17 upcoming sci-fi and fantasy books to look forward to in 2022

polygon.com:

Have you ever wondered why so many highly anticipated books come out in the fall every year? It turns out, readers buy the most books between Labor Day and Christmas — and science fiction and fantasy are no exception. This fall is packed with new releases from N.K. Jemisin, Stephen King, S.A. Chakraborty,Brandon Sanderson, Neon Yang, Alan Moore, C.L. Polk, Mary Robinette Kowal, and even… J.R.R. Tolkien? (In a manner of speaking, yes.)

Here are our 17 most anticipated science fiction and fantasy books hitting shelves between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31, 2022.

At some point in the early days of the pandemic, Stephen King reportedly asked himself, “What could you write that would make you happy?” The resulting novel, Fairy Tale, is about a high school athlete named Charlie Reade. When Charlie starts doing odd jobs for a reclusive old man, he discovers a portal to another world — “a vast deserted city” and a “sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds.”

Everyone’s favorite space necromancers are back in the third installment of Muir’s Locked Tomb series. On the heels of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, the interplanetary saga of the Nine Houses pivots to a woman named Nona, who recently woke up in a new body with no memory of her life before. She was originally going to be a character in the final book of a planned trilogy, Alecto the Ninth, but according to Carl Engle-Laird (Muir’s editor at Tordotcom), Nona “could not be contained, and demanded her own volume,” which will make Alecto the Ninth the fourth and (for now) final book in fall 2023.

The author of one of the best novels of the 2010s — Severance (no, not the show) — returns with a brilliant short story collection that straddles many