Archives de catégorie : Science Fiction

BIRD DEITY de John Morrissey

A scout retrieving artifacts from an ancient species on a distant planet sets out on a search for his missing mentor.

BIRD DEITY
by John Morrissey
Text Publishing Australia, August 2026

BIRD DEITY is a science-fiction novel set in a colony on a distant planet. The protagonist, David, is a young man who works as a ‘scout’, retrieving artifacts made by a now-vanished species called the parasapes. These artifacts encode the memories of the parasapes from a time before their civilisation was destroyed by a mysterious catastrophe.

After ten years, David is due to return to Earth. But he is worried about leaving. His mentor, Tom, has recently gone missing on a plateau where the parasapes used to live. Is he dead? Tom’s girlfriend, Eliza, thinks so and is trying to organise passage home for herself and her baby.

Just before he is due to depart, David is approached by a newly arrived anthropologist named Sarah, who has been sponsored by a trillionaire philanthropist to study the lost culture of the parasapes. David agrees to take her to the plateau in exchange for a massive fee.

But when they get there, David’s story begins to overlap with the story of a parasape astronomer in the months before his civilisation was destroyed. Searching for Tom, David finds himself drawn back into his childhood until he is ultimately confronted by the horrifying Bird Deity.

John Morrissey is a multi-award-winning Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks, Meanjin and the anthology This All Come Back Now. He was the winner of the 2020 Boundless Mentorship, the runner-up for the 2018 Nakata Brophy Prize and named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2024. His debut short story collection, Firelight, was published in 2023 and won Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards 2023 as well as the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection in the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards.

THE ARCHEOLOGY OF FALLING WORLDS de Megan Chee

A science fantasy book for fans of Brandon Sanderson’s Yumi and the Nightmare Painter if it was a Studio Ghibli film.

THE ARCHEOLOGY OF FALLING WORLDS
by Megan Chee
(via Zeno Agency)

Starga is a vibrant, neon city built with magic and technology from athousand unreachable worlds. Existing in a weird splinter of reality where people from across the universe fall out of the sky with no memory of their past lives, it is a mystery even to its own citizens.

No-one knows why Starga exists or what lies beyond it. No-one has ever been able to leave. And with more people falling from the sky every year, Starga’s resources are at a breaking point.

Frey is a disillusioned office worker who once dreamed of being an archeologist—a scholar of fallen artefacts from the worlds above. When she gets the opportunity to salvage artefacts for a criminal organization, she knows it’s a dangerous idea. But she can’t resist the call of the unknown.

She explores the desert wasteland beyond the city walls in search of valuable artefacts. What she finds is a fuzzy black worm. Then the worm starts changing shape… and talking… and Frey’s life suddenly gets a lot more complicated. Because the worm is actually a shapeshifting dragon who knows the secret of what Starga really is—and how to escape from it. He just needs to get his memory back.

Megan Chee is a Singaporean author who has lived in Taiwan,Hong Kong, and the United States, and is currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and other venues. Her work has been translated into Chinese in Science Fiction World, and has been featured in The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol.3 (Pyr Books).

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES d’Emily Jane

America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel. From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
by Emily Jane
Hyperion Avenue, September 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, AMERICAN WEREWOLVES brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

Emily Jane is the USA Today bestselling author of On Earth as it Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide. She grew up in Boise, Boulder, and San Francisco. She earned her BA in psychology from the University of San Francisco and her JD from UC Law San Francisco. She lives on an urban farm in Cincinnati with her husband, Steve; their two children; their cats, Scully and Ripley; and their husky, Nymeria.

FABLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD d’Ava Reid

The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.

FABLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
by Ava Reid
HarperTeen, March 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.

For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.

As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.

And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.

Ava Reid was born in Manhattan and raised right across the Hudson River in Hoboken but currently lives in Palo Alto. She has a degree in political science from Barnard College, focusing on religion and ethnonationalism.

SALVAGE de Renee Nault

A beautifully illustrated graphic romance about finding love in the unlikeliest of places and people, and embracing who you are, even when it’s hard.

SALVAGE
by Renee Nault
Ten Speed Graphic/Crown Publishing Group, January 2026

Paolo only knows life in The Flats, where people live on stilt houses under constant threat of sinking into the ocean below. His family makes a living salvaging materials from the skyscrapers just underneath the water, remnants of a world before sea levels rose. It’s a dangerous job, diving down so deep, but one day Paolo scores big: He finds a suitcase of undamaged clothes, and they just so happen to be in his size. Instead of selling them at the weekly market, he decides to fulfill a dream of his—spending one night in the Uplands, where everyone who’s someone lives.

Getting off the subway in the Uplands, Paolo immediately gets lost and is about to end up in a bad situation when a girl named Jules and her friends usher him away. It turns out they’re living the life he’s always dreamed of. They spend their nights at the most exclusive clubs, have access to all sorts of entertainment, and have no real responsibilities. One night with them—and with Jules—just isn’t enough. Soon, Paolo finds himself sneaking to the Uplands as much as possible and leading a double life. The closer he gets to Jules, the more he has to lie to her and risk the new life and friends he’s made.

Renee Nault began her art career as an illustrator, and her vivid watercolors have appeared in books, magazine and advertising around the world. Renee works traditionally in ink and watercolor preferring the tactile qualities of paint and paper to digital tools. She is best known for her acclaimed graphic novel version of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which she both adapted and illustrated. SALVAGE is her first original graphic novel.