Literary Science Fiction

The Empires of Varkal and Med'ariz have always been at war. Alefret, the founder of Varkal's pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a 'visionary' scientist. But now they're offering him a chance of freedom. Ordered to infiltrate one of Med'ariz's flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy's population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

Bathsheba is a woman who longs for love. With her devout husband away fighting the king's wars for many months at a time, discontent and loneliness dog her steps - and make it frighteningly easy to succumb to King David's charm and attention. Though she immediately regrets her involvement with the powerful king, the pieces are set in motion that will destroy everything she holds dear. Can she find forgiveness at the feet of the Almighty? Or has her sin separated her from God - and David - forever?

George Orwell (1903-1950) was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. Considered a classic of dystopian fiction, 1984 has contributed many terms to common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "newspeak", and "thoughtcrime", while the adjective "Orwellian" has entered the English language in the context of government deception, surveillance, and misleading terminology. The narrative unfolds in an imagined future when most of the world has fallen prey to omnipresent government surveillance, propaganda, and endless war.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, but fall is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding, his younger brother Tom, and their friends do their best to take advantage of these last warm days, rampaging through the ravine, tormenting the girls...and declaring war on the old men who run Green Town, IL. For the boys know that Colonel Quartermain and his cohorts want nothing more than to force them to put away their wild ways, to settle down, to grow up. If only, the boys believe, they could stop the clock atop the courthouse building.

On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way listeners think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class.

Hundreds of years before the time of Imager, the continent of Lydar is fragmented. Years of war have consolidated five nations into three-Bovaria, Telaryn, and Antiago. Quaeryt is a scholar and friend of Bhayar, the young ruler of Telaryn. Worried about his future and the escalating intrigues in Solis, the capital city, Quaeryt persuades Bhayar to send him to Tilbor.

It’s tough to be a buffoon when the Age of Reason is trying to downsize your job. When the King’s Fool dies unexpectedly, a professional buffoon tries to move up the ranks and grab the top slot. But the politics involved in becoming a court jester are no laughing matter. The rules of becoming the top fool are simple: The winner is the one who performs the most outrageous act. Our buffoon and his fellows struggle for supremacy in a profession that is heading for extinction.

Ce ne sont encore que des enfants : Patrocle est aussi chétif et maladroit qu'Achille est solaire, puissant, promis à la gloire des immortels. Mais, grandissant côte à côte, un lien se tisse entre ces deux êtres si dissemblables. Quand, à l'appel du roi Agamemnon, les jeunes princes se joignent au siège de Troie, la sagesse de l'un et la colère de l'autre pourraient bien faire dévier le cours de la guerre... Au risque de faire mentir l'Olympe et ses oracles.

Working in the ER, Dr. Marie Lavant sees the darkest side of New Orleans. But the bloody wounds of patients are not the only things that haunt her. As the descendent of a legendary voodoo queen, Marie is cursed with the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead.

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown.

From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure. Beautiful You is Palahniuk's much-anticipated satire of the emerging erotic thriller genre, a mash-up of mommy porn and chick lit à la Sex and the City, and fantasy lit à la Clan of the Cave Bear. Imagine if Ira Levin had a baby with Jean Auel.

A scarlet tide of Rondian legions is flooding into the East, led by the Inquisition’s windships flying the Sacred Heart, the bright banner of the Church's darkest sons. They are slaughtering and pillaging their way across Antiopia in the name of Emperor Constant. But the emperor's greatest treasure, the Scytale of Corineus, has slipped through his fingers and his ruthless Inquisitors must scour two continents for the artefact, the source of all magical power.

A hardened group of survivors fight back against a zombie plague that has brought down civilization. With the world consumed by a devastating plague that drives humans violently insane, what was once a band of desperate survivors bobbing on a dark Atlantic ocean has now become Wolf Squadron, the only hope for the salvation of the human race.

Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in the Himalayan foothills of China - dubbed the true Shangri-La - and heads south into the jungles of Burma. But after the mysterious death of their tour leader, the carefully laid plans fall apart, and disharmony breaks out among the pleasure-seekers.

Flight is the hilarious and tragic story of an orphaned Indian boy - "Zits" - who travels back and forth through time in a charged search for his true identity. With powerful, swift prose, Flight follows the troubled teenager as he learns that violence is not the answer.

Ever wondered what Bones was thinking and feeling, when he and half-vampire Cat Crawfield first met? Or how their story might differ if he were the one telling it? Now, relive the beginning of Cat and Bones' best-selling love story through Bones' point of view, which reveals a darker, sexier take on their early days, as well as a deeper dive into Bones' past, the vampire world, and other things that Cat didn't see, when their story was told only through her eyes in Halfway to the Grave. Cat had her say. Now, it's Bones' turn.

In the vein of Wicked, The Woodcutter, and Boy, Snow, Bird, a luminous re-imagining of a classic tale, told from the perspective of Agnes, Cinderella’s "evil" stepmother. We all know the story of Cinderella. Or do we? As rumors about the cruel upbringing of beautiful newlywed Princess Cinderella roil the kingdom, her stepmother, Agnes, who knows all too well about hardship, privately records the true story...

In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world’s first time machine. But just as they are about to debut their creation, one of them suffers a breakdown, putting the whole project - and future of time travel - in jeopardy. To protect their invention, one member is exiled from the team - erasing her contributions from history. Fifty years later, time travel is a big business. Twenty-something Ruby Rebello knows her beloved grandmother Granny Bee was one of the pioneers, though no one will tell her more.

In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates’. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond.