Cannibal Sororities and Butterfly Girl Gangs: October’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

This month’s TBR looks to be as varied as a bucket of candy after a solid night of trick-or-treating. There’s sour-sweet gummy worms (cyberpunk from Ken Liu and K.M Fajardo). The soulmate pairing of peanut butter and chocolate (Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting). Nougat and nuts and caramel somehow all working together (Eric Heisserer’s Simultaneous). Something to get stuck in your teeth, but in a good way (Olivie Blake’s Girl Dinner). In fact, I think I’ve also just described the two short fiction collections on this list—one from a debut author, the other collecting last year’s best SFF. Like your Halloween bucket, you’ll want to take your time sifting through this one, but you could start anywhere and have a feast before you.

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Kristina Ten, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine
(Stillhouse Press, October 7)

Despite Kristina Ten’s prolific publication record, somehow my first introduction to her genre-bending work is through this collection, slim enough to slide beneath your pillow at summer camp but crammed full of the kinds of stories you want to stay up late retelling to your cabinmates. These modern urban legends cleverly transplant the language of ‘90s/’00s adolescence into speculative settings: putting a macabre spin on harmless pranks (“Bunny Ears”), Mad Libs for microaggressions (“ADJECTIVE”), delving into r/creepypasta (“The Dizzy Room”) and, perhaps my favorite, a post-war society rebuilding its population via cootie catchers and soda can tabs (“Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod”).

Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem
(Saga Press, October 14)

Ken Liu’s first sci-fi thriller plunges readers into a cyberpunk noir where the gumshoe is an “orphan hacker” all grown up, and the damsel in distress is an oneirofex—a dream artist, weaving subconscious strands in virtual reality. But Elli Krantz knows too much, which is to say she dabbles in the dreams of crime lord Prince; so when she goes missing, her husband Piers Negri hires bounty hunter Julia Z to track her down. Elli stole something dangerous from Prince, but Julia’s search to uncover it will take her into AI-heavy alternate realities and reveal even more devastating secrets about their world.

Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here
(Liveright Books, October 14)

Couldn’t let October pass without a gothic tale on the list! The fact that the teenage protagonist at the heart of Amber Sparks’ debut is equal parts Merricat (from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle) and Turtle Wexler (from one of my formative texts, Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game) warms my heart to ward off the chills of the plot: Mother and daughter duo Alice and Fern move into the eccentric Pine Lake Apartments, a former sanatorium full of weird yet sweet neighbors. But when Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster, her amateur investigation exhumes all of her new friends’ secrets and threatens to reveal what Alice is running from.

K.M. Fajardo, Local Heavens
(Bindery Books, October 14)

Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful has made it that I can’t see The Great Gatsby as anything but a novel of unrequited queer longing. To see another take on Nick and Gatsby’s ill-fated affair, this time with a cyberpunk bent in K.M. Fajardo’s debut, is thrilling. The futuristic New York of 2075 is leagues apart from 1922, yet the same themes fit oh-so-well: Nick Carraway as the outsider, a Filipino American hacker infiltrating the elite upper echelon; Jay Gatsby using impossibly expensive tech to cheat death; secrets and betrayals brought to light by the little people sacrificed for capitalism and opulence.

Olivie Blake, Girl Dinner
(Tor Books, October 21)

Olivie Blake’s latest genre mashup feels perfectly timed to experiencing RushTok (via Anne Helen Petersen’s reporting and commentary) and the all-encompassing culture of sorority life, as well as the dream-come-true surreality of being chosen for a house. Or in this case, The House—the most elite sorority on campus that promises beauty and success for its alumnae. For new pledge Nina Kaur (looking to rewrite the disaster of freshman year) and new academic liaison Dr. Sloane Hartley (still not quite herself eighteen months postpartum), it would seem like nothing to sign over their loyalty in blood. But is cannibalism a step too far, or the obvious sacrifice to make for a lifetime of sisterhood?

Wen-yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly
(Tor Books, October 21)

In 1972 Singapore, schoolgirl Adeline Siow loses her mother to a house fire but discovers her double life as Madam Butterfly, head of the Red Butterflies: a secret gang sworn to an ancient Chinese fire goddess but now adrift without a leader. The goddess’ existence has been nearly snuffed out, Adeline’s bloodline the only thing sustaining her. The desire to learn more about her mother’s life—and the allure of the charismatic Red Butterfly Ang Tian—has Adeline embroiled in gang warfare and a succession crisis, while tapping into her own flame magic.

Nnedi Okorafor (editor), The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025
(Mariner Books, October 21)

Another excellent collection of SFF short fiction from a mix of established and emerging authors, first published everywhere from well-known magazines to short story collections to newer publications. Nnedi Okorafor’s curation includes Isabel J. Kim’s viral story “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” as well as the celebrated “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim (both Hugo Award finalists). Plus, works by S.L. Huang, Tananarive Due, Joe Hill, Olivie Blake, and many more.

Sam J. Miller and Mary Robinette Kowal, Red Star Hustle / Apprehension
(Saga Press, October 21)

The latest Saga Double binds together two complementary sci-fi crime stories: Sam J. Miller’s Red Star Hustle, in which a high-class escort gets framed for his client’s assassination, only to fall in with cloned monarchs and bounty hunters; and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Apprehension, in which a grandmother on interplanetary vacation gets mistaken for a deadly spy after her grandson is kidnapped by a terrorist organization. Sounds like a fun mix of “wrong place wrong time” premises intertwined with grief and heartbreak, and secret pasts and wormholes.

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting
(Tor Books, October 28)

I already called out Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea in my 2025 preview, so envision it sitting in your TBR alongside Alix E. Harrow’s latest—both about lady knights breaking out of nationalist narratives. I wasn’t sure that Harrow could top herself with the devastating cyclical story “The Six Deaths of the Saint” (which served as the seed for this novel), but she astoundingly has. Historian Owen Mallory is sent back in time to write the ultimate epic about Sir Una Everlasting, the lady knight whose heroic quests—and tragic death—will power the kingdom of Dominion in his present, centuries later. But as Owen must lead Una to her grim fate, over and over, he falls not for the legend but for the woman. And as both ponder what it means to reshape destiny, they must contend with another player in the story, who will accept only one ending.

Eric Heisserer, Simultaneous
(Flatiron Books, October 28)

Almost a decade on, I still frequently think about Eric Heisserer’s screenplay for Arrival—and, let’s be honest, Final Destination 5 just as often—so of course I was super intrigued to hear of his debut novel. Gratifyingly, this speculative thriller has time-jumping of a sort paired with reincarnation via past-life hypnosis. Federal agent Grant Lukather works for a department of Homeland Security called Predictive Analytics, which sounds an awful lot like Minority Report and Person of Interest. But the imminent threat of an explosion in New Mexico pairs him up with therapist Sarah Newcomb, who (you guessed it) taps into her patients’ supposed past lives. It’s a fun merging of past, present, and future that could tie into Death, aliens, or some other powerful force entirely.