A few elements recur in the coming season’s SFF action-adventure novels: sought-after artifacts, gamelike settings, and good old-fashioned space romps. But no matter the details, it’s the human element that holds it all together.
“I want a story where I can go along with somebody on a high-stakes physical adventure, through chases and fight scenes—if there’s a good emotional reason to justify all of that,” says Andrew Ludington, whose first novel, the time-travel thriller Splinter Effect, is due out from Minotaur in March.
Ludington and other sci fi and fantasy authors took PW on a wild ride through their forthcoming books.
Readers of the lost ark
Ludington says he was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies when writing his debut, in which an archeologist races through centuries past to retrieve a precious stolen artifact. The character’s goal is twofold: restore the object’s cultural significance to contemporary society and find some redemption after his failure to recover it the first time resulted in his mentee’s death.
The Improvisers (Harper Voyager, Nov.), a spin-off from Nicole Glover’s Murder and Magic fantasy series set in an alternate 1930s America, likewise hinges on a mission to recover missing objects. Velma Frye, a former bootlegger of forbidden magic turned stunt pilot, goes on the hunt for dangerous enchanted devices that are wreaking havoc across the country. “The action propels a lot of the smaller subplots and human aspects of things,” Glover says. PW’s starred review praised the book’s “colorful cast, unique magic system, and the slow-burning, enemies-to-lovers romance.”
Gareth L. Powell sees the personal and civilizational stakes as equally important in his space opera Future’s Edge (Titan, Feb. 2025). After Earth’s destruction, an
archeologist waiting at a remote refugee camp for her lover must track down an artifact that may be instrumental
in humanity’s survival. Powell, who describes the book as “Casablanca in space,” contrasts depicting action on screen with doing so on page. In a novel, he says, “You have to make the action. You have to describe it from the main character’s point of view—what they see, smell, taste—and they don’t see the whole picture.”
Game start
Gaming scenarios are natural settings for action-adventure stories. Melissa Caruso drew on her experiences as a LARPer (someone who participates in live-action role-playing games) and tabletop gamer for The Last Hour Between Worlds (Orbit, Nov.), which sees Kembral Thorne, an interdimensional investigator and new mother, get stuck in a murder time loop with layered realities. Action scenes are integral to Caruso’s storytelling, she says. “They have a function, whether it’s a character or a plot function, that makes them feel like they matter.” PW’s review said the author “never takes her foot off the gas, marrying riveting action with meticulous worldbuilding and eccentric characters through effortless prose.”
In Dan Hanks’s The Way Up Is Death (Angry Robot, Jan. 2025), 13 strangers get pulled into the base of a tower that appears in the sky, and must battle to the top before time’s up. Hanks describes his characters as ordinary people who’ve gotten, literally and figuratively, way over their heads. “Different personalities react to the gamification of their lives in different ways,” he says. “A lot of the characters are just trying to survive, and for them, that’s their reward. Others are looking for something greater and will do anything they can to win.”
Characters needn’t be human to earn the reader’s investment. In Daryl Gregory’s When We Were Real (Saga, Apr. 2025), the world has been revealed to be a digital simulacrum. Two best friends go on a weeklong bus tour of North America’s greatest glitches, a trip whose final stop may hold answers to who’s running the fabricated reality. Though the duo is the “spine of the book,” Gregory says, he gives the rest of the misfit tourists time to shine. “Just because you’re made of zeroes and ones doesn’t mean you don’t feel loved or don’t feel responsible for other people. It’s real for you, so you might as well act like it’s real for everybody else as well.”
Down to Earth
Science fiction adventure stories are rife with swaggering space cowboy types, but A.G. Rodriguez went in a different direction for Space Brooms! (Angry Robot, Mar. 2025), in which space station custodian Johnny Gomez discovers a data chip that makes him the target of multiple alien species, black markets, and criminal gang syndicates. “Unexpected heroes are the guys nobody gives a chance to or thinks can do it, but who actually do it,” says Rodriguez, who wanted to write a reluctant hero story that poked fun at the “galaxy depends on it” trope.
John Scalzi presents an absurd space scenario—what if the moon turned to cheese?—in When the Moon Hits Your Eye (Tor, Mar. 2025), devoting one chapter to each of his 29 players. “The character piece is paramount,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how breathtaking your action is if, fundamentally, your audience doesn’t have someone for whom there are stakes.” Each person has a distinct ambition, whether it’s the billionaire who’s trying not to go bankrupt after funding a lunar landing or two feuding brothers with competing cheese shops who are trying to reconcile before it’s too late.
For Makana Yamamoto, a madcap premise—“Ocean’s 8 but with lesbians in space”—is the vehicle for imagining a diaspora in the stars. In Hammajang Luck (Harper Voyager, Jan. 2025), about an eight-person crew who set out to rob the trillionaire who’s gentrifying their space station, Yamamoto draws on their Hawaiian heritage and experiences with loss. “While writing, I was grappling with these very real issues of loved ones passing, and the neighborhood I knew changing, and the relationships I had fading away,” Yamamoto says. “How do I cope with that loss and also build something different?”
Edward Ashton’s Fourth Consort (St. Martin’s, Feb. 2025) follows a competent but broken protagonist who inadvertently winds up on an interstellar pillaging mission that leaves him stranded on a hostile planet. Like other authors interviewed for this piece, Ashton emphasizes character motivation without losing sight of the fact that readers are there for the high-stakes thrills.
“We all like to feel that adrenaline, but we’d rather feel it at one degree of separation, where we’re not actually in mortal danger,” Ashton says. “That’s what these kinds of books allow us to do.”
