May 2026 Science Fiction and Fantasy: Your Next Great Read Awaits

The Temporal Location of the Radiant Star divides the people of Ooioiaa — sacred to locals, merely an obstacle to the conquering Radch Empire. As the Radch prepare to absorb the site into their culture, they grant one final concession: a living man may join the mummified saints within. This single decision sends shockwaves through a city already fracturing under food shortages, riots, and an imperial communications blackout.

Three lives are transformed — a religious visionary, a socialite whose world is upended, and a young man enslaved who finds an unlikely path to freedom.

Isako is a legendary swordswoman ready to meet her end with honor — until one final mission pulls her back. At its center is Martim, her most troublesome apprentice, now inexplicably risen to the top of a shadowy corporate world. Drawn into a web of espionage and buried secrets, what she uncovers could reshape humanity’s future among the stars.

Set in a universe where wealth governs life and death, The Last Contract of Isako is a gripping sci-fi epic about loyalty, legacy, and what one woman ultimately decides is worth dying for.

Amina al-Sirafi has finally found her balance — thrilling seafaring adventures for a council of immortal peris, while still coming home to her daughter. Then her troublesome spirit-husband provokes the council’s fury, landing her an impossible task: steal a fate-altering spindle from an inescapable island. Leaving behind an increasingly suspicious Marjana, Amina sails into mounting dangers — deadly storms, a poison mistress, old enemies.

But the greatest threat is the peris’ unraveling secrets, hinting at a deadlier game with an adversary unlike any she’s faced — and a traitor hiding among her own crew.

Everyone’s favorite antisocial SecUnit is back. After volunteering for a rescue mission — possibly its worst decision yet — Murderbot finds itself stuck with a group of unfamiliar humans for an uncomfortably extended period. Worse still: there are children involved. This unfortunate situation may even require eye contact. Fortunately, having someone else validate your terrible choices does take the edge off.

The next installment in Martha Wells’ beloved, award-winning Murderbot Diaries series delivers everything fans adore — deadpan humor, reluctant heroism, and one heavily-armed construct desperately wishing it could just watch serials instead of saving people.

Irody Hasp is a Mortedant — a cleric who reads the final thoughts of the dead — and nobody’s favorite person for it. Barely tolerated even within his own guild, he scrapes by on the lowliest assignments. Then a routine corpse-reading spirals into catastrophe: his apprentice is murdered, and Irody becomes the prime suspect.

To clear his name, he must find the real killer himself — a dangerous investigation that draws powerful, ruthless enemies and unravels a conspiracy threatening the entire corrupt, wondrous city he calls home.

Every Sunday, Oona the St. Berdoodle and her owner Zsuzsu visit the Redemption Center — an enigmatic local landmark mistaken for a haunted mansion. When a celebrity turns up murdered, Oona finds herself unlikely allies with a ragtag band of misfits, unraveling threads of deception surrounding the Center’s mystery.

But Oona carries two extraordinary secrets: she’s a multiverse citizen who travels between dimensions at will — and she knows exactly who committed the murder. Unfortunately, the killer knows she knows, and he’ll do anything to silence her permanently.

Morgan Blackwater’s mother is a legendary demon-slaying wizard. Morgan sells software for a startup that hasn’t figured out its own product. With magic dyslexia and zero interest in heroics, she’s happily carved out a mundane life — until she finds her boss dead mid-demon-deal and inherits his trapped, disturbingly attractive demon, Luke.

Hiding Luke from her mother spirals into an accidental trip to the Infernal Plane, where hell turns out to be exactly as corporate as expected. Now Morgan owes one human soul — and her insufferable tech-bro CEO is looking increasingly expendable.

In the chaos of the 1941 German blitzkrieg, four children find unlikely refuge in the Lithuanian forest. Neriya, a Jewish girl with a gift for biology, has long suspected her local crow flock is extraordinary. Fleeing alongside Polish deserter Czeslaw, Roma fugitive Kezia, and a silent abandoned boy named Innokentiy, she discovers just how right she was.

The crows — keepers of their own magnificent secret — warn the children of danger and shield them from soldiers, partisans, and bandits alike, forging an unbreakable bond between four displaced souls and their remarkable avian guardians.

Mercy Chan arrived in Hong Kong with nothing — no family, no money, no memories — and rebuilt her life in the ghost-infested slums of Kowloon Walled City, working as a spirit negotiator for the local triad. But the past she can’t remember refuses to stay buried. A dangerously powerful ghost has invaded Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and claiming intimate knowledge of Mercy’s forgotten history.

As she’s pulled into a deadly chase with this malevolent spirit, she begins to suspect the monster haunting her city may be one she herself created.

Nisha, a Chicago reproductive health worker barely managing her depression amid escalating abortion bans, seeks refuge in a museum’s Indian art exhibit — and wakes up collapsed on the floor, bleeding, beside a statue she shouldn’t have touched. In the days following, a strange power awakens within her, drawing dangerous, covetous figures into her orbit.

Navigating uneasy alliances and a centuries-old mystery, Nisha must unravel the truth behind her terrifying abilities before the threats closing in destroy everything she loves — her community, her people, and the clinic she’s sworn to protect.

In Rainshadow City, poverty and corruption reign under the shadow of the criminal Lucky Crows. Three revenge-driven siblings hunt the gang that murdered their beloved aunt. An imperial prince quietly befriends magical Sun Spirits only he can perceive. A reluctant immigrant soldier wishes he’d never become a gangster. When one daring theft — a dragon pearl stolen from the Crows’ leader — collides these unlikely lives together, the city’s entire future hangs in the balance.

Unfolding across just two days, The Rainshadow Orphans blends Studio Ghibli warmth with cyberpunk grit in a story about defying corruption and seizing destiny.

For three centuries, humanity’s greatest artworks have been “on loan” at the Greenwood Museum. Now Earth wants them back — but the alien curators aren’t returning them, and the government won’t risk force. That leaves one option: an intergalactic art heist.

The crew is eccentric — a charismatic ringleader, an insectoid pilot of unclear taxonomy, an illegally modded muscle woman, and Jack, Earth’s most powerful uncorrupted machine intelligence. Then there’s narrator Fennel Tycho, ostensibly the art history expert, but really just the only person Jack would work with — not that it helps much.

The Malicarn — a land of dragons, wizards, and warriors — has become a blockbuster phenomenon, its fantasy world faithfully recreated on screen. But its population of thousands are no mere characters: they’re real people, utterly convinced their fabricated medieval lives are genuine.

When a fan-favorite actor begins questioning the studio’s operation, he discovers that momentum of this magnitude is nearly impossible to stop. And liberating people who already believe themselves free turns out to be a far more complicated — and dangerous — mission than he ever anticipated.