The 6 Best Science Fantasy Books Released Since 2010, Ranked
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There should probably be a shelf in bookstores labeled “stop asking whether this is science fiction or fantasy and just read the damn thing.” Half the joy of these books is watching two incompatible ways of understanding reality occupy the same page without anyone feeling obligated to referee. Magic gets treated like engineering. Necromancy becomes infrastructure. Artificial intelligence wanders into witchcraft. The apocalypse arrives and discovers geology has opinions.
What separates the great ones is that eventually you stop noticing the genre collision. You care about the witch and the scientist who grew up lonely. You care about the swordswoman trapped in a death cult. You care about a woman searching for her daughter while the planet physically tears open beneath her. The impossible machinery gets you through the door. The people are why you stay up stupidly late.
6 'The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.' (2017)
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. follows linguist Melisande Stokes after intelligence officer Tristan Lyons recruits her to translate historical documents proving that magic was once real, leading them to create a government program that uses restored magic to send operatives into the past and alter history. Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland are the wonderfully mismatched minds behind it, and you can feel both impulses fighting productively throughout the book. Enormous systems on one side, people making those systems ridiculous on the other.
The funniest idea here may be that humanity successfully rediscovers magic and almost immediately builds an administrative department around it. Time travel requires protocols. Witches become strategic assets. Historical meddling creates paperwork, office politics, rival factions, and the possibility of destroying causality because somebody with institutional authority had a bright idea. The novel sprawls because the joke needs room to metastasize. You start with ancient documents and theoretical physics. Somehow you end up thinking, yes, of course a magical time-travel agency would eventually become unbearable to work for.
5 'Light from Uncommon Stars' (2021)
Light from Uncommon Stars follows violin teacher Shizuka Satomi, who owes seven gifted souls to a demon, transgender runaway violinist Katrina Nguyen, whom Shizuka considers as her final offering, and alien refugee Lan Tran, a retired starship captain hiding on Earth with her family while running a donut shop. That sentence sounds like three unrelated novels accidentally printed together. But just give it fifty pages on my suggestion.
Ryka Aoki understands something that makes the whole mad combination click: people rarely experience their own lives as belonging to one genre. Katrina’s story can involve abuse, music, gender, hunger, fear, and a cursed violin without any of those concerns politely waiting for the others to finish. Lan can carry an interstellar refugee story into a California donut shop and still worry about family. Shizuka can have a literal demonic contract and remain lonely in an achingly ordinary way. I would recommend this one to somebody feeling tired of fiction that mistakes bleakness for seriousness. It is strange, painful, occasionally ridiculous, and stubbornly kind.
4 'All the Birds in the Sky' (2016)
All the Birds in the Sky follows childhood friends Patricia, who grows up to become a witch, and Laurence, who becomes a brilliant technologist, as their lives reconnect in adulthood just as magical and scientific factions move toward conflict during a worsening global crisis. Charlie Jane Anders takes what could have become a very obvious “magic versus science” argument and gives it to two people who have known each other since both were awkward children nobody quite knew what to do with.
That childhood history changes everything. Patricia once talked to birds. Laurence once built a two-second time machine. Neither gift made school any easier. Years later, their respective worlds have become sophisticated enough to threaten civilization, yet the emotional problem remains embarrassingly recognizable: two people who understand one another badly, love one another imperfectly, and have joined communities increasingly convinced the other side is dangerous. Anders keeps the book funny even when the stakes become enormous. Then she lets affection become intellectually important. Sometimes the person complicating your worldview is exactly the person who stops it from becoming stupid.
3 'Gideon the Ninth' (2019)
Gideon the Ninth follows sword-wielding Gideon Nav, who is desperate to escape the death-obsessed Ninth House until its necromantic heir Harrowhark forces her into serving as cavalier at a remote imperial trial where necromancers from eight Houses compete for immortality and begin dying under increasingly suspicious circumstances. It is a murder mystery in a decaying palace, a space-opera succession game, a necromancy textbook somebody vandalized with jokes, and one extremely dysfunctional relationship pretending it does not care.
The book becomes addictive once Gideon and Harrow are forced to cooperate. They have years of cruelty between them, so even basic teamwork feels like character development extracted with pliers. The palace itself keeps producing sealed rooms, skeletal experiments, dead competitors, and clues connected to a civilization whose understanding of death has become both religion and technology. Tamsyn Muir writes Gideon with such aggressively contemporary irreverence that the ancient gothic surroundings somehow get stranger rather than less convincing. The sunglasses help. So does the enormous sword. Mostly, though, it is the slow discovery that all those jokes are protecting somebody who has spent her entire life wanting out.
2 'Harrow the Ninth' (2020)
Harrow the Ninth follows newly immortal necromancer Harrowhark after the events of Gideon the Ninth, as she joins the Emperor aboard his space station, prepares for an approaching cosmic Resurrection Beast, and discovers that her memories, abilities, and understanding of what previously happened can no longer be trusted. It is a sequel that looks at your perfectly reasonable expectation of continuity and chooses violence.
That is why I love it. The book is difficult in a way that feels emotionally necessary rather than performative. Familiar events arrive with the wrong people in them. Harrow remembers a history you know is false. She has written instructions to herself whose purpose she cannot fully reconstruct. The narrative itself behaves like evidence tampering. And then Tamsyn Muir gradually lets you understand why. Harrow is not merely solving some cosmic mystery. Something inside her has been damaged so badly that reality had to be rearranged around the wound. Few sequels have ever made confusion feel this intimate.
1 'The Fifth Season' (2015)
The Fifth Season follows Essun, a woman hiding her ability to control seismic activity, as she searches for her kidnapped daughter after her husband murders their son, while a catastrophic geological rupture tears across the continent and begins another civilization-ending “Season.” If that sounds like the book begins at maximum emotional capacity, N. K. Jemisin somehow still has somewhere worse to take you.
The Stillness has built an entire social order around people called orogenes because they can control the earth, exploiting their abilities while teaching everyone else to fear them. Children with that power are trained, controlled, classified, and punished because society needs them too badly to allow them freedom. Jemisin then tells Essun’s story through a structure whose full meaning I would genuinely hate to spoil for a first-time reader. What I can say is that the form is not showing off. When its pieces lock together, the revelation changes the emotional meaning of what you have already read. That is the moment The Fifth Season stops being an astonishing piece of worldbuilding and becomes something much harder to shake. The planet is breaking. A family already did.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
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