Amélie Wen Zhao is back with a new Chinese mythology–inspired YA fantasy! The story follows Lan: her kingdom was invaded long ago, and the colonizers outlawed their magic and killed her mother — but not before she left a strange mark on Lan’s arm, invisible to all except her. One day, she stumbles upon a practitioner named Zen. He can see the mark and recognizes her as a fellow practitioner of magic. Lan and Zen decide to travel to the last refuge of the Last Kingdom to learn the truth about the mark— and join the fight to overthrow the Elantian regime.

A sequel to Walking in Two Worlds, this emotional sci-fi is an absolute must-read. In it, Bugz is grieving her brother’s death. So once again she finds solace in the virtual world of the Floraverse. There, she’s building a bot named Waawaate. It has her brother’s image, but in reality it’s an incredible weapon against those who threaten her power. Bugz cannot wait to team up with Waawaate and Feng, but the latter is having problems of his own that threaten to turn his life upside down. That’s not the only problem though, because Waawaate is getting too powerful for Bugz to control.

The last YA SFF out in January is Maiya Ibrahim’s Spice Road! This Arabian-inspired fantasy follows Imani, a great warrior with a magical affinity for iron who’s on track to become the city’s next Shield. If only her brother’s shadow wasn’t big enough to darken her accomplishments. He had a magical obsession with spice and tried to steal it before he disappeared. He was presumed dead — until now. Imani has found signs of her brother distributing spice to other nations. She takes it upon herself (and her new team of kickass warriors) to find him and bring him back before he reveals the city’s location. What could go wrong?

I would honestly recommend N. K. Jemisin to anyone interested in fantasy, but I do think she is an excellent fit for Brandon Sanderson fans as well. She has a deep back catalog for fantasy readers who like to be consumed by single authors for long stretches of time. The urban fantasy books set in New York City, The Great Cities, is an excellent option for fans of multiple points of view coming together seamlessly to defeat the big bad. The Broken Earth Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, and The Dreamblood Duology are all full of empires that rise and fall over thousands of years, powerful gods, battles for territory, and individuals resisting oppression at the center of it all. That is to say, if you like Sanderson’s epic worldbuilding and wonderful characters, Jemisin is an excellent option for you.

Tasha Suri is a British Punjabi author who writes South Asian–inspired fantasy novels that absolutely capture the big stakes, big magic, big empire-level government on-the-line energy Sanderson has in his adult high fantasy series. Her high fantasy series, The Burning Kingdoms and Empire of Sand, both interrogate the effects colonial rule has on the native magic systems and religious practices — often in a way where the people impacted attempt to overthrow or subvert the empire in charge. Suri’s work is perfect for fans of Sanderson’s many fantastical uprisings.

Although Saara El-Arifi is a 2022 debut author, I can already tell she is someone the fantasy world should fall in love with. The Final Strife is the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy inspired by her Ghanaian and Arabian heritage. The series is absolutely perfect for fans of Mistborn’s Vin and the crew she works with to overthrow the Lord Ruler. El-Arifi’s first novel not only has a revolution waiting to overthrow the ruling class but also an unlikely chosen one. The whole thing is a lovely ride (and it’s sapphic too).

M. K. England is really my recommendation for fans of The Skyward Series. They write queer YA sci-fi that will knock your socks off. The Disasters perfectly captures the energy of the unlikely group of pilots at Skyward flight academy. Then, Spellhacker is for everyone who loves the heist energy from Cytonic. In general, they are just great at building large casts of YA characters you immediately understand and fall in love with. Then they put them through the most life-threatening scenarios that could save or destroy their communities. Truly excellent all around.

The Cas Russell Series by S.L. Huang is tailor-made for fans of Legion. Listen, I know the Legion fanbase might not be incredibly large, but if you are a part of it, it is your lucky day. The trilogy of Sanderson’s sci-fi mystery novellas following a detective with multiple alter egos is an excellent comp for Huang’s sci-fi thrillers. The series follows an investigator who meets a gun-for-hire using her supernatural mathematical abilities to extract anything or anyone from any situation. Trust me when I say you will want to pick up an S.L. Huang book soon.

Truly, V.E. Schwab is an obvious choice for a Sanderson author comp, but they had to be included. Not only does their work span the Sanderson age range (from middle grade to YA to adult to graphic novels), but the tone and worldbuilding in their books is an excellent fit as well. The YA series I would recommend for fans of the cities and teens in The Reckoners is the Monsters of Verity series. Fans of Mistborn (and mistcloaks) will be down for the Shades of Magic series (and Kel’s coat). Also if you like Sanderson’s creative writing classes, Schwab has an excellent set of videos where they interview authors in No Write Way and discuss their writing process.

