It’s the time of year that hard-working book reviewers publish lists, declaring the “Best of 2019!” and so on. Now, organized reviewers have theirs lists done by early December, thus missing out on most of a month of releases. I’ve waited until the very end of December before drafting my own list. Sometimes procrastination pays.
Books are listed in alphabetical order by author’s name.
Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron
This West African-inspired fantasy novel focuses on Arrah, a young woman descended from powerful magicians who appears to have inherited no magical talent at all. Determined to prove her worth and protect her land, Arrah makes an ill-fated bargain for power. She discovers all too late that she has comprehensively misunderstood the nature of the crisis facing her kingdom.
Arrah is everything one might want in a protagonist: good-hearted, sympathetic, and in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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Kingdom of Souls
Queen of the Conquered (Islands of Blood and Storm, Book 1) by Kacen Callender
Sigourney Rose is an anomaly in her world: black but rich. She isn’t a slave, like so many of her dark-skinned distant kin. Sigourney is determined to claw her way to supreme power, then wreak thorough revenge on the light-skinned enslavers.
Callender’s debut novel works as a seamless blend of Elizabethan revenge play and mystery.
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Queen of the Conquered
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations by S.B. Divya
This single-author collection features fourteen short pieces, including the Nebula Award nominee “Runtime.” Divya’s interests fall firmly within the classic SF mainstream; “Loss of Signal” recalls an early Niven, “The Egg” is steadfastly Bujoldian, “Ships in the Night” is reminiscent of a Poul Anderson tale, and so on. Divya draws on a more diverse background than most U.S. authors and writes accomplished prose. Almost all of her works to date can be found in this collection. One hopes a novel will soon follow.
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Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is, as one might expect, a mystery. Once again a stolid veteran returns from a disappointing foreign war and becomes the roommate and amanuensis of a brilliant consulting detective. Straitlaced Captain John Wyndham dutifully documents the exploits of flamboyantly decadent sorcerer(ess) Shaharazad Haas. Not only is Haas far more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than was stuffy Holmes, the world in which her mysterious diversions occur is far richer in eldritch monsters than that inhabited by the English detectives. Hall delivers a hilarious comic cosmic horror novel populated by characters who are, to use a technical term, “queer as fuck.”
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The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain
Roused from long slumber, the djinn Melek Ahmar wakes to a world transformed. His fellow djinn are nowhere to be seen. Even humans seem to have vanished, save for one lone man, the former soldier Bhan Gurung. In fact, humans have not disappeared, but have merely retreated into hi-tech cities, Kathmandu being the nearest. Gurung is not interested in urban utopia. What he would like is vengeance. The powerful but naïve djinn will be his chosen weapon. One would expect a grim and bloody tale…what one gets is a delightful light comedy.
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The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
Mouse shoulders the task of cleaning out her malevolent grandmother’s North Carolina home. Amidst the detritus hoarded by the old lady, she finds a journal left by Cotgrave, her grandmother’s long-suffering second husband. An editor by trade, Mouse cannot help but glance at the text. It is an error that will entangle Mouse in a horror best left hidden. What follows is an escalating tale of awful relatives, terrible neighbours, and atmospheric horror.
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The Twisted Ones
Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer
Forced to move frequently to elude her abusive father, neither Steph nor her mother have the opportunity to make friends. In real life, that is. Online, Steph has an active social life on Catnet, an image-sharing forum. Among Steph’s virtual friends is one more virtual than the rest, the artificial intelligence CheshireCat. Steph has only her mother’s word that the father she does not remember is a stalker. In fact, he is much worse than he has been painted, and Steph’s efforts to learn about him have put her and her friends in danger. Smart, rich, and ruthless, her father needs few clues to find her. His plans, however, do not take into account an all-seeing, if terribly naïve, non-physical opponent. This is a remarkably good-natured thriller.
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Catfishing on Catnet
Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited by Ken Liu (also translated by Ken Liu)
A thematic sequel to the anthology Invisible Planets, Broken Stars offers a wide-ranging overview of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Included are sixteen short stories, each with an accompanying thumbnail biography of each story’s author. Also included are three essays on Chinese SF and its place in modern Chinese society. While my favourites are the stories by Xia Jia and Tang Fei, there are no disappointments in this anthology. Special appreciation to the translator for his exemplary work.
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Broken Stars
Rediscovery: SF by Women 1958 –1963 (Volume 1) by Gideon Marcus
This delivers exactly what it promises: science fiction by women, published between 1958 and 1963. One danger for retrospective collections is that the stories that editors tend to remember are those that have already been anthologized multiple times. Marcus and his team sidestep this pitfall adroitly, drawing on Marcus’ familiarity with the era to deliver a diverse collection of little known but skillfully crafted short pieces. If you’re unfamiliar with the fiction of this era, you might want to start sampling.
