The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2024
Our favorite books so far this year are so wonderfully human. A sexbot’s quest for self-determination, a haunted house inhabited by angry witches, more than one heartbreaking new take on time travel — genre fiction is always about how we live now, but this year how we live now seems so much closer to the surface.
With romantasy, Gothic horror, and retellings of classic myths, many of our picks this year bleed with wit and pain and good old-fashioned lusty passion, as the dread of the last few years gives way to a feeling of restlessness, a raw chrysalis awaiting what’s next. No one really knows, but we’re having a hell of a time reading these dazzling attempts to sort it all out.
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The frustrating experience of being stuck in a time loop has prompted stories in practically every major medium: comedy movies, action movies, horror movies, television, board games, video games, you name it. At this point, stories that start with the protagonist first discovering they’re caught in a loop may feel like they’re wasting space on events we’ve all seen many times before. But that frees creators to play with ideas like the one at the center of Django Wexler’s violent, grim, yet surprisingly cozy fantasy How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, which launches with the protagonist being tortured to death in a dungeon for at least the hundredth time.
Davi accidentally came from a mundane world to a magical one, isekai-style. She was declared the Chosen One. She joined the forces of humanity against the beast-people and orcs of the wild, and the Dark Lord leading them. Eventually, she failed to save the world and died. And then she woke up again, at the beginning of her loop, as if she’d just lost in a video game — one where she could feel pain as well as despair. After hundreds of agonizing iterations of the same doomed fight, she’s exhausted, furious, and borderline psychotic, so she figures, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” And she sets out to join the bad guys and
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