I am going to start my Patrick Rothfuss recommendation with a warning. If you start this series, I am not responsible for the fact that you may never finish it. The second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, was published in 2011 and the likelihood we will ever get a final book feels like it gets further away with every passing year. Now that that is all settled, the Kingkiller Chronicle is a great option for fans of the Cosmere. The series is told from the point of view of a magic young man who now owns a tavern but is telling a tale of a time before when he was growing up, exploring the world, and learning the extent of his power. It is a solid option for fans of Sanderson’s expansive high fantasy worlds.

This collection of genre-blending short stories contains everything a reader could want, from horror to fabulism to science fiction and more. It was an International Booker Prize shortlist nominee, and features terrifying and strange stories that mimic worlds that could be our own. The title story, “Cursed Bunny,” tells the tale of a cursed lamp in the shape of a rabbit that has a sinister background hidden underneath its cuddly exterior.

This sequel to A River Enchanted picks up where the first book left off: Turbulence on the Isle of Cadence is at an all-time high thanks to Bane’s determination to rule everyone and everything, and Adaira is struggling in the West to find her place and help the resistance. Jack is stuck in the East, setting out on a dangerous mission, and Torin and Sidra are battling a mystery sickness spreading through crops and people. Everyone is fighting to survive, and they need to join together to face Bane, standing up for the island once and for all.

This is the second book in the Adrian x Isolde series from bestselling author Scarlett St. Clair, picking up where King of Battle and Blood left off. Isolde has been newly crowned and coronated queen and knows her one true love and king is her companion vampire Adrian. But now Isolde is faced with playing politics and settling feuds between two kingdoms while news from Adrian’s past that could change everything boils to the surface.

In this futuristic dystopian novel, climate change is not just worrisome, but devastating. Rising sea levels mean coastal lands are no more, hurricanes are stronger than ever, and humans are powerless to stop it. Kirby and Frida and their two sons are trying to prepare for the storm, but when the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby has to set out to look for them. Frida, left alone, begins to go into premature labor. The book tells the story of this family in the aftermath of the hurricane and how they move on, and as the children grow up and the family changes, the landscape, too, changes around them.

The unnamed protagonist in this story, on the verge of dropping out of college and struggling with his personal relationships, is presented with a strange dilemma. After a chance encounter with his crush and not being able to talk to her yet again, he’s presented with an alternate reality: a world in which he does talk to her, a world in which he is succeeding at school. The publisher pitches this book as Groundhog Day meets The Midnight Library, as the character is given four parallel universes in which his decisions take him on different paths.

Hayes is a filmmaker trying to complete his documentary when, out of nowhere, a physicist named Yusuf tracks him down and tells him he’s the key to understanding a mysterious device called the Envisioner. Supposedly, the Envisioner can predict the future. Hayes is suddenly plummeted into a new world as he’s taken to a top-secret facility and shown his alternate self in another universe, one in which he is married to Yusuf. The further he is able to see into the future, the more Hayes realizes they are headed for destruction — both for the world and for Yusuf, who he’s growing closer to by the day — and it’s up to him to save everyone.

Lileala is excited for her new life of fame and stardom to start — she has just been named the Rare Indigo of the planet Swazembi, which means beauty among beauties. But her idyllic future is cut short when she develops a skin infection that causes scabs and scars instead of the glistening glow of the Rare Indigo. She has to go looking for a cure on her own, but what she finds may be bigger than anything she had ever expected.

In 1922, Brigid is one of the most powerful witches and healers in her town of Evermore. When she is seduced by the head of a Knightly coven and becomes pregnant, she vows to protect her child at all costs. When the child is born and falls ill, Brigid will stop at nothing to save her, even if that means risking her own life. In 2022, Evermore is not the place it once was. There is wild magic everywhere, and the villagers are nothing more than prey to be hunted. When Brigid wakes up in this new Evermore, she has no idea how she was transported to this new place, but she knows it’s up to her to save it.

Three years ago, a night in a haunted house fractured the friendship of three young women forever. One of them never left the House. The remaining two, Alice and Ila, were formerly lovers. Now, they can’t stand each other. But when Alice and Ila realize that they each have radically different memories of what happened inside the House, they reunite with a mission: to find out what really happened and rescue their friend before it’s too late.

A father desperate for money moves his two daughters into a deeply haunted house in this debut novel. As the new caretaker of the Masson House, Eric is tasked with determining whether or not the property — adjacent to an abandoned orphanage — is truly haunted. He’s not the first to attempt to unravel the house’s secrets…but will he be the last?

2023 is shaping up to be the year of haunted house novels, in case you hadn’t noticed. In She Is a Haunting, a Vietnamese American teenager plans a five-week stay in Vietnam, where her estranged father is renovating an old house built by the country’s French occupiers. She’s only there to get her college tuition money and go back to the States, but when terrifying symptoms begin to manifest during her stay — phenomena her father and sister deny — she realizes she may be her family’s only hope in getting out alive.

Elle knows her younger brother will kill her if he finds her. That’s why she’s working an entry-level job with a temp agency; she can’t risk putting all of her magical powers on display for him to find. It’s not all bad — she gets to help a cute half-elf named Luc carry out some truly dangerous operations. When Luc’s next target turns out to be Elle’s younger brother, Elle sees a chance at the kind of happiness she can only dream of. But can she really choose Luc over the rest of her family?

