.
Without any career prospects after grad school, Alicia finds her dead-end retail job tolerable only because of two co-workers she sort-of calls friends: bright, bubbly Heaven and jaded, focused Mars. After a rare appearance at one of Heaven’s parties, Alicia tries to return to the Toronto apartment she shares with her mother only to be waylaid by River Mumma, the ethereal Jamaican spirit of the water. Somebody has stolen her comb, and if Alicia doesn’t return it to her in 24 hours, River Mumma will leave this world and take all her waters with her.
Unmoored by the request, Alicia sets off to find the thief. But as visions from her ancestors begin to overwhelm her, and wicked spirits called duppies start to chase down her and her friends, Alicia will need to choose a path, step into her family legacy and go where the river takes her.
Millennial ennui and Jamaican legend intertwine in Zalika Reid-Benta’s propulsive debut novel, River Mumma. Alicia’s quest rests on folk medicine and the oft-buried spirituality of diasporic communities, which Reid-Benta juxtaposes against modern issues of social media and poorly organized subway lines, but also uses to lend a mythic tone to her tale of young people struggling to find their purpose in a big city.
The robust cast of characters, from Heaven’s spiritualist friend, Oni, to the creepy Whooping Boy duppy, keep the story feeling fresh as Alicia catapults between past and present, though River Mumma rightfully takes center stage with each appearance. “Water heals, water nourishes, water has power,” as Heaven declares, and Alicia’s family ties to the water spirit offer her a guiding light through the choppy seas of her late 20s. Ultimately, Alicia, Heaven and Mars learn to embrace the fullness of life over the apathy that helped them survive a mundane day to day. While these themes get lost on occasion, especially in the chaos of duppy attacks, the adventure along the way is worth a sometimes bumpy ride.
For those entranced by folkloric fantasy, and for fans of N.K. Jemisin and Kat Howard, River Mumma will be a must-read.
Millennial ennui and Jamaican legend intertwine in Zalika Reid-Benta's propulsive debut novel, River Mumma.
Tiankawi may be a city half-submerged in water, but like so many cities, it is divided between the haves and the have-nots. The haves, who inhabit Tiankawi’s sweeping spires, are nearly all human. Some of the have-nots are too, but the majority of the city’s dispossessed are of the fathomfolk diaspora: people of the sea who have been forced out of their underwater havens by pollution and human-mediated destruction. Mira straddles both worlds. The first half-siren captain in the border guard, she wants to make a difference in the lives of those who she grew up with—if anyone will let her. Mira’s way of making change is slow and methodical, often relying on her well-connected water dragon boyfriend to help push for better legislation and provide an image of a model minority. Her boyfriend’s sister, Nami, has other plans. Banished to Tiankawi for her rebellious ways, she begins to associate with groups who view violence as necessary for revolution. As she bonds with these new friends, she begins to realize that their methods may be questionable, and soon both Nami and Mira will be forced to grapple with the fallout.
A modern urban fairy tale, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs futuristic cityscapes with fantastical races and real-world politics. The folk are in many ways climate refugees, feared by their hosts and forced to wear bracelets that suppress their powers and prevent them from harming humans, even in self-defense. While it is tempting to draw parallels between the central struggle for the rights of fathomfolk and the rights of refugees in general, Chan’s focus on the intersectionality of issues within Tiankawi makes it satisfyingly difficult to draw a straight line between our world and hers. Chan shows the divisions among the folk, from species-based class divisions among the sea dragons, kappa and kelpies to a distaste for families of mixed heritage. But she also shows that a society bent on oppressing one group will surely not stop there: Tiankawi’s slums are as full of humans as they are full of folk, and its draconian policies harm everyone. This message, both obscured and amplified by the fantasy elements of the story, makes Fathomfolk a nuanced, powerful and complex parable, one that raises questions that linger far after the novel reaches its conclusion.
Set in a city that’s half aboveground and half underwater, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs fantastical races and real-world politics.
Mackerel Sky hasn’t had a good fishing season in centuries. Not since its founder betrayed the mermaid who captured his heart, and she cursed the Maine fishing village in retaliation. That grand tragedy begat many others, but no curse is absolute, even one cast by the most vengeful scion of the relentless ocean. And as young Leo Beale’s alcohol-fueled rebellion against his opiate-dependent mother leads him to the shelter of town elder Myra Kelley; Manon Perle quilts her way out of the miasma of grief over her daughter, born with her legs fused together like a mermaid’s tail and dead far too young; and the local high school’s star pitcher, Derrick Stowe, falls clandestinely in love, the mermaid’s magic may finally be at an ebb.
