Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new sci-fi novel, Alien Clay, presents a vision of extraterrestrial life that’s as fascinating as it is horrifying.
Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
We Love the Nightlife is an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted story about a friendship breakup—between two vampires.
A dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a genre-blending delight.
A sorcerer’s rival accidentally casts an obedience spell on him in Maiga Doocy’s witty and refreshing Sorcery and Small Magics.
Despite its ominous title, Voyage of the Damned, Frances White’s fantasy-mystery hybrid, is an utter joy.
In She Who Knows, her prequel to Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor is as uncompromising as ever.
Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man is a picaresque fantasy adventure following a hilariously unreliable narrator as he stumbles through a series of important political events.
Jeff VanderMeer’s experimental sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy was an immediate crossover success when it was released in 2014, and it’s since been enshrined in the pantheon of modern SFF classics. Much of our current wave of literary, ambitious and unabashedly weird speculative fiction can be traced back to the Southern Reach books and their heady blend of horror, cli-fi (climate fiction) and conspiracy thriller. VanderMeer will return to the series this fall with Absolution, which will tell the story of three separate expeditions into the terrifying yet beautiful Area X.
And lo, a second series in the Sapphic Trifecta comes to a close. If you’re not in the know (read: way too online and/or a Tumblr user), you may not have heard of this most holy of groupings, which consists of C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun and Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, all of which were released to instant acclaim in 2021 and all of which featured epic sapphic relationships at their heart. Parker-Chan’s duology ended last year, and now it’s Suri’s turn to land the ship with The Lotus Empire, the third and final installment in The Burning Kingdoms trilogy.
Buried Deep is a transportive story collection from Naomi Novik, who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.
Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente’s hilarious “Eurovision in space” novel, was one of the harbingers of the hopepunk ethos in SFF, and now another round of the Metagalactic Grand Prix (the high-stakes singing contest that has replaced warfare between alien worlds) is about to begin. Humanity eked out a win in Space Opera, which means they’re the race to beat in Space Oddity.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a triumphant rallying cry for freedom and joy.
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