Ai Jiang’s Linghun isn’t your average ghost story. Here, grieving families camp out in a strange town for a chance at reuniting with their dead loved ones. Dead spirits can be brought back to occupy the houses of HOME, but their presence comes at a steep price: the peace of moving on from grief. This horror novella is a masterful treatise on mourning, family, and the ongoing relationships that bind the living and the dead.

Anequs is the first dragon rider on the island of Masquapaug in decades. The Anglish colonizers who now control her people’s land refuse to let her raise the dragon hatchling she has found unless she agrees to undergo training at an Anglish school on the mainland. Anequs’s dragon companion’s life depends on her successful completion of an Anglish education, but she’s determined not to let the school destroy her connection to her heritage.

Maeve’s connections to Old Hollywood haven’t granted her stardom. Instead, she’s stuck playing a princess at the most magical place on earth by day and haunting seedy bars by night. To put it simply, her life isn’t what it was supposed to be — and it’s only getting worse. As Maeve’s circumstances go down the tubes, her contempt for humanity rises. She’s about to become the kind of monster she’s only read about…and she’s in for a wild ride.

Humanity relies on the architects to survive. People with the ability to psychically shape the plants of the jungle below, architects keep plant-built cities afloat in the sky. Ahilya is not an architect, but her husband Iravan is. He’s revered for his work protecting the city of Nakshar, and his position provides Ahilya with some much-needed cover. Iravan’s wife is secretly a radical who thinks humanity should return to the jungle below, and she’s about to get her chance to make her unpopular philosophy a reality.

A cottagecore retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth? Yes, please! Neither Lila nor Damien is the child their parents wanted. She’s too temperamental for her disapproving parents; he’s already made it clear that he’ll put his own feelings ahead of his duty. Damien knows that Lila is the next girl who must be sacrificed to keep Luna Island safe, but could she be the one to stop the grisly tradition in which he’s forced to take part?

The generation ship Phoenix is halfway between the dying Earth and humanity’s new home when a massive explosion jeopardizes the fate of the mission. Now, three of the crew are dead, and Asuka — an American crewmember chosen for the mission because of her Japanese ancestry — is the primary suspect. She needs to clear her name by finding the real bomber, but her crewmates aren’t exactly inclined to help.

Steeped in Venezuelan folklore, The Sun and the Void centers on Reina, a servant indebted to the sorceress of Aguila Manor — a woman she barely knows, who happens to be her own grandmother. She begins working as a servant in the grand old house, where she finds herself falling for the Don’s daughter, Celeste. Reina is determined to stay close to these two women — the one who saved her life and the one she’s growing to love — but her dealings with an ancient god may get in the way.

Craving some dark academia to go with the dark winter nights? Look no further than Babel. This delectable volume follows the orphaned Robin Swift from his birthplace in Canton to London. It’s 1829 and this London is similar to ours except that Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation (a.k.a. Babel) is focused on both language and magic. The wealth and power of the British Empire comes from the magical silver bars composed of meanings lost in translation. Given this premise, it’s no wonder the novel delves into global power dynamics. After all, in the 1800s, the sun hadn’t yet set on the British Empire so colonization was in full swing. Robin can’t avoid these dynamics as he becomes more and more enmeshed in the perilous power struggles undergirding Babel.

“Before you arrive, you remember your lola, smoking.” So begins Simon Jimenez’s wild fantasy epic in the second person. The book switches between first, second, and third person narration in a really innovative way; right from the start, that direct address will pull you headfirst into the novel. It’s the story of the wronged Moon goddess, the sons she cursed the last emperor with (a.k.a. the Three Terrors, very aptly named), and a young warrior who gets tangled up in this larger-than-life conflict. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s at least one love story in the mix. It’s one of the most unique SFF books I’ve ever read, and it’s absolutely worth spending the winter with.

Seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade had a hard childhood, so when he befriends Radar, his elderly neighbor’s dog, he isn’t expecting to inherit the man’s big old house. And he’s definitely not expecting to discover that the shed out back is a Narnia-esque portal to another world. The ensuing adventures are perilous and creepy in that classic King way. Fairy Tale is a story of epic proportions, and Charlie and Radar find themselves at the heart of an inter-world battle between good and evil. You know King can do evil on a grand scale, so bring your brave face with you if you decide to while away your winter with this incredible contemporary fantasy.

All right, this is the shortest book you’ll find on this list. It’s not quite 350 pages long, so if you’re a little short on time but still want a sizable story to settle down with, this one’s for you. It’s set 30 years in the future when space colonies are a thing and the Earth’s population is dwindling. The landscape is bleak and populated by a hodgepodge mixture of scavengers, outcasts, and misfits. If you’re wondering about the title, yes, it’s a Biblical reference and it’s not an accident. Onyebuchi’s characteristic worldbuilding prowess is on full display in this sci-fi epic — get that cup of tea ready and cozy up by the fire with your cat, because once you open this book, you’ll have trouble closing it again.