The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a book to submerge yourself in. Debut novelist MZ’s storytelling does not flow in straight lines. Rather, it eddies, lingering in tiny moments in the present before transporting readers back to the story’s headwaters, hundreds of years ago. She explores the past in loving detail, filling every page with lushly crafted, often poetic prose. The backstory seems, at times, irrelevant to the modern-day plotline, inserted more for world building than narrative necessity. However, MZ does nothing without purpose. Every half-finished historical anecdote and ancillary encounter contributes to the larger story, like a school of fish following an insistent current.This nonlinear structure is unified by an underlying theme of foreignness. Humans are creatures of the land, whose trespasses on water are tolerated at the mermaids’ whim, while the mermaids themselves are antithetical to land. At its core, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is both a tragedy and a romance, a tale of humans and merfolk struggling to live and love in each other’s domains, and how they all end up moored to the liminal space of the shore.
A lushly crafted tale of a Maine fishing village cursed by a mermaid, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a debut to submerge yourself in.
In Three Kinds of Lucky by Kim Harrison, author of the bestselling Hollows series, magic has its own specialized sanitation service: Sweepers, who pick up a byproduct of magic called dross. If left unattended, dross can attract shadow, a dangerous, somewhat intelligent life-form that can easily kill mages, sweepers and normal humans alike.
Harrison wastes little time getting down to business; the story kicks off in St. Unoc, a fictional city set east of Tucson, Arizona, where mages congregate to learn, research and test their skills at St. Unoc University. While tackling a messy dross cleanup, our narrator and protagonist, sweeper Petra Grady, discovers she has the rare ability to manipulate shadow itself. Petra is soon drafted into a research project on dross that could upend everything she thought she knew about St. Unoc.
Three Kinds of Lucky revolves around its distinct class system: The magical equivalent of janitors, sweepers cannot use magic, and most mages ignore or sneer at them. However, unlike mages, the sweepers can directly handle dross with no ill effects. Harrison uses Grady to personify this complicated interplay. Her struggle to balance her pride in her work with the fact that some people would rather spit on her than acknowledge her is a key pillar of the story. What’s more, jealousy over the mages’ ability to craft and manipulate magic has always burned in Grady’s heart, despite her sense of duty as a sweeper. As her role in St. Unoc evolves, she learns more about the origin of the two separate classes, discovering sins so old that the mages don’t remember their existence.
Three Kinds of Lucky will immediately pull readers in with its fast pace and efficient storytelling; the entirety of its nearly city-shattering events all happen within a few days. Sometimes, however, the character development fails to keep time with the speed of the plot, resulting in frustrating moments where one wishes that Grady and her companions would adapt more quickly to what’s happening around them. However, the mechanically intricate magic system and complex world Harrison has created makes this series opener well worth the read.
Kim Harrison’s Three Kinds of Lucky is an immediately compelling urban fantasy with an intricate magic system and complex world.
Anna Sinjari is a Kurdish woman dealing with both office drone existential dread and the lingering trauma of the violence she escaped when she immigrated to America. Ssrin is an alien on the run, who immediately bonds with Anna when they encounter each other in Central Park. As a cosmic crisis looms, the pair’s uncanny connection could be what saves Earth from destruction—or dooms it.
When you were first forming the ideas that became Exordia, what concept crystallized first? I was in study hall in high school in 2002 or 2003, and because it was 2002 or 2003 and I was about 14 years old, of course I was thinking about Lego Bionicle: an action figure line with a weirdly compelling (and somewhat uncomfortably appropriative) world based on Maori and Polynesian myth. And I was also thinking about space. And when you put those two together, you might think to yourself, what if Lego Bionicle was invaded by space aliens? So I wrote a story about that.
And it turned out in the course of this story—inspired by Garth Nix’s Sabriel—that, like many fantasy villains, the invading aliens were evil. Not just destructive, or behaviorally incompatible, or obeying an alien set of beliefs or incentives or values, but actually, in a real physical way, inhabited by capital-e Evil. After many years I got to thinking, huh, what would that mean for a galaxy of inhabited life?
You can’t do this story with human beings. I think the idea of a human culture that is intrinsically evil is itself unhuman, it’s an evil thought experiment. It’s too close to so many lies that have been used to justify suffering and genocide. And one of the duties, maybe the only duty of a writer, is “You will not spread lies.” But it is nonetheless an idea humans entertain anyway: What if my moral enemies were not just wrong, but actually, ontologically evil? I think that when we get into disagreements or fights or actual life-or-death conflicts with other humans, there is still a part of us which craves that certainty.
“What if, along the way, we had to work with people we’ve treated quite badly?”
Do you think Exordia depicts how Earth would respond to an alien invasion in real life? To this specific subtype of alien invasion, where the aliens are hostile, where they are advanced but still roughly constrained by the need for a ship and a physical presence and so forth, where they need something from the planet and can’t just kill us all with impunity from on high?
