#ya sff

[thethiefandtheairbender]

Finally got this off the ground - Spotify podcast for now with youtube to follow, focusing on unconventional writing advice for people who are a few years into their writing journey already (although hopefully helpful for everyone)! Our first podcast episode is about worldbuilding religions! if you want ideas on pantheons to politics to artistic portrayals, this is a nice jumping off point!

#writeblr #writing advice #mine #fantasy #ya sff #sff #write or get off the pot

[alvoskia]

Isn't nature supposed to be... nice? I'm more of the 'wolf kills the baby deer without remorse' side of things.

#ally hatten #ally #infransedit #yalit #ya sff #sff #my edits #graphics

[whilereadingandwalking]

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao is a blaze of female anger and the refusal to bury it for anyone or anything. A mix of Pacific Rim and The Hunger Games, it depicts a world where men grow up to be pilots of Chrysalises, giant transforming robots meant to protect Huaxia from the aliens beyond the Great Wall. 

But to obtain their glory, they take concubines into battle—concubines that they drain and leave for dead to fuel the transformations. But Zeitan is done with it all. Her feet painfully bound, her sister dead at the hands of one of Huaxia's most famous pilots. She wants to see him die. Little does she know she'll emerge as one of the best and most controversial female pilots Huaxia has seen. 

I could not put this book down. It is satisfying and cut-throat. Zeitan is determined to watch this world burn, and so are we. I've been anticipating this one ever since someone at the Hugos told me they thought it was the best depiction of female rage they had ever read, and it filled that bill—everything Zeitan feels is justified from a lifetime of chronic pain and being taught that her life is only meant to serve as a man's energy well. 

The danger feels real, the chemistry in the romances is absolute fire, the twists are exciting, the systemic, structural misogyny is infuriating, and the imagery and action are incredibly cinematic. It's brutal, vivid, and powered by a main character who is cunning, uncompromising, and bold. Can't wait for the sequel. 

Content warnings for violence, domestic and emotional abuse, suicidal ideation and discussion, alcohol addiction, torture, ableism, and references to sexual assault.

#iron widow #xiran jay zhao #ya science fiction #ya sff #bookworm #book recommendation #my book reviews

[cappuccinoandglitter]

A reminder that I write books. Some of them are even out there for you to read. Currently on Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com: Pike Martell: books, biography, latest update

#lgbtqia+ authors #sapphic fiction #ya sff #fantasy author #queer lit #gay books #lgbtq community #nonbinary author #queer books #sapphic romance #mermaids #mermaids in love #stolen by the fae

[minnepaulitan]

The amount of writing time spent working out government structures and operations, religious dogma, and urban planning... again, why did I decide to create my own world?

#writblr #amwriting #novel writing #ya sff #sff

[jordanbseltzer]

“As his lips graze mine I realize that the heights of love and the depths of hate feel awfully the same in the dark.”

BLACK MOUNTAIN ACADEMY is LEGENDBORN meets ACE OF SPADES. A YA Contemporary Fantasy inspired by the zodiac and featuring generational female rage turned REVENGE 😈

#book trailer #writer #writeblr #authorstuff #booktok #enemies to lovers #ya sff #contemporary fantasy #this is my first book trailer and i dont know what im doing pls help me

[readordiebyemilyt]

#tor #ya sff #books #reading #asexuality

[virtuallyleslie]

Congratulations Moniquill Blackgoose!

TO SHAPE A DRAGON'S BREATH is on the official reading list for Best First Novel with the Locus Awards

The Locus Awards are reader awards! You decide the winners!

Just go through the poll: https://poll.voting.locusmag.com

#to shape a dragon's breath #writers on tumblr #own voices #amreading #female writers #book tumblr #booktok #ya fantasy #gaslamp fantasy #fantasy #sff books #debut novel #first novel

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #10 – The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

I read A Deadly Education last year and quite enjoyed it (and Novik’s unrelated Spinning Silver is just one of my favourite low fantasy books full stop so she has quite a bit of my trust), so I finally got around to putting in a hold request for the sequel. Broadening your horizons and reading outside your comfort zone means swimming through 400 pages of YA a couple times a year, right? Anyway, despite only barely remembering who anyone but El and Orion were when I went into this, was a fun read!

