Science Fiction

Imagine a city buried beneath the earth, sealed away from everything the old world once knew, where the ruling class has decided that the most dangerous thing a citizen can do is read. That is the premise behind Carrie Patel’s Recoletta trilogy, and Cities and Thrones, the second installment published in 2015 by Angry Robot,…

Tristan Palmgren’s debut novel opens inside a Carthusian monastery outside Florence in 1348, as the Black Death begins its catastrophic sweep through Europe. Brother Niccoluccio Caracciolo has watched his brothers die one by one. He is the last alive, surrounded by the silence they left behind, his faith shaken and his prayers going unanswered. Into…

Megan E. O’Keefe’s debut novel drops readers into the desert city of Aransa, a mining settlement perched on the edge of a vast, scorched wasteland. Published in January 2016 by Angry Robot, Steal the Sky is the first volume of the Scorched Continent trilogy, and it announces O’Keefe as a writer with sharp instincts for…

Kameron Hurley’s Empire Ascendant, the second volume of the Worldbreaker Saga, picks up where 2014’s The Mirror Empire left off and immediately makes everything worse. Published in 2015 by Angry Robot Books, this 460-page epic fantasy drops readers into a world where parallel universes are colliding, genocide is state policy, and every character who survived…

Wesley Chu’s The Rise of Io arrived in October 2016 as the first book in a new duology set in the same universe as his Tao trilogy, and it came with one of the most appealing premises in recent SF: a habitual loser, both human and alien, thrown together by accident and forced to figure…

Published in October 2015 by Angry Robot, The Flux is the second novel in Ferrett Steinmetz’s ‘Mancer trilogy, following Flex and preceding Fix. The series is built on a premise that sounds whimsical but plays out with real emotional weight: in this version of our world, obsession creates magic. Love something deeply enough, whether it’s…

Like a Boss is the second novel in Adam Rakunas’s Windswept series, published by Angry Robot in June 2016. Set on Santee Anchorage, a sugarcane colony planet at the edge of human-occupied space, it follows Padma Mehta, a former labor organizer who has finally bought the rum distillery she spent the first book dreaming about….

What happens when you take a union organizer, drop her on a distant planet smelling of fermented sugarcane, and then tell her she has a matter of hours to find a shuttle full of missing workers before her corporate enemies close the curtain on everything she has built? You get Windswept, the debut novel by…

Patrick S. Tomlinson’s The Ark opens with a premise that grabs you by the collar: Earth is gone, swallowed by a rogue black hole, and every human being left alive, roughly 50,000 of them, lives aboard a single generation ship crawling toward Tau Ceti at five percent the speed of light. After more than two…

Saffron Coulter is seventeen, Australian, and running late to class when she sees a woman drag a girl through what looks like a tear in the air. Most teenagers would keep walking. Saffron follows. In a single reckless moment she falls out of her world and into Kena: a land with different moons, a language…