The Stardust Thief is the first book of the Sandsea Trilogy, which makes it a great place to start. (Bonus: the second book is tentatively expected in November 2023, so if you like this one then you’ll have built-in reading for next winter, too!) Chelsea Abdullah’s novel centers on Loulie al-Nazari (a.k.a. the Midnight Merchant) and Qadir (her bodyguard…who also happens to be a jinn). As if that wasn’t recipe enough for a whole winter’s worth of fantasies, there’s also a forced quest for a magic lamp (yup, you read that right) accompanied by a cruel prince and a thief. You may have guessed this, but these characters have their fair share of secrets they’re trying to keep from one another. Their journey will keep you on the edge of your seat, so don’t forget your lap blanket for this one!

It feels like forever ago that N.K. Jemisin released The City We Became, the first book in the Great Cities series — and it kind of was: that book came out right as the pandemic began sweeping the globe. The World We Make catches up with New York City’s newly minted avatars as they navigate the political and personal perils of their new roles. Jemisin’s masterful worldbuilding is just as rich in this book, and her characters are rendered in wonderful depth. The exploration of white supremacy and systemic racism is no less pronounced in this much-awaited addition to the Great Cities series, which took on the entrenched racism of Lovecraft’s narratives in imaginative and unexpected ways. I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for the next book, but Jemisin’s worlds are so memorable that even a few years won’t dim the memory of this alternate NYC.

Weighing in at over 1000 pages collectively, Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Heart of the Sun Warrior make up Sue Lynn Tan’s Celestial Kingdom duology. It begins when the Moon Goddess’s daughter, Xingyin, angers the Celestial Emperor. In her solitary imprisonment on the moon, she finds an unlikely friendship in the emperor’s son. The power struggles and politics that ensue complicate Xingyin’s newfound friendship and unearth a host of other problems she’ll have to deal with. Without plot spoiling, I’ll say there’s magic and mythology and plenty of good turns in these books — more than enough to keep your imagination engaged all winter long.

It was supposed to be a trilogy. As you might guess, Speaking Bones — the fourth and final book of Ken Liu’s epic Dandelion Dynasty quartet — was finally released in the middle of 2022. That means that if you’re looking for some SFF to take you all the way through this dark season, you have four books, for a total of over 3,500 pages of wonderful winter reading, to hunker down with. Ken Liu describes this fantasy series as “silkpunk,” and it’s pretty apt that he’s coining terms to describe the genre he’s working in because it’s one of the most inventive SFF works I’ve encountered in recent years.

Locus Magazine is the preeminent magazine for SFFH reviews, from short fiction to novels. If your work is well-reviewed and recommended in Locus, that’s a big feather in your cap. Alex Brown, Charles Payseur, Paula Guran, and Karen Burnham comb through hundreds of stories each month across the broad spectrum of speculative literary magazines. This is another way for readers to discover stories and find awards-eligible work. At the end of each year, Locus also puts out an annual recommended reading list, and readers can vote on finalists for the Locus Awards. Locus is a pillar in the SFFH community, and you can support the publication by visiting its Indiegogo campaign.

Alex Brown publishes their must-read speculative short fiction roundup each month, sharing a list of stories after reading across a wide variety of speculative magazines. These roundups are hugely important to the community, and each monthly roundup brings excitement and social media traction for the writers included. You can always count on Alex to find brilliant jewels of the short form.

You can read Alex’s October 2022 roundup here.

Likewise, Nebula-award winning writer Cat Rambo is a force for good and compiles links to awards-eligible threads and blog posts on their website. They announced they”ll be busy in November when compiling usually begins, but still included a post where writers and readers can comment on the post with links to threads and blog posts. Don’t forget to scroll down when you check the page!

I included the link further above in this article, but I think it will also be helpful to list it here as well. Wise has compiled eligibility posts for writers for a few years now, and the list has grown to become a community-involved effort, which is lovely to behold. Wise will announce on Twitter when she’s updated the list, which authors can then share if their name is on it. Each update announcement is also a reminder for authors who have yet to share their link to post it in the replies. “I love seeing the community of SFFH authors supporting each other this way!” Wise said.

Series: The Nsibidi Scripts Series

Sunny doesn’t fit in. She’s Nigerian, but born in America. She’s a great athlete, but because she has albinism, she can’t play sports in the sun. But it turns out she also has latent talents that allow her to reshape the world.

Series: The Legacy of Orisha

Adeyemi’s West Africa–based debut novel is an absolute stunner. Magic has disappeared under the rule of the king, when before, the soil hummed with the power of the Orïsha. Zélie has a chance to right that wrong, but it will take everything she has.

Check out more of Bahni Turpin’s amazing audio performances here.