The book picks up more or less directly where A Deadly Education stops – with the horrible murderous monster-infested extradimensional wizard high school’s cleansing machinery repaired for the first time in generations, and the place therefor incredibly less monster-infested than previously. El, prophesied future dark lady of the apocalypse with a savant’s talent for specifically the sort of magic you cast after cackling and before someone puts a sword in you, doesn’t get to enjoy that much – her senior year seems destined to be spent being the target of just about every monster that’s left. Eventually you really have to wonder if the school is trying to kill you – and that question is where the plot really starts to go off.

So I said it before, but this is very much YA. I don’t mean that as an insult, or even a marker of quality, just that it’s a book from the perspective of a 17 year old looking down the end of high school and clearly written to provide a relatable emotional reality for an assumed audience of the same. So El sometimes acts like a cartoon character, and is pathologically incapable of expressing her emotions coherently or expressing affection for the guy she likes in any sane manner, and is far more blase about murder attempts and soul-eating monsters than emotionally awkward conversations – but honestly all that just rings as pretty true to life. Deeply aggravating at times, and her internal monologue and all its snark and doublethink does occasionally grate a bit, but overall it really works. She’s just a fun character to spend time in the head of, (and far less irritating in basically every way than she was in the last book. So hey, maturity!).

The emotional beats were all pretty simple and clearly telegraphed, and it isn’t exactly a book that requires you to sit down and ponder deep symbolism or metaphor to comprehend, but the pacing is tight and it’s very readable. The prose isn’t really anything to write home about – especially knowing what Novik can do when she decides to get fancy and show off a bit – but it very clear and just dripping with El’s personality on every page. I read this at the same time as I was picking through an incredibly dense and citation-heavy historical reader, and the contrast made me very appreciative of those virtues.

Character-wise – well, there’s El, and Orion (love interest, single-minded and near divinely-ordained monster hunter, golden boy of the most powerful enclave in the world), and there’s El’s few close friends, and then there’s a cast of dozens of students with maybe one memorable character trait who kind of drift in and out of the narrative as required. The amount of nuance and exploration someone gets drops off dramatically with each step down the list you go. Most of the cast shows up precisely when required and is more or less forgotten about directly afterwards – which does sell this being a school with over a thousand students in it! But the number of characters who really feel real drops off pretty rapidly.

(Also like, I assume it just comes down to social progress in the 2010s coming at you fast, but you really get the sense that at some point between the books getting written the publishers sent down a memo that you were allowed to say queer people existed now.)

Even more than Deadly Education, this is a book without any sort of singular villain, or even really any consistent antagonists. Some of the other students are assholes, sure, but the book’s whole thesis is that no one is that murderous or awful for the sake of it – they are because they’re rats in a cage, convinced that amoral self-interest and husbanding and acquiring every resource they can is the only hope they have of maybe living to see their families again. Offered a chance to do good, to actually change things for the better and help everyone without getting themselves killed in the process, just about everyone takes it. Even the semi-intelligent school itself gets in on it by the end, pressing the senior class to figure something out and make it obsolete – and the whole conflict of the final act is how and whether everyone will.

El and Orion can both kill basically arbitrarily large numbers of monsters (or people), so the monster-killing is never really where the book finds its drama either. I mean, both do a lot of it through the climax, but the actual tension mostly comes down to crowd management and logistics and whether everyone else is as committed to this as the two of them are.

As for what they’re struggling against – so like, this isn’t Divergent, by the standards of the YA I read in high school, the social commentary is both subtle and nuanced. But I mean, it’s also a story where highschool is four years or murder-hell-prison and justified only because it’s barely the lesser of two evils, and also a story where the poor and marginalized are only kept around more-or-less explicitly as ablative bodies for the kids the powers that be care about, with their only hope of good life being so impressive and useful to those kids that they try to bring them along when they ascend back up to the gilded paradise that is their birthright. So like, not that subtle.

As far as teenage romances go (which, for me, really isn’t very fair at all), El and Orion’s was surprisingly tolerable. It helps that they’re both actually deeply profoundly weird about it, and also that the book didn’t try to milk any drama out of will-they/won’t-they stuff or a love triangle. The ‘and they have sex for the first time the night before the final climactic struggle where one or both of them could very well die’ did feel right out of an old bioware game, though. (Also I’m just a sucker for tragedy and ironic mirroring/repetition, so the ending was great for me).

