The Best Books of 2023: Science Fiction and Fantasy!

2023 was yet another very weak year for science fiction and fantasy, every month choked either with a million incredibly derivative indie publications or with a handful of fairly lame mainstream releases, or both. Dozens and dozens of new releases were tenth, twentieth, or two thousandth chapters in some ongoing series or other (no offense to the dogged authors of these series, but honestly: try something new once in a while, just to remind yourself how it feels to be a writer as opposed to a sequelist), which is fine if diminishingly exciting for fans but utterly baffling for newcomers. Even with pruning and picking, it was ultimately impossible to build a year-end list without sequels,

10 Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit)

This clever take on the 'dark forest' idea of a galaxy full of predatory super-species just waiting to pounce on some new tadpole-spacefarers gets a clever and very readable twist in Tchaikovsky's saga of a struggling human colony on a terraformed alien world and the conflicts that arise when that colony is approached by aliens with a fairly obvious hidden agenda.

9 A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon (Bloomsbury)

In another continuation-novel, Shannon here furthers the epic story laid out in her fantastic Priory of the Orange Tree, tracing the lives of her four main characters and a very large and well fleshed-out cast of secondary characters. This is very appealingly person-driven narrative, and although it's not going to be much use to those who haven't read the first volume, it's certainly going to please readers who have.

8 Cold People by Tom Rob Smith (Scribner)

Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 and Agent 6 both disappointed me, so I went into this new book with my guard up – and I was delightfully surprised: virtually all the stooping pandering I saw in his thrillers was gone from this story of humans herded and penned into bitterly cold Antarctic territories by alien conquerors. As anachronistic as it might feel in 2023 to equate Antarctica with bitter cold (in the lifetime of most of this book's readers, it will be a fertile island-continent surrounded by temperate ocean currents), this novel is sharp and grippingly intelligent in its execution.

7 Observer by Robert Lanza & Nancy Kress (Fiction Studio Books)

A futuristic medical thriller wasn't exactly the kind of thing I might have expected from the great science fiction author Nancy Kress, but this book, the story of an enterprising neurosurgeon being drawn into disturbing secret research on the nature of consciousness and mortality, is terrific and thought-provoking.

6 The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (Tor)

Our list returns to the classic science fiction idea of terraforming in this heartfelt novel by Newitz about a planet-shaping team whose dream of changing the planet Sask-E is darkly complicated by the one discovery guaranteed to derail such dreams: the presence of indigenous life. Newitz's narrative wonderfully follows the ensuing complications.

5 Hopeland by Ian McDonald (Tor)

This author's “Luna” sequence is full of straight-up and deliciously enjoyable traditional science fiction, and this book is completely different in tone and setting but every bit as enjoyable, the story of a strangely compelling alternate London (and world) being navigated by the 2023 requisite Girl Who's the Key To Everything, only here very nearly rendered likable. The novel is a good example of how reliable a talented author can be even when they try something new.

4 The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (Tor.com)

Even if the ubiquity of series-fiction in SFF is a bit depressing, there's always something refreshing-feeling about the start of any series, and this one by Candon, the first in the “Downworld” series, is a perfect case-in-point: it's the dusty, weathered story of dead machine god's gay outcast son, and it's done in such deadpan, assured tones throughout that readers will gladly sign up for future volumes.

3 Cassiel’s Servant by Jacqueline Carey (Tor)

In another continuation of a long-running series, Carey returns to the world of Terre D'Ange and the characters of her breakout book from 300 years ago, Cushiel's Dart. Luckily for readers, that world and those characters have always been deeply fascinating, and this author's skill at evoking both has only grown with each book. In these pages, that skill just barely manages to cover the needs of first-time readers.

2 Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)

The reliably-terrific Harkaway here writes a taut, involving novel that's neither a prequel nor a sequel to anything, instead being a fantastic fully-realized world on its own two feet, the story of a world containing a thin and dwindling population of genetic super-beings called Titans. When one of these towering, ancient beings is found dead by violence, the story centers around the luckless detective who has to solve the rarest crime of all in this strange world.

1 Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini (Tor)

Paolini follows up his epic To Sleep in a Sea of Stars with this much slimmer and more pointed novel set in the same shared universe, the story of an intrepid (and conflicted) group trekking across a bleak and empty world in order to examine an ominous – and certainly not natural – gaping hole in the ground. It's a simple enough premise, but Paolini once again displays his increasingly impressive powers not only to make it spellbinding but also to make it the best science fiction novel of the year.