Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2009
Explore the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2009! Discover top-rated novels, must-reads, and award-winning titles in this curated list of 2009's finest speculative fiction.
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Lamentation
by Ken Scholes
This remarkable first novel from award-winning short fiction writer Ken Scholes will take readers away to a new world—an Earth so far in the distant future that our time is not even a memory; a world where magick is commonplace and great areas of the planet are impassable wastes. But human nature hasn't changed through the ages: War and faith and love still move princes and nations. In Lamentation, the first entry in the Psalm of Isaak series, an ancient weapon has completely destroyed the city of Windwir. From many miles away, Rudolfo, Lord of the Nine Forest Houses, sees the horrifying column of smoke rising. He knows that war is coming to the Named Lands. Nearer to the Devastation, a young apprentice is the only survivor of the city—he sat waiting for his father outside the walls, and was transformed as he watched everyone he knew die in an instant. Soon all the Kingdoms of the Named Lands will be at each others' throats, as alliances are challenged and hidden plots are uncovered. The Psalms of Isaak #1 Lamentation #2 Canticle #3 Antiphon #4 Requiem #5 Hymn
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Canticle
by Ken Scholes
Come back to the Named Lands in this compelling sequel to Ken Scholes amazing novel Lamentation. It is nine months after the end of the previous book. Many noble allies have come to the Ninefold Forest for a Feast in honor of General Rudolfo’s first-born child. Jin Li Tam, his wife and mother of his heir, lies in childbed. As the feast begins, the doors of the hall fly open and invisible assassins begin attacking. All of Rudolfo’s noble guests are slain, including Hanric, the Marsh Queen’s Shadow. And on the Keeper’s Gate, which guards the Named Lands from the Churning Waste, a strange figure appears, with a message for Petronus, the Hidden Pope. Thus begins the second movement of The Psalms of Isaak, Canticle.
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Best Served Cold
by Joe Abercrombie
Duke Orso imagines that he can become king by ending the civil wars that have devastated Styria, but he errs by trying to kill his overly popular general, mercenary Monza Murcatto. Recovering from her massive injuries and mourning her murdered brother, Mo
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The Steel Remains
by Richard K. Morgan
Forgotten, feeling obsolete, and living in a backcountry village, one-time war hero Ringil believes that he is past his prime as a warrior, until he is asked to find a lost cousin who has been sold into servitude and is drawn back into a dangerous world that he had thought long left behind. By the author of Thirteen. 30,000 first printing.
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Night of Knives
by Ian C. Esslemont
The small island of Malaz and its city gave the great empire its name, but now it is little more than a sleepy, backwater port. Tonight, however, things are different. Tonight the city is on edge, a hive of hurried, sometimes violent activity; its citizens bustle about, barring doors, shuttering windows, avoiding any stranger’s stare. Because tonight there is to be a convergence, the once-in-a-generation appearance of a Shadow Moon – an occasion that threatens the good people of Malaz with demon hounds and other, darker things … It was also prophesied that this night would witness the return of Emperor Kellanved, and there are those prepared to do anything to prevent this happening. As factions within the greater Empire draw up battle lines over the imperial throne, the Shadow Moon summons a far more ancient and potent presence for an all-out assault upon the island. Witnessing these cataclysmic events are Kiska, a young girl who yearns to flee the constraints of the city, and Temper, a grizzled, battle-weary veteran who seeks simply to escape his past. Each is to play a part in a conflict that will not only determine the fate of Malaz City, but also of the world beyond … Drawing on events touched on in the prologue of Steven Erikson’s landmark fantasy Gardens of the Moon, Night of Knives is a momentous chapter in the unfolding story of the extraordinarily imagined world of Malaz.