Look forward to finishing the series whenever I get around to it sometime in the fall.

#book review #the last graduate #the scholomance #sff #ya #urban fantasy

[scholar-of-yemdresh]

Will anybody be interested if I made a list of adult transmasc and Nonbinary/transneutral main/major characters in adult fantasy and Science Books.

Because I'm legit sick of the infantilisation both within and outside the community. Why is so much of the NB and transmasc rep children 😭.

Even outside of the miniscule rep Even less of it are grown adult main characters. None of that side character's love interest is a trans dude business, or a they/them appears for one page and is never seen again.

Anyway I've got a handful of characters in books I've read/on my TBR and I want to share them with others looking for this kind of rep.

#adult fantasy #adult science fiction #adult sci-fi #lgbtq #queer representation #trans #transmasc #nonbinary #transneutral #also I'm not interested in romance so a NB mc in a capital R fantasy romance i don't give. shit about that guff lol #And why are so many grown ass trans(or queer in general) adults so invested in YA #Like Gawd damn all the rep shouldn't regulated to kids books. #by adult the characters need to be 20s and above #because if i used the 18/19 year old legal adult excuse way too much YA BS will clog the list lol #adult sff #books

[bookishfeylin]

Black Fantasy TBR Part 1

It's taking so long to compile all my books that I might as well release my tbr one portion at a time. This isn't really that organized, but here's the first part of my fantasy (and a little bit of scifi) tbr listed out for people who are curious and/or want to see more fantasy books with Black protagonists:

The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton

Nubia: The Awakening by Omar Epps and Clarence A. Haynes

A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow

Abengoni: First Calling by Charles R. Saunders

Across the Broken Tide by Lakase Cousino

Iron Cast by Destiny Soria

That Self-Same Metal by Brittany N. Williams

Kingdom of Feathers by Deborah Grace White

Priestess of nKu by Milton J Davis

Promise of Shadows by Justina Ireland

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Queen of Zazzau by J.S. Emuakpor

Elysium by Nora Sakavic

Daughters of Jubilation by Kara Lee Corthron

Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Dream Country by Ashaye Brown

The Reluctant Sacrifice by Kerr-Ann Dempster

She Steals Justice by J. Clark

Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen

Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender

The Hope of Aferi: The Wolf Queen by Cerece Rennie Murphy

A River of Royal Blood by Amanda Joy

The Blazing Star by Imani Josey

A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne Brown

Bones to the Wind by Tatiana Obey

Treachery of Water by Angela J. Ford

Wings of Ebony by J. Elle

Beautiful Nightmare by L.C. Son

Conquest by Celeste Harte

Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye

The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin

Magic Dark, Magic Divine by A.J. Locke

Shadow's Dissident by Ariel Paiement

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

Mirage by Somaiya Daud

A Conspiracy of Stars by Olivia A. Cole

This was mostly stand-alones and duologies, so the next part of my tbr should be mostly trilogies and longer series.

#black books #black authors #black sff books #black fantasy books #black ya books #ya books #bookblr #book tumblr #diverse fantasy books #diversity in fantasy #diverse books #fantasy #fantasy books #ya fantasy #diverse fantasy #bookish rambles #TBR #ofc i haven't read any of these yet so please look up trigger warnings and age and stuff because some are adult and some aren't #very few people will probably see this or care but i hope at least a few black girls see this #booklr #representation matters

[thethiefandtheairbender]

also for newer followers who might not know

i'm writing a book! and it's getting published!

if you just want the immediate details you can click the read and read a short FAQ! if you need more to get sold on it, stick around and check it out!

My YA SFF fantasy debut, ALVOSKIA: Call of the Infrans, follows an Unchosen one named Ally who is struggling to find where she belongs amidst her chosen one found family family when violence arrives at their doorstep, and they're forced to fulfil their duties earlier than expected. There's dragons and child soldiers and subverted fantasy tropes, some tone consistent werewolves, an almost entirely queer main cast with the majority also being characters of colour, and if you've been following my blog for any amount of time, it probably has something for you.

