Excited to see so many DMLA titles on the New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for 2024! Check out these spotlights!
Rakesfall
By Vajra Chandrasekera
Chandrasekera’s second novel shifts wildly in structure and narration to dazzling result. Souls recur in various combinations and circumstances, organized around how to endure fascism and kill kings. A TV show that is perhaps reality gives way to a play about beings who reincarnate over thousands of years, which gives way to a murder mystery involving a cybernetically enhanced near-immortal who wakes from an ancient sleep. Ambitious and kaleidoscopic.
Exordia
By Seth Dickinson
Dickinson’s science-fiction debut is a first-contact story about a Kurdish war orphan and the warmongering six-headed snake alien she meets in Central Park. Scrutinizing ethics, theoretical physics and the military-industrial complex, “Exordia” is so brilliant that I’m including it in this list despite its decidedly non-stand-alone ending, for which I feel the publisher owes me either an apology or the next two volumes in quick succession.
Those Beyond the Wall
By Micaiah Johnson
This is a stand-alone sequel to “The Space Between Worlds,” Johnson’s postapocalyptic debut. Here, travel through the multiverse is possible but comes with the risk of being crushed to death by a cosmic “backlash.” But someone has figured out how to shift that risk from the traveler to others, and innocent people are being killed. Stopping this will require old nemeses and unlikely friends to unite against a common enemy.
The Tainted Cup
By Robert Jackson Bennett
Bennett’s perfectly executed fantasy mystery novel introduces two dynamic detectives in a strange world, as if Nero Wolfe were solving mysteries in Area X. Dinios Kol is an “engraver,” able to remember crime scenes in perfect detail; his employer, Ana Dolabra, is an ostracized investigator whose sensory sensitivity often requires her to wear a blindfold. When a wealthy man is spectacularly murdered, Ana and Din are called in to solve the crime.