World building is my favorite part of science fiction and fantasy. Whether I’m exploring cities and landscapes that are built on the limitless stage of the author’s imagination, or collecting little details that light up a character’s interior life, I love that sense of being immersed in a strange place.
When most people hear the term world building, they probably think of series like “The Lord of the Rings,” where Middle-earth is a wholly original realm not meant to exist anywhere on our earth or in our history. But there are many different ways to create a world. The list below includes books set in wholly original worlds, settings grounded in actual historical detail and stories that take place in the far future of interstellar travel. All will transport you somewhere exciting and new.
Long Live Evil
by Sarah Rees Brennan
In Brennan’s portal fantasy/isekai novel, Rae, a 19-year-old cancer patient, makes a deal with a mysterious stranger and is transported from her hospital room in the real world to the realm of her favorite fantasy book series — a dark city of fire, chasms and the prowling undead, where she finds herself playing the villain. Rae tells herself this is all just a story, and that her actions can’t actually hurt the people who populate this imagined world. But her cancer treatments have made her memory of the books’ plot unreliable, and soon she and the characters she loves find themselves in real danger. (Note: This is the first book in a new romantasy series, and the ending is quite a cliffhanger. You have been warned.)
This was one of our favorite science fiction and fantasy books of 2024.
Don’t Sleep With the Dead
by Nghi Vo
This stand-alone novella is set in the same world as Vo’s fantastic “The Great Gatsby” retelling, “The Chosen and the Beautiful.” In her version of the roaring 1920s (and the fraught late ’30s, where the new book picks up), dark magic is woven through the historical reality of New York City, the dangerous fae realm is only one wrong step away, and terrible bargains are made for knowledge and power. While Vo’s first book focused on Jordan Baker, here the spotlight turns to Nick Carraway, who has spent over a decade trying to build a life without Gatsby. But in a world with demons and ghosts, the dead are never truly gone.
A Palace Near the Wind
by Ai Jiang
This book, set in an inventive and expansive world, treads the line between science fiction and fantasy. Liu Lufeng is a princess of the Feng — her body made of bark and branches, and her life bound to the forest that sustains her. To save her people, she must marry the human king and move into his ever-expanding palace of wood, metal and dead animals, which is slowly invading and destroying Feng territory. But Lufeng is not the first in her family to make this sacrifice: Her mother and sisters made the same bargain, and were never heard from again. Trapped within the palace walls, Lufeng is determined to find out what happened to them and to stop the king any way she can.
The Lies of the Ajungo
by Moses Ose Utomi
Tutu is an adolescent living in the City of Lies — an arid metropolis subjugated by the Ajungo people, who demand the tongues of every citizen over the age of 12 in exchange for a meager allotment of water. Desperate to save his dying mother, and his own voice, Tutu sets off into the Forever Desert to find another water source. This novella is the first of a gripping three-book series, but it packs a punch all on its own. As Tutu’s universe expands, his (and the reader’s) understanding of the world is upended by one painful truth after another.
Read our review.
Black Water Sister
by Zen Cho
Cho’s contemporary fantasy blends modern-day reality with the mythology of the spirit world. Jessamyn Teoh moves with her parents back to Malaysia, a country the recent college grad hasn’t seen since she was a baby. Unemployed, broke, missing the girlfriend she left behind and reluctant to tell her parents that she’s queer, Jessamyn starts hearing a voice in her head. Turns out, it’s not just a side effect of stress: It’s the ghost of her grandmother, Ah Ma, a spirit medium whom no one in Jessamyn’s family wants to talk about, and who has passed her gift to her reluctant granddaughter. Ah Ma needs Jessamyn’s help fulfilling a mission from a powerful, little-known god, and she won’t take no for an answer.
Furious Heaven
by Kate Elliott
This action-packed sequel to Elliott’s interstellar adventure novel “Unconquerable Sun” is space opera at its best (it is helpful, but not required, to read the first book before diving into this one). Both books put a science fiction twist on the wars of Alexander the Great, with political intrigue and family machinations that are just as dangerous as the battles. Princess Sun and her powerful mother, Queen-Marshal Eirene, clash with each other while they battle an invading fleet from the Phene Empire, which uses genetic manipulation to create unstoppable fighters. Sun has few people in her life she can trust, and each of them also have their own ambitions and personal battles to fight.
Master of Poisons
by Andrea Hairston
In the dystopian terrain of the Arkhysian Empire, a poisonous desert and violent storms are overtaking the farmland and jungles. This epic fantasy follows Djola, the Arkhysian lord’s exiled spymaster, as he searches for a solution to the realm’s climate crisis, and Awa, a powerful griot in training, who learns that the world’s salvation may come through forbidden magic. I’ve been a fan of Hairston’s work for a long time, and this novel’s wonderfully lush details are some of her best. (I contributed a blurb when the book first came out.)
Archangel
by Sharon Shinn
Shinn, a prolific author of speculative fiction, was writing romantasy long before that term existed. Though at first glance this novel may look like fantasy, it is better described as far future science fiction. The book takes place on Samaria, a planet where the mortal population is guarded and ruled by angels who use their voices to control technology they no longer understand. After deposing a corrupt Archangel, the angel Gabriel is chosen by the oracles as his heir. But first, he must find Rachel, a mortal woman who has been selected not only to marry him but also to help him conduct the most important rite of their lives: singing to the god above to keep Samaria from being destroyed.
The Mimicking of Known Successes
by Malka Older
This novella is a cozy Sherlockian mystery, with an academic and an investigator who search for answers after a series of disappearances at a university shrouded by fog. It’s also science fiction, set in a world where refugees from Earth have fled to Jupiter and now live on an elaborate framework of platforms and train lines above the gas giant’s swirling clouds. The book kicks off a series, and each gripping mystery that follows continues to builds on this fascinating world.
The Nightward
by R.S.A. Garcia
This is another novel that seems, at first, like a fantasy — with a loyal guard, Luka, fleeing a devastating attack on a city and trying to protect Viella, the young princess and heir to the murdered queen’s throne. The setting is steeped in Caribbean mythology, but the clues that this is science fiction stack up: As the reader’s expectations are continually upended, it becomes clear that this world is far stranger and more mysterious than it first appears.
The post Want to Escape Reality? Try One of These Books. appeared first on New York Times.