Series: The Legendborn Cycle

Bree Matthews has been accepted to a residential high school program at UNC-Chapel Hill, which seems like an excellent escape from the recent death of her mother. But that all changes when Bree witnesses a magical attack on campus. As the cause of Bree’s mother’s death starts to come clear, there are questions inside questions about legacies, family, and the history of Chapel Hill itself.

Series: The Pandava Series

Aru Shah is a fibber, and three of her classmates have arrived at her house to prove it. Aru decides to light the Lamp of Bharata to prove that she’s telling the truth – which she was not. But lighting the Lamp awakens the Sleeper, and now the four of them must save the world.

If you love her performance of Aru Shah, discover more of Soneela Nankani’s work here.

Series: The Parasol Protectorate Series

Alexia Tarabotti is a spinster with no soul. She’s been attacked by an extremely rude vampire, who she then killed by accident, and now a werewolf has been sent by the Queen to investigate. It’s up to Alexia to figure out what’s going on before she’s blamed for the whole situation.

Series: The Graceling Realm

Gracelings are blessed with a grace. Graces can be anything: creating beautiful clothes, cooking, leadership…or, in Katsa’s case, killing. It makes her a dangerous weapon, especially in the hands of a king whose grace is that people believe anything he says.

Series: The Sandsea Trilogy

Based firmly in the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, Abdullah weaves together stories of a thief, a prince and a quest to find an ancient lamp that will revive a dying land — at the cost of the lives of all the djinn.

Series: The Scholomance

The Scholomance is a school where a huge percentage of the students end up dead on a regular basis, so when El Higgins decides that Orion Lake needs to die as well, it shouldn’t cause too much ruckus. Except it’s a decision that will cause ripples far beyond the walls — walls? — of the school.

Series: This Poison Heart

Briseis’s power is to grow plants from seed to maturity with a single touch. She hopes to finally learn to control it at her late aunt’s dilapidated New York estate, willed to Bri’s family. But when she gets there, the mansion is full of unexpected plants, not to mention neighbors and strangers who being showing up for tinctures and elixirs.

Most people know Louise Erdrich as the author of the 1984 novel Love Medicine, the writer who brought us a bookstore haunted by its most annoying customer (during the COVID-19 pandemic, nonetheless!) in The Sentence, or the owner of the amazing Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. Regardless of how you came to Erdrich, it may surprise you that she’s written a sci-fi novel. The premise of Future Home of the Living God is fascinating: evolution has begun to reverse itself, humans are birthing (or rather, failing to birth) babies that are not quite homo sapiens, and pregnant protagonist Cedar Hawk Songmaker is on the run because the government is rounding up expectant mothers in a totalitarian attempt to keep humanity on the books. It’s as terrifying and beautiful as it is heartbreaking. It was already a relevant book that asked crucial questions about bodily (and Indigenous) sovereignty, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it feels even more urgent.

Kazim Ali is a critically acclaimed poet…and this book is an honest-to-goodness Choose Your Own Adventure book. For reals. For everyone who grew up during the heyday of CYOA books, this is a double win. Not only is an amazing poet working in YA fantasy, but he’s doing so in this interactive and (for some) nostalgic form. Amazing! Citadel of Whispers centers on a young Whisperer named Krishi. As Krishi, the reader is simply attending school to learn the ropes as a Whisperer, but when a new student arrives everything is turned upside down. Suddenly the reader is faced with decisions that have tremendous consequences for the land of Elaria. It’s hard not to get pulled into this story world, especially given the CYOA format of the book.

Chang-rae Lee is best known for his poignant literary realism in works such as A Gesture Life and My Year Abroad. The poignancy remains in On Such a Full Sea, which is set in B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) in the post-environmental-collapse near future. Class divisions are extreme, mechanisms of control are rigidly enforced, and the landscape is starkly divided into former urban centers (now labor colonies) and the lawless rural Open Counties. Within this context, when Fan absconds from B-Mor in search of the man she loves, all bets are off. As the narrative unfolds, it retains Lee’s signature storytelling style even as Fan’s journey takes her into uncharted territory (both literal and literary).

The Candy House is the follow-up to Egan’s highly acclaimed A Visit From the Goon Squad. As such, it delves further into the future. While Goon Squad walked that line between literary fiction and dystopian sci-fi (staying much closer to our own time), The Candy House is far more future-oriented and therefore goes deep on future technologies and their impact on human lives. With characters able to upload their memories to what I can only describe as a sort of logical extreme of contemporary social media, there’s an important questioning of privacy (among other things) at the heart of this one.

Adam Silvera is best know for his YA dramatic fiction, although his book More Happy Than Not admittedly gets a little speculative. Regardless, Infinity Reaper is the second book in the Infinity Cycle YA fantasy series. Book 1, Infinity Son, is set in an alternate New York City and centers on brothers Emil and Brighton. They may live in a world full of magic, but until they find themselves the targets of an attack they aren’t aware of Emil’s magical powers. Infinity Reaper picks up where the first book left off, following the same characters as Brighton’s powers take shape. Between attempting to save the world, queer romances, and deepening backstories, you’ll be wishing for the last book in the trilogy to make an appearance ASAP.