Sure. I’ll say yes! Just cause I’m really interested to see what email I get as a result. Yes, it’s an accurate depiction of how we’d react to that scenario.
We have one advantage in this book that we probably wouldn’t get in real life, which is that the aliens need something specific from our planet, and we have a chance to get to it first. I suspect that if you narrowed this question to “Does this book accurately depict how Earth would respond to a bizarre radio signal from the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan?” then my answer is “Yes, to the best of my ability, with a few concessions for dramatic effect.” But I also bet that if you got the national security advisor or the Joint Chiefs of Staff or their counterparts from Iran or China or Russia or Turkey or Pakistan, etc. etc., to do an interview with me, they could give me some pointers on what I got wrong.
I loved the choice to make Anna Kurdish. What drew you to the Kurds when building her character? In 2019, a guy named Jon Schwarz wrote something which seems pretty correct: “Nothing in the world is certain except death, taxes, and America betraying the Kurds.”
What’s really striking about the Kurds to an American is that they are a huge challenge to American exceptionalism. We see ourselves as the birthplace of modern democracy. We like to believe that we bring democracy to places we invade. But of course we fuck it up constantly, we create this hideous cauldrons that spawn monsters. Yet the Kurds, living in exactly that kind of cauldron, have produced some social movements which are dramatically more egalitarian and democratic, in some respects, than anything you could campaign on in America. Try to get a law passed in the U.S. which says you must have as many women as men present at every level of government. Try to declare that women are the primary actors of history and that women’s liberation is the central task of human liberation. You’d never make it past the local selectboard. But not only have Kurds in places like Rojava made these declarations into central principles of their communities, they have done so in the kind of war-torn, chaotic environment that Americans, I think, implicitly believe can only spawn groups like ISIS.
I am not here to beatify the Kurds. Like any group of people they have evils and mistakes and dark history. It is always dangerous to just pick an ethnic or cultural group and treat them like your favorite Pokémon. But I am here to put the Kurds and their relationship with the United States at the center of a science fiction story. Very probably, even with the help of some Kurdish readers, I have fucked it up in some significant ways. But there are so many science fiction stories which treat America’s generous military and aerospace resources as a guarantee that we would be the protagonist of first contact. What if, along the way, we had to work with people we’ve treated quite badly? What if they had their own efforts at first contact, their own communication with the aliens, established before we even arrived?
What if, as has so often been the case, we ended up doing as much to harm as to help?
Exordia’s various female characters contemplate their place in the macho-man pressure cooker of the military. What choices do you have to make as a writer to examine such a topic while also letting the characters breathe and the story flow? When it comes to the culture of the United States military in 2013, when Exordia is set, I’m pretty much just a reporter. It’s not hard to talk to vets or current service members on the internet and get their feedback. You never take it uncritically, but you can get a much stronger idea of how these characters would think and act than you would by just watching “Generation Kill” for the ninth time. And of course everyone has strong opinions about the place of women in the military.
A big theme in talking to vets was the idea that in the military, a lot of people don’t really care who you are as long as you do your job and understand the culture—but you’ve got to withstand a degree of hazing and offensive irreverence to prove that you’re tough. Some women I spoke to took a lot of pride in giving as good as they got, in the idea that the military is an endless generator of both stupid bullshit and transgressive humor. Not every woman in the military has the same beliefs as me, an avowed feminist but definitely a civilian. I tried to respect that.
Ultimately, I just tried to give each character their own opinions and values. A joke one character would make offhand strikes another as grotesque and offensive. Black people in the military say things to each other that another Black character would never say in the Obama White House. There were some lines I didn’t want to cross, but other places where expert readers pushed me to just make the characters sound like real people they’d known (or been). My rule was that I wouldn’t write anything I wouldn’t be comfortable reading out loud to a good faith audience.
“If your characters care deeply about what’s happening, so will the readers.”
Daniel M. Lavery’s review of Exordia calls it “a comprehensive taxonomy of violence at every level.” Do you agree with him? Was that an intentional focus on your part? Sure. I think the problem of violence is an intentional focus in all my work. There’s this override code for any disagreement in the universe, which is, you just go kill the other guy. You’re a little slimeball in the primordial ocean and you can’t get enough carbon? Well, you could evolve a novel strategy of carbon fixing, and chill out reproducing without hurting anybody else. Or you could just eat your neighbor and take its carbon. Which one’s more likely to evolve?
