You won’t survive this coming month without some great
stories to carry you through. Luckily, January is just chock full of amazing
reads, including fantasy epics, space adventures and near-future weirdness.
Here are all January’s most essential science fiction and fantasy books!
Top image: A Darkling Sea by James Cambias.
Indexing by Seanan McGuire (47North)
Do you love Fables
and Once Upon a Time? Then here’s a
very different take on fairy tales in the real world, from the author of the
October Daye novels and the InCryptid
books. In the first volume of a new fantasy series, previously serialized as a
Kindle serial, fairy-tale narratives are constantly threatening to invade the
world, via “memetic incursion,” and only the ATI Management Bureau
can stop them.
Hang Wire by Adam Christopher (Angry Robot)
The author of The Age
Atomic and Empire State
is back with a noir urban fantasy in which a San Francisco
blogger celebrates his birthday in Chinatown
— only to have a mysterious explosion at the restaurant, followed by cryptic
fortune cookies turning up at his apartment. But that’s not all — Ted Hall’s
sleepwalking seems to coincide with murders by the notorious Hang Wire killer.
And there are also sinister circuses, superpowered people, flame cults, and
tons more.
Perfect: A Novel by Rachel Joyce (Random House)
A young boy gets into a car with his mother and sister, but
only he notices that they’ve left the real world behind as something terrible
and startling happens. Soon, Byron Hemmings is having to confront strange
truths about the past, while trying to protect his parents from the darkness.
Like Joyce’s first novel The Unlikely
Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, this is being described as a story of strange
journeys, laced with forgiveness and redemption.
Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn (Tor Books)
The sequel to Vaughn’s superhero novel After the Golden Age — and by all accounts, this one
is better than the first. This novel skips forward in time, and now the first
novel’s protagonist Celia is a powerful businesswoman — and now, Celia’s teenage
daughter is developing superpowers and dreaming of following in her
grandparents’ footsteps as a superhero, protecting Commerce City from the bad guys. Read
an excerpt here.
Pandemic: A Novel (Infected) by Scott Sigler (Crown)
The conclusion to the trilogy that began with Infected and Contagion. This time around, the alien intelligence that threatened
humanity in the past has left behind a tiny container of pathogens that can
turn humans into, basically, murderous zombies. And it’s a race against time
before zombies and Cthulhu can wipe us all out. Basically, a completely bonkers
thriller.
The Almost Girl by Amalie Howard (Strange Chemistry)
A new young-adult debut. Riven is no ordinary 17-year-old
girl — she’s actually a general from another dimension, sent to our world to
capture a young man and take him back with her. But she finds herself fighting
with her own sister, who wants to protect that boy, and with her own emergent
feelings of humanity and compassion. Early
reviews suggest it’s pretty exciting and engaging, with a main character
who pulls you in.
Vitro by Jessica Khoury (Razorbill)
On a mysterious island, scientists are experimenting with
creating superpowered clones, in this new standalone novel from the author of Origin. But a young girl shows up, seeking
her mother and the superpowered twin she never knew she had. Apparently it’s
full of creepiness and weird science, but it also delves
into the question of what makes us human and what defines us as people.
Pig’s Foot: A Novel by Carlos Acosta (Bloomsbury USA)
A novel of magical realism by a professional ballet dancer
from Cuba, who now lives in London. Oscar wakes up one
day to find himself alone in the world, so he sets out to find his ancestral
village, while also searching for the meaning of the mystical pig’s-foot amulet
he has inherited. Full of lovely, haunting descriptions of the Cuban landscape
as well as strange characters, as Oscar explores his family’s roots in a world
without people.
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
It’s the future, and civilization has all but collapsed due
to pollution and disasters, in this novel from the award-winning author of Native Speaker. The world has been
colonized by people from New China, but now that civilization, too, has started
to collapse. A
rave review in the New York Times by Andrew Sean Greer compares this book
to A Clockwork Orange while also
praising its weird creation-myth tone.
Mercy Snow: A Novel by Tiffany Baker (Grand Central Publishing)
A bus accident
uncovers a terrible secret in the small paper-mill town of Titan
Falls, New Hampshire
— and when an old skeleton turns up, town matriarch June McAllister is
determined to keep the past buried. Full of magical realism
and Stephen King-y awfulness, this novel is getting praise for its beautiful language
and haunting main character.
The Atopia Chronicles (Atopia series) by Matthew Mather (47North)
Could virtual
reality help prevent an environmental collapse by addressing our constant
hunger for more natural resources? That’s the provocative concept behind this
debut, which takes place on a corporate-owned artificial island where the
wealthy can escape from the overcrowded, polluted rest of the planet. The
setting is reminiscent of Elysium, but the actual storytelling is getting early
comparisons to William Gibson and Philip K. Dick. Notably, Mather is a computer
scientist who worked at the McGill
Center for Intelligent
Machines.
The Vanishing by Wendy Webb (Hyperion)
A woman who’s
just been widowed and left dirt-broke by her ponzi-scheming husband gets a job
offer she can’t refuse: go work as the personal assistant to a notorious horror
novelist, who everybody thinks is dead. Of course, going to live with a horror
novelist in a house full of terrible secrets might have a downside. But who
cares? It’s free room and board.
A Darkling Sea by James Cambias (Tor Books)
A neat spin on first-contact narratives — humans are
exploring an ice world where blind aliens live under the kilometer-thick ice
sheet. But the first aliens we’ve ever encountered, the Sholen, have made us promise
not to disturb the blind creatures’ habitat. Which is all well and good, until
one of those blind creatures gets too curious and slices one of the human
explorers open. And then all heck breaks loose with the Sholen. Read
an excerpt here.
Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (Crown)
Can’t believe we almost left this one out. In a dystopian future where the rich escape into virtual reality but everybody else is left in the ruins of our broken world, a garbageman changes careers and becomes a hitman, eliminating anyone… for a price. By all accounts, it’s a noir cyberpunk yarn that has a distinct 1980s feel.
Stay tuned for our
guide to the can’t-miss books of 2014, coming next week!
