The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2024

Our favorite books so far this year are so wonderfully human. A sexbot’s quest for self-determination, a haunted house inhabited by angry witches, more than one heartbreaking new take on time travel — genre fiction is always about how we live now, but this year how we live now seems so much closer to the surface.

With romantasy, Gothic horror, and retellings of classic myths, many of our picks this year bleed with wit and pain and good old-fashioned lusty passion, as the dread of the last few years gives way to a feeling of restlessness, a raw chrysalis awaiting what’s next. No one really knows, but we’re having a hell of a time reading these dazzling attempts to sort it all out.

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How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

The frustrating experience of being stuck in a time loop has prompted stories in practically every major medium: comedy movies, action movies, horror movies, television, board games, video games, you name it. At this point, stories that start with the protagonist first discovering they’re caught in a loop may feel like they’re wasting space on events we’ve all seen many times before. But that frees creators to play with ideas like the one at the center of Django Wexler’s violent, grim, yet surprisingly cozy fantasy How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, which launches with the protagonist being tortured to death in a dungeon for at least the hundredth time.

Davi accidentally came from a mundane world to a magical one, isekai-style. She was declared the Chosen One. She joined the forces of humanity against the beast-people and orcs of the wild, and the Dark Lord leading them. Eventually, she failed to save the world and died. And then she woke up again, at the beginning of her loop, as if she’d just lost in a video game — one where she could feel pain as well as despair. After hundreds of agonizing iterations of the same doomed fight, she’s exhausted, furious, and borderline psychotic, so she figures, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” And she sets out to join the bad guys and take over the world, using her time-loop resets to build knowledge she can use to gain the allies and minions any dark overlord needs.

There’s a nervy, madness-driven dark humor to all of this, which makes Davi a pretty hilarious protagonist with a surprising dark side. She doesn’t take life or death seriously anymore, but she does value whatever pleasure she can get. All of that leaves her jaded, profane, self-indulgent, hedonistic, smug, and reckless. But as she gets to know the orcs and “wilders” she’s been slaughtering in her hundreds of past lives, her perspective starts to shift. This is openly a series launch rather than a stand-alone — it ends on a fairly massive cliffhanger — but it’s a zippy, surprising, grabby ride of a book that makes the prospect of more to come feel like a warm promise. —Tasha Robinson

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Woodworm by Layla Martínez

With 149 spare, furious pages, Layla Martínez builds a haunted house. Within it an old woman and her granddaughter live on the edge of town, sharing the space with shadows and rage. A boy disappears, and suspicion makes the locals once again consider the women they’ve neglected, causing them to knock on their door. The shadows and saints that roam the dark halls come out to play, and generations of injustice and class warfare come roaring into the present.

Chilling and beguiling, Woodworm is a work of ghostly wrath, about women who remember and men who forget, and how wealth lets the real monsters thrive in plain sight. —Joshua Rivera

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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I’m friends with this one couple. He likes books about explorers; she likes stories about complicated women who maybe sometimes get down with a hot guy. When The Ministry of Time was released, I told them: It’s like a character from one of his books fell into one of her books.

A genre-skipping delight, Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel follows an unnamed protagonist who participates in a top-secret time-travel experiment conducted by the British government. Only she’s not the one traveling — her job instead is to host Lieutenant Graham Gore, a Victorian polar explorer plucked from certain death and brought to the present. With deadpan wit and brisk prose, Bradley’s fish-out-of-water rom-com zigs into a conspiracy thriller and chilling mystery, and zags into a sobering examination of the millennial condition and the generational pain of mixed-race children. Breezy like the best beach read but with a thoughtful heart that lingers, The Ministry of Time is hopefully the first of many more from Bradley. —JR

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The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel

A young man named Georgi is given a strange diagnosis: obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome. Another way of putting it: He falls into the cracks of other people’s stories, sublimating himself into the experiences of others. With this rather direct metaphor for the writer’s mind, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov weaves a fragmented tale about a writer who shares his name, who slips into the stories of his ancestors and the myths he’s grown to love, becoming like the Minotaur of legend, lost in a labyrinth of fable and history.

Newly available in paperback over a decade after its initial publication in Bulgaria, The Physics of Sorrow is a novel to get lost in and a desperate struggle to look everywhere — in history, politics, science, myth, literature, and Tamagotchi (really) — to make one’s place in it all make sense. It is beautiful to read and believe that Georgi might find an answer. It is wonderful to read and understand that he might not. —JR

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Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

John Wiswell’s debut novel (after a long series of intriguing short stories, well worth looking into online) reads a bit like a fantasy spin on Martha Wells’ Murderbot books, if the main character was a powerful protoplasmic goo-monster in a medieval-ish society instead of a cyborg in space. It’s a sort of cozy asexual romance, where the point-of-view character, a human-devouring creature named Shesheshen, makes meaningful contact with a monster-hunter and starts learning about the human experience, besides the basics of being anxious, aggressive, and tasty.

Shesheshen’s slow awakening about the lies and misapprehensions she grew up with makes for warm, emotional, satisfying reading. And the way she navigates her tentative relationship with the monster-hunter, who accepts Shesheshen’s human facade as reality and doesn’t realize she’s a monster, builds sympathy and hope for this unlikely couple’s future. The conflict here is largely on the human side, in ways that also make Someone to Build a Nest In a story about surviving and recovering from familial abuse and manipulation. It’s a nurturing, satisfying found-family story where half of the found family has a whole lot more tentacles and internal pockets of sloshing acid than in other books in this subgenre. —TR

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The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo

The Woods All Black is a short but powerful read about identity, prejudice, revenge… and monster sex. After serving in WWI, trans frontier nurse Leslie is assigned to a remote Appalachian town, where his attempts to administer vaccines are immediately rebuffed by the hostile religious citizens. Already in danger just by being there, Leslie puts himself at further risk by trying to help a young trans boy who’s being pushed into an unwanted marriage.

Mandelo grounds the story in historical realities and the dangers of zealotry, which provide the novella with plenty of horrors before the monster lurking in the woods is even introduced. The Woods All Black is violent, erotic, and fueled by rage in all the best ways. And while the paranormal elements don’t take center stage until the very end, they’re more than memorable enough to make an impact. —Sadie Gennis

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Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Before I started Annie Bot, I guessed it would either be a didactic, derivative DNF or an instant favorite. Given its place on this list, I think the answer’s clear.

Annie is a top-of-the-line sex robot devoted to being the perfect girlfriend to divorcé Doug. He prides himself on being a benevolent owner and praises how human she seems, but as Annie begins to develop true sentience, he grows increasingly frustrated and controlling. Annie struggles to reconcile her guilt and pain over displeasing Doug with her own wants and needs — feelings she’s discovering for the first time. Greer does an incredible job allowing Annie’s journey for self-fulfillment to live alongside her enduring desire to please Doug, even as he becomes more abusive. This push-pull is uncomfortable, heartbreaking, empathetic, and tense — and it’s precisely what makes it all so human. —SG

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Sunbringer by Hannah Kaner

This sequel to Hannah Kaner’s 2023 novel Godkiller has an advantage over the first book in the series, in that it doesn’t have to introduce an entire world, explain what gods are in this setting and why there’s a whole subclass of people dedicated to killing them, and then build an emotionally fulfilling narrative within that framework. Instead, it just brings back the same characters to face an escalated threat. That makes it less surprising and less of a voyage of discovery than Godkiller, but the stakes feel higher and Kaner has more room to dig into the details of this world.

Sunbringer raises two major threats at the same time: a cult devoted to resurrecting and empowering a vicious fallen god, and a king who’s out to become a god himself. This time around, the main characters have more space to stretch and grow, as they all learn more about what they’re capable of and what it means to accept change, especially in themselves. All of which makes Sunbringer a thornier and more complicated book than Godkiller, but also a richer one. —TR

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A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

Danielle L. Jensen is one of the top romantasy authors out there, and after reading A Fate Inked in Blood, I understand why. The book packs in a lot of intricate world-building, delivering you to a Norse mythology-inspired universe where those who possess a drop of god’s blood are gifted with echoes of their abilities.