If you like ATLA: "what if there were multiple Avatars running around, and what if they weren't all automatically good people?" + past lives and reincarnation cycles

If you like Derry Girls: hot mess of teenagers getting in and out of trouble together while being ridiculous (and sometimes very sad)

If you like PJO: young teenagers with cool powers going on quests together and coming-of-age. And snark. Lots of snark

If you like Six of Crows: morally dubious collection of protagonists, some heisting may or may not happen, outsiders working together

If you like TDP: elves and dragons and long standing grudges and politics

If you like Star Wars: y'know how the Force like consumes you the farther you wander in? yeah that's the magic system here. + some shadow, death, and shapeshifter stuff

If you like HTTYD: you're here for the found family and fun fantasy aesthetic aren't you

Rep: queer (aro, ace, bi, pan, trans, lesbian, nonbinary, genderfluid, gay main characters, often times overlapping); Asian (Indonesian), Black, Sri Lankan and Pakistani (coded) rep; hijabi rep; one character is an amputee and one main character is Autistic.

The debut month is March 2026! Sometimes there is even very pretty (commissioned or friends) art for it:

If you want more info in the meantime you can shoot me an ask or you can follow this sideblog for it. If you want a taste of my fandom writing first you can check out my AO3 or writing snippets on said side blog, like this one:

Likes and reblogs mean a lot and I hope you enjoy!

#indie author #sff ya #sff #young adult #writeblr #fantasy #original character #infrans #alvoskia #atla #pjo #derry girls #httyd #sw #six of crows

[alvoskia]

When war comes, you will be expected to end it.

#infransedit #yalitedit #sff #ya sff #ya #fantasy #my edits #graphics #indie sff #indie lit #writeblr #book one

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Walking In Two Worlds & The Everlasting Road

YA sff set in the near future where an opensource augmented reality is commonly used like social media, and there’s also a completely virtual fantasy game version

follows an Anishinaabe girl who who’s the top player in the VR game, and is constantly fighting to keep her place against the misogynist neo-nazi group in second place

as well as her real life, dealing with being a shy and self-conscious teen growing up on the Rez, and her brother having cancer

and a Uyghur boy who’s moved to her community from China after finding acceptance in an online community (even when he doesn’t agree with their more extreme views) - but when he gets to know Bugz, he has to decide who truly deserves his loyalty

great mix of sff and culture, the future while also very real community traumas of the past (and present)

#walking in two worlds #the everlasting road #wab kinew #aroaessidhe 2024 reads #This has some REALLY interesting and important concepts! #I just think it could have used some more development… Obvs this is YA and I’m an adult I know I’m not quite the audience! #There’s a lot of depth in the setup of the characters but I feel like it skips a lot of the progression #I think there could have been space for more development in a lot of places to make the story feel more dimensional #- but also has so many plot threads that maybe that would have bulked it out too much #It does also jump around quite a bit between the different parts but I think that makes sense with how juggling with irl / online life. #she’s got a lot of internalised fatphobia at the start (and the love interest going “I don’t think you’re fat!!” when people call her fat.. #then in book 2 suddenly she’s okay about it - again I wish there was some progression! #her brothers cancer journey is. basically all offscreen lol mostly as set up for plot in book 2. so it doesn't have the emotional impact it #could have.. #I liked the way it integrates her culture into the game in a really cool way (though I would have liked more detail there) #also having auto language translators but they regularly don't translate quite right / still run into issues - realistic! #the parallels drawn between his being taken from his family and put in a state education school and Indigenous residential schools #the way that a future world will never be as separate from the past as ur average sff future often portrays #but yeah anyway lots of good ideas execution not so much for me..

[ingloriousgigi]

“The entitled assholes of the world are sustained by girls who forgive too easily.” ― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

#iron widow #xiran jay zhao #mood boards #booklr #sff books #ya books #hot topics

[apollo-cackling]

a good female character is when a female character is traumatised and abrasive. the more awful she is to be around the gooder female character she is

#I'm joking but also kind of not #my rambles #it's very funny to me that back when I was reading mostly YA/etc the character I was obsessed with was catra #and then my taste in sff got darker and now it's felisin #like yea. my tastes in books changed. favourite character type is still this tho! #felisin paran #catra #malazan #spop #10n #20n