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Science Fiction for November 2026

by Henry L Lazarus

I get shocked by how high the price of Fantasy and Science Fiction ebooks from major publishers has become. This is at a time when many self-published writers offer their ebooks for much less and some of them I find I enjoy better than the expensive tales. I’m lucky to be able to get free review copies.

I splurged and bought the eighth and The Last Thursday Next Novel. Because it is the last novel, Thursday has lost her plot armor and her enemies are trying to kill her. They actually succeed several times and she is only revived through illegal tropes like deus-exmachina.Someone from Book world is bribing Jasper Fforde to change the plot of the book and Thursday has to get his help by entering his diary. Not only that but the Martians from the War of the Worlds trilogy are attacking numerous books. Thursday can only find the true villain after the book ending by going into Dark Reading Matter(hard from Soho Press). Beware the fourth wall is nuked and thinking too deeply about the tale can lead to insanity. 

Brandon Sanderson tells of The Fires of December (hard from Dragonsteel). December is an orphaned woman raised in an inn in a small town. In the capital city someone releases the huge demon impaled and constantly bleeding. Decades later the river of blood from the demon dries up, and then eventually plague comes to the land. When December dies at age eighty, she is the last person in the area. But then she is alive again, returned to when she was twenty-one. It seems to make sense to travel to the capital city and tell the king so the demon is not released.  Helped by a demon in cat shape and a former king’s spy, she at first seems to be successful. This is a lot of fun. I like the idea of restarting my life to prevent my mistakes. 

Take an Agatha Christie plot and twist it through a prism of fantasy tropes and you get a tale of Tides and Torment(hard from ‎ Keylight Books). Roisin is an indestructible assassin working for the goddess of souls. She can call on Thadaryx, God of Sight, because she knows his true name. When he rescues her from a dungeon that her latest case had put her in,, the two of them steal tickets to a ship. Unfortunately someone is murdering the passengers. Caitlan Honer tells a wonderfully complicated tale set on a sea filled with dangerous sirens. Passengers are poisoned, stabbed and one has his head cut off. It doesn’t help that Thadaryx wants Roisin dead to cut his links to her. I really enjoyed this. 

The dark ages were especially hard on women who might be burned at the stake for witchcraft. Caitríona Moran sets her tale in a world where magic exists, which means that some magic might be evil. Since the date of The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow(hard from G.P. Putnam's Sons) is still not set, Magdalena is sent to the Lord Proctor of Cair Gramora in the far north.  There she is given more freedom than she expects and can use her magical abilities to help heal women in trouble including the abortion potion she invented. She enjoys learning the strange customs of the North. There is also sexual tension between the celibate Lord Proctor  and herself which ends her time in the North early. Then she has to face the trial that has an expected ending. This is a warm tale that somehow creates a few twists. 

Richland, Ohio is dying because the meat processing plant is being closed. Mike Boyd, a furloughed federal employee, has come home to live with his father and his father’s new wife, while looking for a new job. His friend Dave, the town's only cop, ropes him into helping him investigate an exploding cow, because Mike used to work for the USDA, But that’s when modified pets appear and the town confronts the Monsters of Ohio (hard from Tor). Luckily what follows is not horror, but warm and friendly hijinks in modern rural America. I truly love John Scalzi’s off-beat sense of humor. The tale is remarkably silly with a logic all of its own. 

Tanya Huff considers the complication of being a home room teacher in a prestigious High School for Magic. Abby Bellman is starting with a group of freshmen that she will follow for four years. On the first day the bleachers collapse, and soon other bad things start happening. Instead of being Saved by the Spell(hard from DAW) Bex Olynyk, one of her students, steps up. It is obvious that she is a rare hero, and Abby has to protect her from the villain opposing the hero, if she can find the villain. She has to deal with school politics, a principal over a century old, and other  continuing complications. Light fun guaranteed to bring a smile particularly from teachers who will recognize the non-magical problems. 

The Maze of Ortygia (ebook from Tau Protocol Press) seems to be about the sudden disappearance of an agricultural engineer from  the unfinished Hecate Station and the shooting  of a space cleaner floating near the station. It isn’t about the investigating team that gets trapped in a small ship set hurtling to the local moon where they find an abandoned research laboratory. It isn’t even about the invasion of Hecate station by two corporate armies.. Instead Robert Hildenbrand’s tale is about researchers living a few thousand years later entering the ether copy of that time period to discover what happened. Interesting. 

