As genre boundaries become increasingly blurred, elements of science fiction and fantasy have been showing up everywhere from literary fiction to cozy mysteries to—of course—romantasy. It feels like many readers want to escape reality right now, whether into space, the future, or a different world altogether. Here are some of the most engaging SFF books that have come out this year.
The Fox Hunt by Caitlin Breeze (Little, Brown, Feb. 24): Fans of campus novels like Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House will enjoy this one, set at a British university like Oxford. When Emma Curran attracts the attention of an ancient all-male secret society, she finds herself taking part in a human “fox hunt”—and transported to the Night City, a domain that only sometimes intersects with her own. “Smart, propulsive, and multilayered, this deftly crafted fantasy thriller immerses readers in a narrative that recalls the wonder—and horror—of Grimms’ fairy tales in a darkly elegant academic setting,” according to our starred review.
Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (Graywolf, June 9): In Unferth’s “quirky, bold, and endearing masterpiece of climate fiction,” as our starred review calls it, people live, among other places, under the sea in acrylic pods, on Mars, and encoded on microchips. There’s a girl whose mother named her XY but whose friends call her Dylan; she grows up to fall in love with Melanie, who resembles a robot after having spent too many seasons on a body-modification reality show called Celebrity Plastics. The story “unfolds over vast vistas of time and space, profound, funny, alarming, and imbued with love and sorrow for our lost world,” according to our review.
River of Bones and Other Stories by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga/Simon & Schuster, March 3): Roanhorse uses the tools of both SF and fantasy in these stories from the past eight years, which include vampires, imperialist aliens, and existential horror. Our starred review calls her “one of the sharpest writers publishing today,” saying “she plays with readers’ expectations but is always one step ahead, pivoting before you can guess what she’ll do next.”
Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian (Saga/Simon & Schuster, June 16): The opener of this new collaboration between Sanderson and Orullian introduces the Strata, layers of London’s past living underneath the modern city, inhabited by all sorts of gruesome creatures and memories—and the entrance lies inside a music hall. With its “exceptional worldbuilding,” our review calls this “a headbanging beginning to what could be a remarkable urban fantasy series.” (Read a feature about it on p. TK.)
Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, June 23): What a delight: an SF noir thriller featuring a world of service workers who are genetically modified animals. They’re supposed to remain unobtrusive but they’ve created a whole society, and our guide is Skotch, a raccoon trash collector turned private eye who’s been hired to find a missing mouse who happens to be a genius chemist. “This novel works because Tchaikovsky takes his world so seriously,” says our starred review. “These characters are real; the stakes are real.…engaging and mind-bending.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
