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Blair Braverman, Small Game:Five people set out on a reality show about wilderness survival. The narrator is a woman raised by survivalists who’s tried to find a way out, but needs money to have choices. She falls fast and hard for Ashley, who’s there to get famous. Then, a few weeks before the scheduled end, things change fast, and the show turns deadly real. It’s got a lot of sharp observations about how women manage men for their advantage and safety; the narrator is very conscious of what she’s doing but also understandably does not feel powerful in doing it. Survival, here, is not about wilderness competence but about the benefits of connection and larger human society. It ends kind of abruptly, as if Braverman wasn’t interested in the denouement, which I very much was.
Max Gladstone, Dead Country: Tara Abernathy returns to the badlands after the death of her father, to confront the mother and the town she left behind. In the process she acquires an apprentice, renews an old flame, and has to fight a curse that threatens to eat her as well as the entire town. It advances the narrative in a Lovecraftian direction (not in terms of language/descriptions, which get their creepiness from the scientistic/legalistic language of Craft, but in terms of horrors from outside our universe).
R.B. Lemberg, The Unbalancing: Very much in the vein of kind fantasy: People make bad decisions and very bad things happen, but the bad decisions are rooted in past wounds or human frailty, and the main challenge is essentially environmental. A fallen star made of magic (deepnames) keeps the people of the isles safe—except it seems to be failing, and the new starkeeper might not be the right one to fix it (or heal it—as another character says, there’s a difference). The ghost of the first starkeeper wants another person to do the job instead, but they’re unwilling to engage so much with the world. Surprisingly, when the two—actual starkeeper and could-be starkeeper—meet, sparks fly, and that both is and isn’t as important as the survival of the isles’ people, since each life is a whole world. I’m probably not the best audience for a lot of cozy fantasy, but I thought this was pretty good, even as I wouldn’t want it to be my entire fantasy diet. Bonus points for a religion based around the Bird, leading to the curse word “plucking.”
Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words: Really interesting worldbuilding: aliens have arrived and seem to have mitigated some climate disasters, though there are still lots of refugees and not enough jobs. The aliens can only communicate mind-to-mind, and only through some human minds; translator is a good job but talking to aliens for long enough makes you drunk (minus the impact on non-neurological systems). Our protagonist escaped a dead-end town and is desperate to avoid returning. When her client—the cultural attache—is murdered, things get very strange. I don’t want to spoil anything, and maybe the explanation is a little baroque on the human side, but it was still fun.
Samit Basu, The City Inside: In authoritarian, climage-change-wracked India, it’s still possible to be in the elite and keep your head down, only worrying about water shortages and targeted sexual harassment. The main protagonist manages a Flowstar, which is like an Instagram influencer but worse, and tries to navigate family and professional challenges while not thinking too much about the structures that constrain her—until, maybe, she can’t avoid them. It’s very well done and leaves glimmers of hope.
Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few:In the human remnant fleet, small struggles occur with big individual consequences even though politics and economics are relatively stable (but changing with exposure to the larger galaxy). There are fake IDs, theft, deadly accidents, and other challenges, so the stakes are higher than in many of Chambers’ other books, but it’s definitely still on the cozier side.
Barbara Hambly, The Iron Princess: This fantasy reminded me a lot of Stranger Things, in that it feels very much like it was published in an alternate 1980s. Magic, except for the magic of the Crystal Mages, is failing as the Crystal Mages destroy a conquered land to mine the substance that gives them power. A princess whose father is one of the invaders and whose mother was indigenous nobility strives to fight back, with the help of the Prometheus-like figure she rescues—a wizard who destroyed a city of fifty thousand souls. I dunno, it just felt like it had been kept in a box for forty years, but not in a bad way. (Brief mention of sexual assault.)
Max Gladstone, Dead Country: Tara Abernathy returns to the badlands after the death of her father, to confront the mother and the town she left behind. In the process she acquires an apprentice, renews an old flame, and has to fight a curse that threatens to eat her as well as the entire town. It advances the narrative in a Lovecraftian direction (not in terms of language/descriptions, which get their creepiness from the scientistic/legalistic language of Craft, but in terms of horrors from outside our universe).
R.B. Lemberg, The Unbalancing: Very much in the vein of kind fantasy: People make bad decisions and very bad things happen, but the bad decisions are rooted in past wounds or human frailty, and the main challenge is essentially environmental. A fallen star made of magic (deepnames) keeps the people of the isles safe—except it seems to be failing, and the new starkeeper might not be the right one to fix it (or heal it—as another character says, there’s a difference). The ghost of the first starkeeper wants another person to do the job instead, but they’re unwilling to engage so much with the world. Surprisingly, when the two—actual starkeeper and could-be starkeeper—meet, sparks fly, and that both is and isn’t as important as the survival of the isles’ people, since each life is a whole world. I’m probably not the best audience for a lot of cozy fantasy, but I thought this was pretty good, even as I wouldn’t want it to be my entire fantasy diet. Bonus points for a religion based around the Bird, leading to the curse word “plucking.”
Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words: Really interesting worldbuilding: aliens have arrived and seem to have mitigated some climate disasters, though there are still lots of refugees and not enough jobs. The aliens can only communicate mind-to-mind, and only through some human minds; translator is a good job but talking to aliens for long enough makes you drunk (minus the impact on non-neurological systems). Our protagonist escaped a dead-end town and is desperate to avoid returning. When her client—the cultural attache—is murdered, things get very strange. I don’t want to spoil anything, and maybe the explanation is a little baroque on the human side, but it was still fun.
Samit Basu, The City Inside: In authoritarian, climage-change-wracked India, it’s still possible to be in the elite and keep your head down, only worrying about water shortages and targeted sexual harassment. The main protagonist manages a Flowstar, which is like an Instagram influencer but worse, and tries to navigate family and professional challenges while not thinking too much about the structures that constrain her—until, maybe, she can’t avoid them. It’s very well done and leaves glimmers of hope.
Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few:In the human remnant fleet, small struggles occur with big individual consequences even though politics and economics are relatively stable (but changing with exposure to the larger galaxy). There are fake IDs, theft, deadly accidents, and other challenges, so the stakes are higher than in many of Chambers’ other books, but it’s definitely still on the cozier side.
Barbara Hambly, The Iron Princess: This fantasy reminded me a lot of Stranger Things, in that it feels very much like it was published in an alternate 1980s. Magic, except for the magic of the Crystal Mages, is failing as the Crystal Mages destroy a conquered land to mine the substance that gives them power. A princess whose father is one of the invaders and whose mother was indigenous nobility strives to fight back, with the help of the Prometheus-like figure she rescues—a wizard who destroyed a city of fifty thousand souls. I dunno, it just felt like it had been kept in a box for forty years, but not in a bad way. (Brief mention of sexual assault.)