Every sci fi and speculative book we've recommended, in one place.
California has collapsed, water costs more than gas, and a teenager who physically feels other people's pain walks north inventing a religion as she goes. Butler set it in the 2020s. It reads less like invention every year.
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Two immortals meet in seventeenth-century Africa: a man who survives by taking bodies, a woman who survives by changing her own. Their argument lasts centuries and crosses an ocean. The best entry point to Butler after Parable.
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Lilith wakes up centuries after a nuclear war, on a ship, held by aliens who saved humanity and want something in return. A book about consent and what counts as rescue. It gets under your skin and stays.
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A Himba girl leaves home to be the first of her people at the galaxy's best university, carrying her otjize and her math, and something goes very wrong on the ship. A novella you can read in an evening. Won the Hugo and the Nebula.
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Post-apocalyptic Sudan, a girl born of violence and marked for it, who grows into a sorcerer capable of ending the people who made her. Heavy subject matter handled without flinching. Won the World Fantasy Award.
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A world that ends regularly, and the people who can quiet earthquakes with their minds and are enslaved for it. Jemisin won the Hugo three years running for this trilogy, which had never been done. Start here.
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New York wakes up. Each borough gets a human avatar, and they have to find each other before something older takes the city apart. Funny, angry, and the most fun Jemisin has put on a page.
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Toronto's core has been abandoned by the government and rebuilt by the people left in it. A young mother turns to her grandmother's Caribbean spirit work to survive a gang lord. Hopkinson's first novel and still a standout.
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Dana, a Black writer in 1976 Los Angeles, is yanked backward in time to a Maryland plantation, again and again, each trip longer and more dangerous. Butler uses time travel to make history physical. Once you start, you will not put it down.
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