Nora Roberts is a staple in contemporary romance novels. This isn’t her first foray into SFF, but it’s her most recent and notable. The Choice is book 3 of The Dragon Heart Legacy — which is, incidentally, a fantasy series that’s also classifiable as romance. The series follows Breen Kelly as she returns to the magical world called Talamh from, of all places, Philadelphia. Breen has magick and a limited amount of time in which to hone her skills. Maybe it helps that she has an attractive fey to help her do this. Either way, this third installment in the series sees Breen take on the conflict that’s been looming in her future since the earlier books.

David Yoon is an interesting one: he worked in tech for a while until he got a toehold in the literary world with his YA fiction (like Frankly in Love). After a couple of heartwarming YA novels, he came out with Version Zero, which is a techy thriller at its best. (For the record, I think it would pair wonderfully with Dave Eggers’s The Circle.) The novel follows Max and two of his closest friends (one of whom he’d love to be closer to, if you catch my drift) as they embark on a dangerous path. Max was a starry-eyed young employee at one of the biggest social media firms in the world…until his ethics got in the way and he went from rising star to mega hacker. The novel heats up from there, going in some really unexpected directions as Yoon asks important questions about the role of for-profit technology in our lives.

Katherine Locke typically produces books for young people, whether children’s picture books or YA novels. Their Red Balloon books are sort of fantasy, but the majority of their work is either romance or is focused on queer and/or Jewish experiences. While This Rebel Heart engages with Jewish history — specifically, the Holocaust — it’s set over a decade after the end of WWII in an alternate, magical Budapest. It follows young Csilla as she escapes the Hungarian secret police and is thrown into a dangerous struggle for freedom. Locke manages to ground This Rebel Heart in actual history even as it embarks on a highly fantastical journey.

I love a good antiheroine, and Devon definitely qualifies. She was raised in a book-eater family on a diet of stories that reinforced the patriarchy, only to have her first child taken from her. When her second, a son, is born with a hunger for eating human minds, she runs. She’s not going to lose another child — she’s going to protect this boy at all costs, whatever it takes, and survive no matter the cost. It’s a powerful book about the incredible strength of possessive maternal love and the realities of finding a way to survive through trauma.

Finally, a superb science fiction novel that features the most intelligent and quietly terrifying creature of the sea: the octopus. In Nayler’s debut, scientist Dr. Ha Nguyen is flown into a privately owned island to help mega-corporation DIANIMA investigate what might be the first proven sign of advanced intelligence outside of humanity. Nguyen teams up with a startlingly human android and a scarred security agent to try and figure out whether the “sea monsters” of the archipelago are really as intelligent as they hope. Picture it like Arrival, but with octopi.

Because of the simple truths of traditional publishing, some of the absolute best science fiction and fantasy being published and translated is in short fiction. These Tordotcom collections are immensely valuable for encountering new, exciting writers and concepts from around the world. Read about dragons and climate change, folklore-infused tales of goddesses and love, sci-fi futuristic stories of androids and drought, and much more, in these 32 stories written by African and African diaspora authors.

Also worth a read for some superb international fiction: The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.

Sometimes we don’t give enough love to the cozy, fluffier SFF in our midst. This book is a Meg Cabot–like love story between a transmasc vampire who lives in his archivist office, and the vivacious widow of a late queer sci-fi author who may or may not be a ghost. It’s a soft fantasy mystery with spicy queer sex scenes, and if that’s not enough to sell you on it, there’s also lot of quiet meditation and discussion of what it means to be gender nonconforming and what it means to occupy a body, as the protagonist deals with transphobia and workplace nonsense.

Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy is thick, vivid, poetic fantasy on such a large and yet personal scale. I loved this sequel even more than his first, which itself made it to many best books of 2019 lists. It tells the story of the Moon Witch, Sogolon, and her life of violence, control, and chaos, from court dealings to monster battles, all with the chancellor Aesi as her arch-enemy. James’s prose is vividly stunning, but the true strength of this book lies in Sogolon’s journey, its magic, her need to survive, her repeated absolute heartbreaks.

No one would blame you if you couldn’t quite imagine reading about a plague right now. But if you’re going to make room for one plague book this year, make it this one. In 2030, an archaeologist finds the remains of a young girl who seems to have died of an ancient virus. As you might imagine, things go downhill from there. The novel unspools in a series of connected short stories as the Arctic Plague devastates the world. It ties humanity together, unpacking all the ways that we’re intricately connected to the rest of the world, and while it can be bleak — warning that many children die in this book — there’s something quietly hopeful in its portrayals of resilience and grief.

