Best SFF Books of 2018

My Favorite SFF Books Read in 2018

Christmas was, of course, last week. If any of you readers are like me, you asked for--and hopefully received!--a lot of books for the holiday this year. Never mind that I'm a Buddhist and don't believe in God or their controversial demigods, I will take any excuse to beg for books. And spend time on family, I guess.

For me personally, 2019 seems to the be the year that I should really consider getting an extra bookshelf rather than just piling all the books in my room. But before we move forward, I thought it would be fun to look back on the best sci-fi and fantasy books I personally read and reviewed in 2018.

Note: these are in no particular order. Don't ask me to choose my singular favorite or to even vaguely list them. That'd be like torture.

Another note: these are all books that I read in 2018. While some of them did come out this year, some are a few years older. But they're included in this list because it's my blog and therefore follows my rules of time, space, and physics. Enjoy!

Throne of Glass Series

While Sarah J. Maas's YA epic fantasy series has been going on for years, I only just got into it a few months ago, and binge-read all seven available books--including the prequel anthology--before impatiently waiting three weeks for Kingdom of Ash to come out. Talk about good timing! Though I've had mixed feelings about this series (I'm putting down three review buttons, for crying out loud), it's still an excellent read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the epic fantasy genre.

series review
​(pre-koa)

how not to write a romantic subplot
​(starring sarah j. maas)

kingdom of ash review

The Adventure Zone Graphic Novel

Do you like Dungeons & Dragons and/or have a really fucked up sense of humor? You'll want to check out the new graphic novel series The Adventure Zone , based on a podcast of the same name. It's basically a D&D adventure that makes fun of D&D adventures. You'll never look at oregano or umbrellas the same way again.

Fun fact: book two comes out in 2019! And according to my roommate (who loaned me book one and also follows the podcast, of which I will remain blissfully unaware), it only gets more fucked up. So, looking forward to that!

read the review

Red Queen

The Red Queen series is a YA fantasy/possible post-apocalyptic starring Mare, whose story is engaging and incredible enough that I was even able to forgive the love triangle, the most unforgivable of triangles.

Now this is kind of interesting: when I posted my review for Red Queen online, the main response I got was: "Book one was great, but the sequels sucked." There were a few dissenters, but that was the majority vote. So I'll be interested to start reading Glass Sword (that's book two of this series, which I got as a Christmas present--yay!) and see whether the criticism is warranted or if everyone's just full of BS.

read the review

By Fire Above

Anyone who's read previous blog posts about Robyn Bennis's Signal Airship series and/or the interview I did with her a while ago knows that I absolutely adore these steampunk books.

​ By Fire Above is the second in this series, taking place immediately after Bennis's smashing opener The Guns Above . It's basically feminist military sci-fi with airships and snark. Like, all the snark . The characters are constantly bickering with one another and Josette (the main character) even starts a relationship with her BFF's older brother just to annoy said BFF. It's beautiful.

read the review

Trials of Apollo: The Burning Maze

Rick Riordan released the third book in his Trials of Apollo series back in May and subsequently broke the fandom. I can't go into details because of spoilers, but basically it involves a lot of tears, the return of two Heroes of Olympus characters, and even more tears. I'm pretty sure that man feeds off of the despair of his readers. But it's not like many of us were that surprised. Riordan loves his patterns, and book three of his Greek series is always a heartbreaker (see Zoe in The Titan's Curse , and Percy and Annabeth at the end of The Mark of Athena ​).

If you're new to Riordan, then you need to fix that. Start with the Percy Jackson series, followed by the Heroes of Olympus series, followed by The Trials of Apollo . This is pretty much mandatory reading for anyone interested in YA fantasy.

read the review

The Nemesis series

You know how most superhero movies/books/shows feature a cast of characters that are exclusively cisgender, straighter than Hawkeye's arrows, and anywhere from 90-99% white?

April Daniels basically decided ​f uck that and has an ongoing YA superhero series starring Danny, who's basically transgender Superman--er, Super woman --with a lot of self-esteem and anger issues. Daniels delves into all the things without coming across as preachy, and somehow manages to fuse the dark realism of Watchmen with the hopeful theme of classic superhero stories. Now that's a superpower.

read the review

Archangel

This is book two of Margaret Fortune's series The Spectre War , and I literally cannot say anything regarding Archangel 's story or plot without revealing all the spoilers for book one, Nova .

It's basically a mystery series with a hard sci-fi setting. Publishers consider it to be adult sci-fi, but I'd argue that it should belong in the YA section. It's got all the right ingredients: young protagonist(s), fast pace, lots of action, lots of depth, a nice bundle of family drama...It's also got a lot of death, destruction, and an argument on the ethics of genocide. I guess older adults don't like to think that teenagers actually talk about that stuff? (They totally do.)

If you haven't started this series, I highly recommend it. If you've read Nova but not Archangel , I can assure you that the sequel is just as good.

read the review for nova ​

read the review for ​archangel

Lagoon

An alien invasion story that doesn't take place in New York. Whoo-hoo!

Nnedi Okorafor is considered a queen of afrofuturism--that is, science fiction heavily influenced by African/African American culture and people. And rightly so; she is fan-fucking-tastic.

Lagoon takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. While you could consider it sci-fi, it also incorporates fantasy elements and includes several characters who are African gods and witches. It's short and sweet, but manages to tackle a wide variety of issues, from LGBT issues to global pollution to the nature of humanity. If you're a sci-fi nut looking for something a little different, this is something you want to check out.

watch the review

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What were your favorite books from this year? Let me know in the comments so I can add them to my reading list!

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