Introducing the Best SFF of 2022

Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy is thick, vivid, poetic fantasy on such a large and yet personal scale. I loved this sequel even more than his first, which itself made it to many best books of 2019 lists. It tells the story of the Moon Witch, Sogolon, and her life of violence, control, and chaos, from court dealings to monster battles, all with the chancellor Aesi as her arch-enemy. James’s prose is vividly stunning, but the true strength of this book lies in Sogolon’s journey, its magic, her need to survive, her repeated absolute heartbreaks.

No one would blame you if you couldn’t quite imagine reading about a plague right now. But if you’re going to make room for one plague book this year, make it this one. In 2030, an archaeologist finds the remains of a young girl who seems to have died of an ancient virus. As you might imagine, things go downhill from there. The novel unspools in a series of connected short stories as the Arctic Plague devastates the world. It ties humanity together, unpacking all the ways that we’re intricately connected to the rest of the world, and while it can be bleak — warning that many children die in this book — there’s something quietly hopeful in its portrayals of resilience and grief.

Picture this: Golden Age Hollywood. Ruthless, always looking for its next star. Now add magic to the mix and imagine that the cutthroat world operates on a system of handshakes and soul sales, and picture a young Asian girl named Luli who is determined to become a star, and is willing to do whatever it takes to do so. This sharp, chilly book is a stunning and sapphic book of fae-like negotiations and traps, of predatory directors and monsters lurking in every shadow, but is powered by Luli’s passion and fierce determination to succeed.

This weird novel needs to get more attention. A girl named Laisvė who lives in the flooded Brook discovers that she is a carrier: in other words, she can use talismans (like old pennies) to ride currents into other times. She takes the reader on a trip to meet a group of iron workers putting the Statue of Liberty together, and to meet the man who designed the statue. It’s a book that explores the big, serious issues of exploitation, climate change, and freedom through a rich web of kink, humor, and nature. There’s so much going on in this novel, and all of it comes together in such magnificent, incredible ways.

Becky Chambers recently won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novella for A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and this sequel shows the genius behind her cozy, hopeful, vivid world. Dex, a nonbinary tea monk, and Mosscap, the first robot to venture into the human world in generations, are going on a tour of Panga so that Mosscap can learn more about how humans work and what they need. This book builds on the world and asks questions that are philosophical and fascinating, picking apart a communal, anticapitalist world, all while still being a quick read.

This book flew under too many people’s radars, and I’m determined to fix that. What if you took a zombie apocalypse survival story and combined it with a workplace comedy pointing out all the absurdities of large corporations? That’s what you get with The Temps. When a toxic gas descends on mega-corp Delphi Enterprises, all the full-time employees are outside at a big outdoor meeting — and only a few hundred temps, who didn’t go, are left alive. As they try to figure out what to do next, they also start asking a question that quickly morphs into a big sci-fi mystery: what exactly did Delphi do?

Indi is a huge online celebrity — and it’s up to Joey, her ex, to control her multi-reality streams and handle social media crises. She pulls in Rudra, a man who left behind his rich family. Together in Delhi, they end up confronting a whole mess of rising issues, from surveillance to the pain points of capitalism to systemic racism and prejudice. This is one darkly plausible near-future dystopia that you won’t want to miss. It’s a vivid cyberpunk book that digs into relatable anxieties about our world and where it’s headed, the overwhelming-ness of it, and the paths to resistance.

I really, really love a good queer found family story, and Gladstone has given us a stunning one. A team of five once traveled around America sealing off the rot so that it couldn’t corrupt our world. Ever since they lost Sal to the rot, it’s only been Zelda — everyone left but her. But when Sal’s voice starts whispering through the darkness, and the massive eldritch darkness on the other side of the cracks starts creeping through again, Zelda has to get the gang back together to see if they can save the world — and maybe even Sal too.

Monáe’s Dirty Computer film and album were works of queer, radical, cyberpunk genius, and in these five stories, she and her talented team of collaborators expand and dig more into that world. Some of the stories are vast — the Director Librarian uncovers a rebel plot to clog memory collectors — while others are more zoomed-in — an exhausted student discovers that time stops in her apartment pantry. It’s genius SFF that digs into queerness, gatekeeping, dystopia and hope. I’m rooting for “Timebox Altar(ed)” by Monáe and Thomas to win all the awards next year.

I was eagerly awaiting the day that the trend of mythic retellings would reach the Indian epics, and Patel brings a richly feminist perspective to the story of Kaikeyi, a queen villainized in the traditional Ramayana for using two god-granted boons to banish Rama and make sure the crown goes to her own son instead. Patel writes Kaikeyi as a warrior in her own right, a powerful woman who is fighting against the rigged system of the gods, who just want chaos and bloody war and have chosen Rama as their hero. Fans of Circe should already be falling for Kaikeyi!

This book has taken the SFF world by storm, and I’m not surprised. All the blurbs compare it to dark academia darling The Secret History and modern fantasy classic Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but it also takes on issues of colonization and imperialist injustice. Robin is a Chinese student pulled between Babel, the world’s center of translation and a utopia of knowledge, and the Hermes Society, which is trying to sabotage the silver-working that enables the British Empire to stay in power. He has to decide where his fight belongs, and how a colonial power can best be brought down.