Picture this: Golden Age Hollywood. Ruthless, always looking for its next star. Now add magic to the mix and imagine that the cutthroat world operates on a system of handshakes and soul sales, and picture a young Asian girl named Luli who is determined to become a star, and is willing to do whatever it takes to do so. This sharp, chilly book is a stunning and sapphic book of fae-like negotiations and traps, of predatory directors and monsters lurking in every shadow, but is powered by Luli’s passion and fierce determination to succeed.

This weird novel needs to get more attention. A girl named Laisvė who lives in the flooded Brook discovers that she is a carrier: in other words, she can use talismans (like old pennies) to ride currents into other times. She takes the reader on a trip to meet a group of iron workers putting the Statue of Liberty together, and to meet the man who designed the statue. It’s a book that explores the big, serious issues of exploitation, climate change, and freedom through a rich web of kink, humor, and nature. There’s so much going on in this novel, and all of it comes together in such magnificent, incredible ways.

Becky Chambers recently won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novella for A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and this sequel shows the genius behind her cozy, hopeful, vivid world. Dex, a nonbinary tea monk, and Mosscap, the first robot to venture into the human world in generations, are going on a tour of Panga so that Mosscap can learn more about how humans work and what they need. This book builds on the world and asks questions that are philosophical and fascinating, picking apart a communal, anticapitalist world, all while still being a quick read.

This book flew under too many people’s radars, and I’m determined to fix that. What if you took a zombie apocalypse survival story and combined it with a workplace comedy pointing out all the absurdities of large corporations? That’s what you get with The Temps. When a toxic gas descends on mega-corp Delphi Enterprises, all the full-time employees are outside at a big outdoor meeting — and only a few hundred temps, who didn’t go, are left alive. As they try to figure out what to do next, they also start asking a question that quickly morphs into a big sci-fi mystery: what exactly did Delphi do?

Indi is a huge online celebrity — and it’s up to Joey, her ex, to control her multi-reality streams and handle social media crises. She pulls in Rudra, a man who left behind his rich family. Together in Delhi, they end up confronting a whole mess of rising issues, from surveillance to the pain points of capitalism to systemic racism and prejudice. This is one darkly plausible near-future dystopia that you won’t want to miss. It’s a vivid cyberpunk book that digs into relatable anxieties about our world and where it’s headed, the overwhelming-ness of it, and the paths to resistance.

I really, really love a good queer found family story, and Gladstone has given us a stunning one. A team of five once traveled around America sealing off the rot so that it couldn’t corrupt our world. Ever since they lost Sal to the rot, it’s only been Zelda — everyone left but her. But when Sal’s voice starts whispering through the darkness, and the massive eldritch darkness on the other side of the cracks starts creeping through again, Zelda has to get the gang back together to see if they can save the world — and maybe even Sal too.

Monáe’s Dirty Computer film and album were works of queer, radical, cyberpunk genius, and in these five stories, she and her talented team of collaborators expand and dig more into that world. Some of the stories are vast — the Director Librarian uncovers a rebel plot to clog memory collectors — while others are more zoomed-in — an exhausted student discovers that time stops in her apartment pantry. It’s genius SFF that digs into queerness, gatekeeping, dystopia and hope. I’m rooting for “Timebox Altar(ed)” by Monáe and Thomas to win all the awards next year.

I was eagerly awaiting the day that the trend of mythic retellings would reach the Indian epics, and Patel brings a richly feminist perspective to the story of Kaikeyi, a queen villainized in the traditional Ramayana for using two god-granted boons to banish Rama and make sure the crown goes to her own son instead. Patel writes Kaikeyi as a warrior in her own right, a powerful woman who is fighting against the rigged system of the gods, who just want chaos and bloody war and have chosen Rama as their hero. Fans of Circe should already be falling for Kaikeyi!

This book has taken the SFF world by storm, and I’m not surprised. All the blurbs compare it to dark academia darling The Secret History and modern fantasy classic Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but it also takes on issues of colonization and imperialist injustice. Robin is a Chinese student pulled between Babel, the world’s center of translation and a utopia of knowledge, and the Hermes Society, which is trying to sabotage the silver-working that enables the British Empire to stay in power. He has to decide where his fight belongs, and how a colonial power can best be brought down.

This book from Richard Morgan sparked a great, if short-lived, Netflix series. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex–United Nations envoy long dead. Except in this galaxy, people back up their minds, and so Takeshi wakes up in a new body, on a different planet, and given a dangerous mission from even more dangerous people.

Kiini Ibura Salaam is an essayist and writer of brilliant science fiction and fantasy short stories. This book collects several of the latter, all of which use magic and science and sexuality to challenge gender, myth, and the very nature of magic.

Do you see that list of awards? Ann Leckie burst onto the scene with Ancillary Justice, sweeping up awards like a Dyson. Justice of Toren was once a colossal starship, now a single ancillary — an AI in a human body — is all that remains. She’s determined to find out how the rest of her was destroyed and might unravel a galactic empire in the process.

This novel concludes Naam’s explosive Nexus Arc trilogy in an award-winning fashion. After you read Nexus and Crux, dive into this post-humanist novel in which people are connected, linking up like hive minds, and the next apex species has finally arrived.

While Delany might be better known for his novel Dhalgren, don’t sleep on Babel-17. Rydra is a poet with near-telepathic powers. When a new weapon based on sound enters the fray in a giant galactic war, the military calls in Rydra. She soon recognizes a language in that sound, but that’s only the beginning of what she’ll uncover.

This rock-and-roll-cyberpunk novel hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. In a near-future England, a rock star befriends a guitarist and a techno-wizard against a backdrop of corruption and music festivals. But as this book and series roll along, something like a science fiction Arthurian retelling comes to life.

Yuri Terisov is wasting away in the brig of a pirate ship that he used to command. After aliens destroyed his home colony when he was 4, he was living in a refugee camp until a pirate came and took him away. But now he’s in the brig, at least until a military black ops agent offers him a way out. There are strings attached, of course. Dangerous strings.

N.K. Jemisin is well-known for her Broken Earth trilogy, but that’s fantasy. These are the best award-winning sci-fi books. In The City We Became, New York City is a living life form with six children: the city and its five boroughs. In Brooklyn, a politician can hear the song this great city sings. In Manhattan, a student steps off a train and remembers nothing about himself, but he can feel the pulse of the city. Characters and city combine for a cool exploration.

Time travel and both of the major science fiction awards? This classic has it all. Kivrin is a 21st-century student studying a 14th-century plague. Oh, and she uses time travel to do it. But things go wrong, however, forcing Kivrin’s fellows to launch a rescue attempt. Now Kivrin’s vow to not change the past is conflicting with her ability to save it.

Sometimes award-winning sci-fi books can be based on classics like this. Canterbury Tales…in space. That’s the setup magnificently executed in this novel. Seven pilgrims are journeying to Hyperion on the eve of the end of everything. On Hyperion live the Shrike, creatures that are worshipped and feared. These pilgrims have their tales, their secrets, and one may change the course of human history.

Living on the moon is hard. Taking over a massive company and building it into an empire on the moon? Even harder. But Adriana Corta did it. Now, as her life nears its end, her five children must fight to keep that company going. They’ll have to fight outsiders and each other. Should be fun.

Looking for oppressive aliens and anti-utopian themes? Look no further. Charley wants to be the fastest runner in the world, just like his father. But Charley doesn’t run at track and field meets. He’s a mount for the Hoot, an alien invader. If he ever wants his freedom, he’ll need to find the other free humans and understand what that even means.

It’s hard to overstate just how good Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series is. So when she released the fourth book, which also happened to be the first novel-length book in the series, of course it grabbed both of the big awards. Murderbot is a robot with an A.I. that, well, just wants to kill people. But their human associates are just always so needy, even when Murderbot just wants to sit at home and watch TV.

Namwali Serpell took the world by storm with her debut novel. Beginning in 1904, a feud breaks out between three Zambian families, and thus begins this tale of retribution that spans generations, out of the past and all the way into the future. Romance, history, fairytale, and science fiction all blend together in this one.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a book I recommend often, though this sequel was the one to win a Nebula Award. Having survived the destruction of her home and founded a new religion, Lauren has established a peaceful community. But when an ultra-conservative president takes power, his followers see Lauren’s people as a target.

This highly imaginative, hard sci-fi adventure set the genre world on fire in 1971 and still holds up today. Louis Wu is given a job to visit Ringworld, an artificially constructed ring the diameter of Earth’s orbit. Along with a couple of aliens and a woman named Teela, they soon crash land on the ring and start unraveling its mysteries as they desperately try to find a way off of it.

This incredible novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and astute observations of social issues into a novel that should have won even more awards. Ezili has the powers of an Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love. Now she’s traveling time and space to inhabit other women, struggling against a man’s world and unaware of this holy presence.

Idris was created during the war after Earth was destroyed. Strong, fast, not needing sleep, and able to communicate telepathically with each other and the enemy: the Architects. But when the Architects vanished, people like Idris became obsolete. But something strange has appeared in space, obviously made by the Architects. Now Idris and his crew will have to find answers.

Here’s another one from the way-back machine that wasn’t just part of the pantheon of award-winning sci-fi books, but part of a sexual revolution. Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars by Martians. His homecoming is a heralded event. When he starts to display powers no other human has and espouses a radical philosophy, the world will never be the same.

This book, which begins a series, has captured sci-fi imaginations since it came out, and it’s soon coming to Netflix. In the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, an experiment sends a message to space. An alien species facing their own destruction receives it and plans to invade Earth. Now, as the invaders close in, humanity is crumbling into even more factions.

It’s a rare thing for a science fiction novel to also be historical, and this novel did it with aplomb. Imagine that the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War was a LITERAL underground railroad. That’s what this novel does. The genre is speculative. The human drama and tragedy of slavery are very real.