False Lore and Trickster Time Travel: September’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
Fall sees new novellas, series enders, and standalones from C.L. Clark, Naomi Novik, K.J. Parker, and more
Did anyone else blink and summer is nearly over? I’m writing this with a month left in the season, those weird weeks where summer camp has ended (why) but the nights still stay sunny for long enough that you want to take advantage and stay out. September (which also happens to be my birthday month) has a wonderful bounty of new sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative works featuring lady knights, sapphic swordswomen, and clever retellings. It’s fitting that many of this month’s books are novellas—the perfect length for easing back into more structured weeks and increasingly darker nights.
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K.J. Parker, Making History
(Tordotcom Publishing, September 2)
In K.J. Parker’s latest satirical fantasy, Aelia’s despotic ruler Gyges needs an image overhaul… so he imprisons the realm’s brightest minds to become his very own royal thinktank. If they want to keep their heads, these professors and linguists will retcon Gyges’ invasion, turning the tyrant into a legitimate philosopher-king. But when POWs excavating false burial sites discover a Book of Kings, Gyges’ ersatz historians are shocked to discover that the narrative matches everything they’ve cooked up.
Naomi Novik, The Summer War
(Del Rey, September 16)
Like her other standalone novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik’s latest novella focuses on a young woman coming into new power while change simmers along a powerfully charged border between human and supernatural lands. Celia is the youngest child of Prosper’s Grand Duke Veris, who quells a century of tensions between his kingdom and the Summer Lands through some cunningly planned political marriages involving his offspring. But when her eldest brother Argent rejects his duty and leaves home, fledgling witch Celia accidentally curses him to a life without love… and later finds herself married off to the king of the immortal summerlings. Desperate to fix her mistake, she teams up with Roric, their ignored middle brother, to track down Argent and keep war from reigniting between humans and summerlings.
William Alexander, Sunward
(Saga Press, September 16)
William Alexander’s adult SF debut grew out of a short story featured in The Sunday Morning Transport, about planetary courier Tova Lir and Agatha Panza von Sparkles, one of her baby bot apprentices—functionally, her foster children. When a job runs them afoul of a derelict ship, Agatha’s juvenile AI mind is left vulnerable, and Tova must turn to her grown fosters for help ensuring Agatha has a future in this cozy SF tale.
Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox
(Tachyon Publications, September 16)
Nesi may have godly blood in her veins, but that doesn’t make her special; she desperately needs the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven if she hopes to ever leave her home of Oranoya and explore the world. Having been rejected by 96 members of the pantheon, she makes a last-ditch plea to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks. But their audition catapults Nesi back in time three hundred years, to the Occupation of Oranoya by the fascist Zeminis. In her present, the Occupation was overthrown; in the past, she has to make sure that history happens the way it’s supposed to.
Samantha Shannon, Among the Burning Flowers
(Bloomsbury Publishing, September 16)
The Priory of the Orange Tree established the Roots of Chaos cycle with its feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon, as a fire-breathing wyrm known as the Nameless One unleashed a draconic plague that reshaped how the East, West, and South regarded dragons. Standalone prequel A Day of Fallen Night went back in time five hundred years, and now Among the Burning Flowers tells the story of what happened in-between. It’s a shorter read compared to the other two but its own entry point into the Roots of Chaos cycle, with a yearning love story between an imprisoned princess and her betrothed, while a dragon-hunter seeks to stop a fire-breathing wyrm before the land of Yscalin can be set ablaze.
V.L. Bovalino, The Second Death of Locke
(Forever, September 23)
Welcome to lady knight fall with this romantasy about the bloody, magical bonds between a mage and his knight. On the battlefield, Grey Flynn is Captain Kiernan Seward’s Hand, allowing him to draw from her well of power to enact magic. But when they embark on a life-threatening mission to save a child belonging to the enemy, Grey must reveal how dire the stakes truly are—that if she dies, all magic dies with her.
Seamus Sullivan, Daedalus Is Dead
(Tordotcom Publishing, September 30)
You don’t have to be an expert in Greek mythology to know Icarus, the overambitious youth who flew too close to the sun with manmade wings, hubris and heat melting the wax holding him in the sky. But what of Daedalus, his poor father who watched his son plummet into the sea? What of Daedalus, the architect who created the awful labyrinth imprisoning both the Minotaur and his victims? In this dark fantasy novella, the grieving father descends into Tartarus to try and reunite with Icarus, only to find that King Minos’ labyrinth was a cakewalk compared to the infinite stretches of Hell that can never be mapped nor designed without making its inhabitants go mad.
C.L. Clark, The Sovereign
(Orbit Books, September 30)
This would have been on my 2025 Most Anticipated SFF list if not for waiting on the release date, but what a treat for it to be confirmed. Fantasy romance trilogy The Magic of the Lost barrels to its epic conclusion, following The Faithless’ one-two punch of the Withering plague returning to Balladaire and queen Luca asking soldier Touraine to be her general and her wife. (The way I screamed at the end of the second book…) These two do not take a moment to catch their breaths, so neither will we. A royal wedding?! (If Touraine says yes…!) That cover! (Both of them in one place, but in that pose?!) The Sovereign is going to find new ways to break our hearts before it’s over, I just know it.