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Bauchelain and Korbal Broach
by Steven Erikson
The first three tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, the famed necromancers from the Malazan Book of the Fallen, collected in one volume. BLOOD FOLLOWS In the port city of Lamentable Moll, a diabolical killer stalks the streets and panic grips the citizens like a fever. As Emancipor Reese's legendary ill luck would have it, his previous employer is the unknown killer's latest victim. But two strangers have come to town and they have posted in Fishmonger's Round a note, reeking of death-warded magic, requesting the services of a manservant... THE HEALTHY DEAD The city of Quaint's zeal for goodness can be catastophic, and no one knows this better than Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, two stalwart champions of all things bad.The homicidal necromancers - and their substance-addled manservant, Emancipor Reese - find themeselves ensnared in a scheme to bring goodness into utter ruination. Sometimes you must bring down civilization...in the name of civilization. THE LEES OF LAUGHTER'S END After their blissful sojourn in Lamentable Moll, the sorcerors Bauchelain and Korbal Broach - along with their manservant, Emancipor Reese -set out on the open seas aboard the sturdy ship Suncurl. Alas, there's more baggage in the hold than meets the beady eyes of the crew, and unseemly terrors awaken. For Bauchelain, Korbal Broach and Emancipor Reese, it is just one more night on the high seas, on a journey without end.
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Cyberabad Days
by Ian McDonald
This collection of seven stories and a thirty-one thousand word original novella revisits the vivid world of near future India that McDonald so successfully depicted in River of Gods (a BSFA Award winner). Readers will discover a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. This future India has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Includes one Hugo Award nominee and one Hugo Award winner.
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A World Too Near
by Kay Kenyon
In Bright of the Sky, Kay Kenyon introduced a milieu unique in science fiction and fantasy: The Entire, a five-armed radial universe that exists in a dimension without stars and planets and is parallel to our own universe. Stretched over The Entire is a lid of plasma, called the bright, which ebbs and flows, bringing day and twilight. Under the vast canopy of the bright live many galactic species, copied from our own universe. Former star pilot Titus Quinn loves The Entire, but now he must risk annihilating it by destroying the fortress of Ahnenhoon. To sustain a faltering Entire, Ahnenhoon’s great engine will soon reach through the brane separating the universes and consume our own universe in a concentrated ball of fire. Quinn sets off on a journey across The Entire armed with the nan, a small ankle bracelet containing nanoscale military technology that can reduce Ahnenhoon and its deadly engine to chaos. He must pursue his mission even though his wife is held prisoner in Ahnenhoon and his own daughter has sent the assassin MoTi to hunt him down. As he traverses the galactic distances of The Entire, he learns more of the secrets of its geography, its fragile storm walls, its eons-long history, and the factions that contend for dominance. One of these factions is led by his daughter, who though young and a slave, has at her command a transforming and revolutionary power. As Quinn wrestles with looming disaster and approaches the fabled concentric rings of Ahnenhoon’s defenses, he learns that in the Entire, nothing is what it appears. Its denizens are all harboring secrets, and the greatest of these is the nature of the Entire itself.
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Retribution Falls
by Chris Wooding
SCIENCE FICTION. Frey is the captain of the Ketty Jay, leader of a small and highly dysfunctional band of layabouts. An inveterate womaniser and rogue, he and his gang make a living on the wrong side of the law, avoiding the heavily armed flying frigates of the Coalition Navy. With their trio of ragged fighter craft, they run contraband, rob airships and generally make a nuisance of themselves. So a hot tip on a cargo freighter loaded with valuables seems like a great prospect for an easy heist and a fast buck. Until the heist goes wrong, and the freighter explodes. Suddenly Frey isn't just a nuisance anymore - he's public enemy number one, with the Coalition Navy on his tail and contractors hired to take him down. But Frey knows something they don't. That freighter was rigged to blow, and Frey has been framed to take the fall. If he wants to prove it, he's going to have to catch the real culprit. He must face liars and lovers, dogfights and gunfights, Dukes and daemons.
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Boneshaker
by Cherie Priest
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska's ice. Thus was Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history. His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.