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Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963)
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
As far as Cirilo Layba is concerned, his granddaughter Casiopea Tun is lucky. He forgave her mother’s ill-fated marriage and took in the orphaned Casiopea. Yes, the girl is lucky to be an unpaid live-in servant in backwater Uukumil. Casiopea is determined to escape. She finds an unexpected ally—a revived Hun-Kamé, Lord of Xibalba, god of death. The protagonist appeals and Moreno-Garcia’s prose is entrancing.
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Gods of Jade and Shadow
Girls’ Last Tour, Volume 6 by Tsukumizu
Sisters Yuuri and Chito spent five volumes exploring a desolate cityscape, rarely encountering other humans. Their long-term goal was to find their way to the city’s heights, where perhaps salvation from the inexorable entropy slowly smothering the city might be found. In this final volume, the reader learns what awaits the sisters at the end of their long quest. *sniff*
Despite being composed almost entirely of ominous foreshadowing, the story is charming, even heartening.
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Girls’ Last Tour Vol. 6
Magical Women, edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan
Venkatraghavan delivers an assortment of stories by talented Indian writers. Three elements unite the stories: all are written by women, all are speculative fiction, and all are worth reading. A further element common to many (but not all) is an undercurrent of incandescent fury over the current condition of the world. Taken as a whole, the collection is not quite as upbeat as Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, but the craft of the writers is undeniable.
Buy the Book
Magical Women
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assAlsted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
I am also quite keen on Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Tsukumizu’s Shimeji Simulation.
I loved Gods of Jade and Shadow! I own several of the others on the list, but I haven’t read them, yet!
Loved The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday. For full novels, A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery by Curtis Craddock was also an utter delight!
In case this comes up: because twelve is a much much smaller number than the very large number of interesting books that came out in 2019, this piece does not cover every noteworthy book of 2019.
I’ve only read one of these – The Twisted Ones, which is brilliant! – but I already had 4 others on my wish list, and it appears I’ll have to add a few more.
Are Yuuri and Chito sisters in the genealogical sense, or merely the two most closely related human beings in the world?
I don’t think it matters, to be honest.
The Twisted Ones was so good: funny and terrifying, which is really hard to pull off.
The Twisted Ones is one of the few Bad Place horror stories where there’s a sensible reason the innocent visitor doesn’t just leave.
Absolutely, and the reason and how it plays out keeps the action of the story moving continuously, which is part of what makes it so compelling. (This being a horror novel, the continuous motion is of course from bad to worse to much worse.)
I recently realized, during a reread of an old favorite Martha Wells novel, how much I admire that ability in a writer. Some writers’ books just bog down for a bit, here and there, but Martha Wells never seems to do that – the end of one arc of action unfolding segues seamlessly into another piece of excitement starting. It’s one factor in the Murderbot stories being so hard to put down.
T. Kingfisher seems to have developed the same talent here.
Own a couple; need the rest!
I really liked The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. It is character-driven hard science fiction with some wonderfully weird aliens. Astronomers just found the first Earth-size world in a habitable zone around another star, and it is probably tidally locked. Who’d have thunk it?
Yeah, what’s up with all the rocky worlds in red dwarf habitable zones?
nice list, thanks![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
Why not call this article the best books you may not have read in 2019 by female authors? Even the book by a Gideon was a compilation of works by female writers.
I have no problem with women authors, to the contrary, many of my favorite authors are women. I just think clarifying that all the list was female authors only would be good. Especially considering that there are many quality Male authors that could’ve been promoted. At least if you’re going to make a list like this, make another with Male authors. Not only would you have more books and authors to choose from–though more and more female sci-fi/fantasy writers hit the scene yearly–but then you’ve done a top list for both sexes.
After all, aren’t we going for inclusivity and diversity here?
Saad Z. Hossain is a man and some of the writers in the anthology Broken Stars are men. Just wanted to point that out because one commenter thought there were no male authors listed.
I loved The Twisted Ones. All the living human characters were cool, especially the kick-ass older-lady neighbor who accompanies Mouse on her horror adventure. The dog was cool, too.
Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire is the best book I read last year. I also greatly enjoyed The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry.
@16: Personally, I don’t pay that much attention if a book is written by a man or a woman. What I want to read is a good story.
So, if these are the 12 excellent SFF books that come to Nicoll’s mind first, I’m totally OK with it. Actually, I wouldn’t want him to add male authors just to balance the list. I want to see the best books, no matter who wrote them, man or woman; black, white, Asian, whatever; gay or straight; old or young; I don’t care.
But that’s just me!
[And obviously, it works the other way, too. I wouldn’t want a list to be balanced with female authors if most of the best books happened to have been written by male authors. Like I said, I’m interested in the best books.]
I liked very much the essays in Broken Stars, quite informative and placing the Cinese SF writing in context.
@16, Ken Liu is male as well, so that gives the gentlemen 2/12 spots if you don’t count the Gideon Marcus anthology. Surely you’re not suggesting that there needs to be a quota system that reserves slots on Best-Of lists for less-qualified men!
Alexis Hall is also male and his book is a delight.