Everything in the universe faces this problem. They say never argue with an idiot, because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. But how do you make anything good and durable in the universe when you’re constantly being dragged down to the level of “Do what we want or we’ll kill you,” or, alternately, “Nice industrialization, but you fucked up your environment and now you can’t get any calories lol.” The need to defend your own existence from violence, whether intentional or natural, is the idiot. And it keeps on dragging you down.
Exordia in particular is about what we do when violence is used to coerce us. If someone holds a gun to your head and says “Shoot one of your relatives, or we will shoot them all,” is it morally better to do what they’re forcing you to do, because you cannot be held responsible for someone else coercing you into evil—the evil is ultimately theirs? Or better to refuse, because you will not enable evil by complying with it? Or better to make a grab for the gun, because you’re so hopping mad you’d rather die fighting? Or better to never get into this situation in the first place, to treat your lack of answering violence as the real moral wrong?
When you think back on writing Exordia, what sequence or moment was the most memorable to put down on paper? The finale, no question. Just the whole last act. The bit where things move fast, you’ll know it when you read it.
When it came to the humorous bits of your novel, did those moments arise naturally or did you find yourself intentionally deploying it in certain parts? I never once thought “I should go back and script doctor this to add some humor.” Sometimes the situation just lenses through the characters in such a way that the resulting ray of focus points to something funny. It’s absolute death to a story, in my opinion, when the characters get too arch and self-reflexive about it. “So THAT just happened” is the quip that gets bagged on the most, but the real problem, I think, is nonspecificity. Self-reflexive humor is humor about recognizing a trend across stories, and if you’re recognizing a trend across stories, maybe you should instead be making your story different! If there’s gonna be a funny bit, it should be a joke that’s specific to those characters in that situation.
I am glad you thought there were funny bits, though. That’s a good sign.
When writing, how did you know when a scene or idea was working? How did you know when something wasn’t working, either tonally or logically? If something is just going on and on, building up complications—whether it’s dialogue or an explanation of some alien phenomenon—it needs to be tossed. Now you might say, “this whole book goes on and on, building complications!” That is true. To tell you the truth, in a few months I will work up the courage to reread this thing, and then I will have to decide if it’s worked or if I should’ve tried again.
The real trick with this is that if a scene is not working it may be because of a mistake you made 10,000 words earlier. You got to this scene but didn’t find the right ingredients waiting, because 10,000 words ago, you didn’t get those ingredients ready.
And the realest trick of all is just that you’ve got to constantly be finding more important reasons for your characters to care about what happens. People ultimately care about people. If your characters care deeply about what’s happening, so will the readers. If it’s all confusing and opaque and alienating to your characters, then odds are it will be to the reader too. Now you might say, “This whole book is about a confusing, opaque, alienating artifact!” Yes. But it is hopefully an artifact that heightens what the characters care about, rather than concealing it.
What other works inspired you the most when writing this book? Startide Rising by David Brin, just for the giddy maximalism of its alien galaxy—I read it very young. The Andromeda Strain and (more importantly) Sphere by Michael Crichton, for their absolutely terrifying scenarios of alien contact. A whole bunch of technothrillers, particularly by David Mace, an obscure British writer I adore. Eon by the late Greg Bear, the tributes there are pretty obvious.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizard books were a huge influence in their willingness to reckon directly with death and evil on a cosmic scale. C.J. Cherryh is a touchstone whenever I try to write anything tense or military-adjacent; I do not think I have grasped much of her style but it’s an ongoing project. Vonda N. McIntyre’s brutally under-read Starfarers books have one of my favorite aliens ever, Nemo the squidmoth; her “Star Trek” novels were also a huge early influence on me (same for Margaret Wander Bonanno’s and for Diane Duane’s “Star Trek” books). Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest steered me into the multiple protagonist structure.
Do you think that serendure, the connection between two souls, is a real sensation? No, I don’t. Not in the same way as compassion or camaraderie or love or hate. Those passions are the result of shared experiences with other people, and the attitudes that form in our minds. Even when we’re compatible with someone as a friend or a partner, we have to come to realize that inside ourselves.
Serendure isn’t just “you really vibe with someone.” It’s “Like it or not, you are stuck to each other.” Stuck so hard that if a bullet comes at you, then serendure will make sure it kills both of you, or neither. That doesn’t exist in reality, unfortunately. I can’t love someone enough to protect them from bullets, or hate them enough to share wounds. But it’s a pretty common idea in storytelling, whether it’s soulmates in romance or vendetta in tragedy. So serendure is like the cosmic generalization of that human story, like realizing that the sun in the sky is the same as all the stars.
In his action-packed sci-fi debut, the author wades into the murky morality of evil, imperialism and violence.
In 2019, we’ve enjoyed a number of good comic tales—but they’re dark, a little wicked, and even when they’re a little fantastical, they’re deeply, utterly real. Here are five of our favorites.