For years, power-hungry men have searched for the Hlin-blessed shield maiden who is prophesied to unite Skaland under the one who controls her fate. Because of this, the headstrong Freya kept her powers a secret all her life, even going along with her family’s wishes to become a wife rather than pursue her dreams of battlefield glory. When her Hlin blood abilities are unintentionally exposed, Freya finds herself forcibly oathbound to an ambitious jarl and thrust into a dangerous political game that tests her cunning, strength, and how much she’s willing to sacrifice for (what she’s told) is the greater good. There is, of course, also a spicy forbidden romance between Freya and the jarl’s brooding, tattooed son, but what really hooked me into A Fate Inked in Blood was the tightly wound plot, compelling character development, and engaging mythology. It’s a great first foray into romantasy, even if you’ve never had a strong interest in the genre before. —SG

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The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

Those looking for a fun time-travel adventure, be warned: The Other Valley is not a barn burner. Instead, it’s a wistful novel of quiet devastation and philosophical uncertainties that will give you a bad case of heartache. It’s also one of the most stunningly original takes on time travel I’ve ever read.

Sixteen-year-old Odile lives in a valley town where if one were to walk east, they’d arrive at the same town 20 years in the future. Walking west, they’d find the same town 20 years in the past. This pattern repeats itself across infinite towns in both directions, with trips between the valleys rigorously governed by Conseils, local officials who evaluate citizens’ requests — like a parent’s wish to see a child who has since passed. So when Odile accidentally sees the parents of a classmate visit from the east to secretly observe their son, she knows something terrible must be about to happen to him. Torn between the strict rules against interference and her desire to save the boy she’s begun to fall for, Odile finds herself questioning the world around her in ways that might change not only the future of her classmate, but of their entire society.

It’s a refreshingly unique approach to a well-trodden genre, elevated further by Howard’s elegant prose. And while the pacing is slow, Odile is such a wonderfully drawn protagonist that I relished the opportunity to experience her journey moment to moment. So if you love to sink into a story’s atmosphere and the minutiae of a character’s interior world — or are wondering what a mix between Emily St. John Mandel and The Giver would read like — you’ll find few rivals to this memorable debut. —SG

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An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson

Sapphic Gothic vampire dark academia. These are not just AO3 tags, but also a description of S.T. Gibson’s An Education in Malice.

A decadently lush Carmilla retelling, it follows two young women at a remote college whose lives become consumed by their desires for validation and for each other. Gibson skillfully fleshes out the complicated relationship between the rivals-turned-lovers Laura and Carmilla and their exacting poetry professor De Lafontaine, a vampire whose obsession with Carmilla ensnares the trio in a high-stakes web of wanting and withholding. While I’m not always the biggest fan of retellings (I’m not talking about you, Madeline Miller), between An Education in Malice and the Dracula reimagining A Dowry of Blood, Gibson has left me thirsting for more of her new takes on vampire classics. —SG

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The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Fans of Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman and similar tales about kitsune and like-minded folkloric tricksters shouldn’t miss Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife — but it reads equally well for fans of Netflix’s animated series Blue Eye Samurai, given its revenge journey, its strong personalities and points of view, and its narrative split between complementary characters chasing down different goals. The fox of the title is Ah San, or Snow, who shifts between human and animal forms at will. She lives in the hinterlands of 1908 Manchuria — until a hunter’s selfish act kills the child she’s raising on her own, and she starts hunting the killer in turn.

Meanwhile, the aging detective Bao, who has a supernatural gift for detecting lies, takes on a case to identify a woman found frozen in the snow under mysterious circumstances that suggest a fox’s involvement. Choo skips back and forth between Bao’s past and present and Snow’s quest as their paths cross, and as the reasons behind Bao’s lifelong fascination with the folklore around foxes become clear.

This is a complicated narrative, a historical fantasy packed with characters and connections, which makes the journey here particularly rich — the kind of narrative that hooks readers in with hope, as Choo teases the possibility of specific information coming to light, or specific characters’ paths crossing. It’s absorbing and beautifully told, particularly in the characters’ distinctive and different voices, which help build out a unique world where magic seems minimal, but woven seamlessly into the setting. —TR