Horse Girls, Ghostly Aftertastes, and Alien Plants: May’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

We’ve finally made it into spring, but May is still very much a transitional month: wrapping up school years and/or fiscal years for some, and easing into our summer plans. Let this month’s TBR sprout like the greenery you might have noticed popping up overnight: extraterrestrial sentient plants from Mira Grant, Guy Gavriel Kay’s medieval tavern poet meeting a quasi-Joan of Arc, Lincoln Michel’s meta commentary on both the Brooklyn SF scene and the Golden Age of SF. And if you feel like really taking your time, check out an excellent anthology of queer and trans SFF spanning the spectrum of identities and ideas.

*

Mira Grant, Overgrowth
(Tor Nightfire, May 6)

These unprecedented times call for the bleakness of Mira Grant’s apocalyptic horror, or what author Seanan McGuire refers to as the crueler side of her fiction. This time, what ends the world is not zombie flu or body-snatching parasites, but killer plants from space, who warned us from the beginning: Long ago they left us an alien in human guise, one Anastasia Miller, who has been telling everyone who’ll listen that she’s an alien and that someday her family will come back for her. When the rest of Earth hears the incoming alien broadcast, that time is now. McGuire says that it’s “a pleasure and a privilege to write as Mira Grant”; the pleasure is all ours.

Joe Abercrombie, The Devils
(Tor Books, May 13)

Joe Abercrombie’s latest adventure romps around alt-history medieval Europe, in the midst of a schism between the Eastern and Western churches, colliding with an absence on the Serpent Throne of Troy. Well-meaning Brother Diaz goes to meet with the Pope, only for Her Holiness to saddle him with an impossible task: put a gutter-thief-slash-secret-princess on the throne. He won’t do it alone, but his divine intervention comes in the form of the eponymous devils—a necromancer, pirate, werewolf, elf, and more—known collectively as the Church of Holy Expediency. Bombarding their way from the Holy City to Troy will have them dodging bloodthirsty elves and plotting rival royals, as Brother Diaz comes to terms with the unholy magic and monsters upon whom he’s relying for deliverance. Sounds like bloody good fun.

Lincoln Michel, Metallic Realms
(Atria Books, May 13)

The Golden Age sci-fi featured in Lincoln Michel’s latest novel is The Star Rot Chronicles, detailing Captain Baldwin and his crew’s escapades across the solar-whale-inhabited Metallic Realms. But the larger epic involves the Orb 4, the Brooklyn-based writing group collectively spinning this saga, and their own personal psychodramas influencing their fiction. The final layer is the most compelling, if also deliberately cringe: Michael Lincoln, the group’s obsessive and socially awkward archivist, who thinks he’s chronicling an homage to pulpy SF but is such an unreliable narrator that he can’t tell that he is but a pesky footnote in the Orb 4’s history.

M. Stevenson, Behooved
(Bramble, May 20)

I still haven’t watched My Lady Jane (I know!) but considering the way viewers fell head over hooves for that show, M. Stevenson’s romantasy debut has a herd ready and waiting. On the night of their royal-union-under-duress, reluctant newlyweds Bianca and Aric are surprised by an assassination attempt that winds up with Aric transformed into a horse and both of them on the run. With her chronic illness and his preference for libraries over court politics, each has been raised to believe that they are disposable yet owe their respective realms their unflagging duty. As they discover that the war brewing may have less to do with either of their nations—and as they figure out how to handle their horse-by-day, man-by-night conundrum—their slow-burn romance gallops into happily ever after.

Adam Oyebaji, Esperance
(DAW, May 20)

This science fiction mystery crosses an American police procedural with a British grifter and her enigmatic new friend. In Chicago, Detective Ethan Krol is trying to figure out why a Nigerian medical student and his infant son show signs of drowning, yet there is no ocean nearby. Across the pond in Bristol, Hollie Rogers makes a new friend in Abidemi Eniola, who claims to be from Nigeria; except that her accent is from the past, and her technological prowess might be from an unknown future. The fact that Abi is returning some heirlooms related to a ship called the Esperance, which left Bristol in 1791, makes Hollie all the more interested in joining this mad scheme. But when Hollie realizes that Abi is wanted as a person of interest in an American  murder investigation, she wonders how deep she’s gotten herself into a centuries-old whodunnit.

Daria Lavelle, Aftertaste
(Simon & Schuster, May 20)

The supernatural thriller set in the occasionally hellish world of New York City fine dining offers the ultimate personalized culinary experience: Konstantin Duhovny will make a dish or drink that reunites you with your dearly departed… at least until the final sip or bite. But these “aftertastes,” as they initially appear to Kostya, are not just gifts but also warnings to not mess in others’ unfinished business—especially when he’s crossing paths with Russian gangsters who want him to keep serving up his unusual meals, and a psychic who can’t help but fall for him even as she knows she needs to shut down his morbid business.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark
(Ace, May 27)

Guy Gavriel Kay’s historical fantasies draw upon real-world events to create fictional contexts within which he situates his compelling characters. His latest is set in Orane, a city evoking medieval France—specifically, the Hundred Years’ War and the saga of Joan of Arc. But our hero is Thierry Villar, a modestly successful tavern poet—people like that he tells it like it is—who dreams of attaining a little more fame in his lifetime. He does not, however, account for that adventure coming in the form of being whisked to court, meeting a king, an aristocratic lady poet, and a young woman who claims to hear divine voices pointing her like a sword. What a legacy Thierry could have, if he can make it out of the prologue of his own epic.

Lee Mandelo (editor), Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity
(Erewhon Books, May 27)

The fiercely joyful stories that Lee Mandelo has collected in this anthology envision radical futures, both familiar to the now or lightyears away. Join the Republic of Ecstatic Consent at a protest; book an appointment with the orgasm doula, or with the digital medium who can briefly resurrect your loved one via their social media footprint; unbury your gays, TV networks be damned; hop through temporal portals in Appalachia, or try to get into the galaxy’s last gay club. What an excellent collection of queer and trans SFF from Maya Deane, Sarah Gailey, Katharine Duckett, Sam J. Miller, Wen-yi Lee, and many more.