Emily Krempholtz tells how Prudence Marsh Is Not a Nobody Anymore (paper from Ace). Pru decides to finally leave Dragon’s rest and become famous for her musical talent. However, early in the journey, her violin is destroyed by Callum DiCorvo, a bandit robbing a wealthy carriage and she is blamed for the robbery, making her an outlaw. The gang is planning a robbery of the Queen’s vault. Which requires three magical keys. Assisting her is the formally-human, potted-plant who is very good at lock picking and former members of the gang brought in for one last robbery. Light fun with romance and an impossible heist. 

A Grim Reaper's Guide to Living Twice (paper from Berkley) states that soul possession is impossible. Jack McCoy has possessed the body of the S.C.Y.T.H.E. agent, octogenarian Margaret Chen since she came to guide his soul to the afterlife. He’s been a petty criminal all his life, so stealing the monthly list of deaths to sell is obvious. He gathers his old gang from high school together to accomplish the heist, but there are complications.Maxie Dara has a nice addition to her other mysteries that are totally independent of each other except for background.  

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. tells how Steffan Dekkard rises  Premier (hard from Tor)in the latest book in his Grand Illusion series. In the years since the previous books in the series, he has become a respected leader in the Craft party. His twin daughters are doing well. The death of the aging Imperador leads to elections and there are assassinations of some members of his party including the previous Premier. The tale considers local and national politics while setting up war on the horizon. This series is a bit too dry for some readers, but I really enjoy them. 

Melissa Caruso concludes her The Echo Archives trilogy with The Last Star in the Void (paper from Orbit). Centuries before the void had tried to absorb the sun, but the moon interfered and Earth was given twelve echoes of the prime reality which get weirder the deeper one goes. Kembral Thorne, a hound who can find lost pets and children in the echoes, has no problems finding a good sitter for her baby because she has both her girlfriend and a dragon, is brought in by the Raven Guild to help them deal with holes in reality. Since she named this year in the first book in the series, her blood can seal the hole shut. Unfortunately there are far more holes, and a date in which she must face the void, or the void will finally get through the barrier and destroy the world. Excellent series and solid ending. 

ACE is reprinting the third book in A Thousand Li series. Long Wu Ying has been raising his Chi levels and gets involved with The First War(hard) since he started cultivating. Unfortunately the village he grew up in has been caught in the violence and needs protection. There are very powerful cultivators involved and much magical violence. The series was self-published in 2020 and was good enough that a major publisher picked it up. I enjoyed it. 

Sung-il Kim concludes his tale of an empire that uses the corpses of dead sorcerers to power their various engines. They had connected over three hundred of them to predict the future and, unfortunately, this circuit predicted world destruction. It has released demonic monsters to accomplish what it predicted. To stop this Blood to the True Crown(hard from Tor) are three heroines. Echeya is the only survivor of a tribe wiped out by both Imperial troops and demons. She is helping a young girl who appeared in the disaster and is immune to the demons. Arienne is the sorcerer who has managed to create the destroyed province of Mersia in her head. And Loran who can evoke dragon abilities as needed. Nice ending. 

The crew of the Halcyon Days are celebrating their win against the Azure Colossus. They had lured it into the ocean and disabled it. Bad guys don’t stay down, alas. Prince Lucan has stolen the Azure Crystal and has repowered the colossus, unfortunately losing control of the monster. He also kidnapped three members of the Halycon Days crew, in order to get their engineer to bring back control. The monstrous being is heading towards Halcyon Days: The City in the Sands (ebook from CALM Studios), Rosewood, the capital of the empire in the middle of the desert. There Prince Lucan has to confront his father, Kensie, the ship’s pilot, has to face her hidden past and Locke must find inner strength to face his demons. I’m waiting eagerly for the final book in the series. 

Erin Ampersand continues her tale of Meghan Moretti, a soccer mom with three kids, whose husband was away when aliens decided to turn Earth into a video game, expecting most humans to die. After winning a store selling food and water, she finds herself Making Friends (paper from Tor) and building a community. In this second book, she and her friends have to fight off new monsters, survive another competition, and face people who terrorize their neighbors. The series is growing on me. 

Mercedes Lackey has the 20th anthology of stories about Valdemar by other authors. It is A Many-Splintered Thing(paper from DAW)

There are more reviews at http://www.henrylazarus.com/sf.htm