This list is about regime change in sff. Not rebels running around torching things, or dreaming of a better day, but fiction that actually deals with what happens when the ruling order forcibly changes. It was a hard list to compile, because most people want aspirational stories, not hard truths, even authors, it seems.
Elliott is one of the best world builders in fantasy, and Crossroads does not disappoint. These novels deal with not only the clash of worlds, but what it means when a foreign army marches into another nation and forcibly changes the way things are done, with only the brutal efficiency that can be managed by religious zeal and desperate fear. And also there are giant eagles.
2. Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson
In this case, the humans start out on top, until some computers achieve ascendancy and decide the humans are too dangerous to keep around. This is the story of the survivors of the original blow out, and how they adapt to a world where every machine is a potential murderer.
3. Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch #2), by Ann Leckie
In the fallout of Breq’s mission to kill Anaander Mianaai for her role in the destruction of Breq’s ship Justice of Toren, Breq must travel to a distant system where possible rebellion brews. A sort of peace may now exist, but ripples of Mianaai’s duplicity are sparking all sorts of problems across Radch space and Breq must find the problems and quell them–in her own, not necessarily imperial, ways–before the empire falls apart.
4. The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard
Selene is doing her best to hold House Silverspires together after the mysterious disappearance of Morningstar, the most powerful of all the angels who fell from Heaven, but despite her best efforts, things are falling apart. A series of mysterious deaths and magical failures make Silverspires ripe for plucking by the likes of House Hawthorn or even houses not controlled by Fallen. This is the aftermath of regime change in one house, but the loss of Morningstar may mean the loss of ascendancy for all Fallen in Paris if the mystery is not solved.
5. Cloudbound(Bone Universe #2), by Fran Wilde
In this second of a trilogy, Kirit and Nat must contend with the consequences of their actions from Updraft, in which they revealed how the Spire and its Singers have been hiding the truth of the city from its inhabitants. Although these secrets may have provided some safety and kept order–important for a populace who lives in the sky and for whom any large-scale disruption to trade could prove disastrous–it may also have led to the imminent collapse of the city structure and understanding of the city’s history. Kirit and Nat are not welcomed as heroes, but looked upon with suspicion, forced out of the society they’d hoped to save, existing on the edges of the city and down in the damp cloudbound layers from which citizens usually never returned.
Advertisements Share this:
