Science fantasy makes room for both impossible technology and genuine magic. These eight 21st-century books move between spaceships, ancient powers, artificial intelligence, dragons, demons and worlds on the brink of collapse.
Like the best genre-blending arcade experiences, each story uses familiar ideas in unexpected combinations. If imaginative worlds are your thing, you may also enjoy browsing RETROCADE’s arcade blog or exploring an arcade machine for your games room.
Cinder by Marissa Meyer (2012)
Marissa Meyer reworks Cinderella as a science-fiction adventure. Cinder is a cyborg mechanic living in New Beijing who becomes caught in a royal conspiracy involving the people of the Moon. These lunar inhabitants can manipulate others by controlling their bioelectricity.
The novel launches The Lunar Chronicles, a continuing series that brings satellites, genetic engineering and spaceships to stories inspired by Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White. The books are also being adapted into an animated television series.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning novel begins with the destruction of the world and follows three women living through its consequences. It is the opening volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, a bleak examination of climate change, social intolerance and survival.
People with the ability to trigger the geological forces that shattered the world must conceal their powers, fearing violence from mobs and even their own families. What initially appears to be magic is ultimately connected to forgotten technology.
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2016)
Charlie Jane Anders’ Nebula Award-winning novel follows Patricia, a young witch, and Laurence, a gifted boy who builds his own time machine. Their relationship crosses the boundary between magic and science while the wider world slowly deteriorates through war and severe storms.
Patricia and Laurence repeatedly find one another, separate and reunite across their lives. Their connection may be the key to joining the two forces and preventing humanity’s destruction.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (2016)
In the first book of the Machineries of Empire trilogy, Kel Cheris is ordered to reclaim a fortress seized by enemies labelled heretics by the galactic government. To succeed, she must share her consciousness with General Shuos Jedao, one of history’s most brilliant tacticians.
Jedao was executed after using a devastating weapon to kill a million people, including troops under his own command. Cheris must decide whether Jedao, her superiors and her own judgement can be trusted. The space opera draws on Korean folklore and introduces calendrical workings, rituals that power mind control and technologies capable of violating the laws of physics.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (2019)
Gideon has spent her life attempting to escape the Ninth House, a planet that serves as the prison of the godlike Emperor’s most dangerous enemy. Her opportunity arrives when she is assigned to protect the necromancer Harrow while the heirs of the empire’s great houses compete in trials for a chance at immortality.
The pair begin as bitter rivals, but survival forces them to cooperate as competitors are murdered in a funny, claustrophobic mystery. The story continues in Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth, with a fourth book in development.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (2020)
Matt Dinniman’s self-published Dungeon Crawler Carl series helped popularise LitRPG fiction before receiving a commercial printing in 2024. Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, is pulled into an alien reality-television competition alongside his ex-girlfriend’s valuable show cat.
The unlikely team battles monsters, gains levels, entertains a cruel artificial intelligence and builds an audience across the galaxy. Seth MacFarlane is developing an adaptation for Peacock. Readers who enjoy interactive worlds may also want to compare the experience with RETROCADE’s virtual pinball machines.
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2021)
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella shows how the same events can look like fantasy or science fiction depending on who is observing them. Princess Lynesse Fourth-Daughter seeks the aid of Nyrgoth Elder, an ancient sorcerer she believes can save her people from a destructive demon.
Nyr is actually an anthropologist from Earth, stationed to observe an abandoned colony. He is forbidden from interfering, but his isolation from his homeworld leads him to join Lynesse. Together, they search for a rational explanation for the monster threatening her people.
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki (2021)
Ryka Aoki brings aliens, demons and music together in a warm, queer story about three women whose lives become intertwined. Shizuka Satomi is regarded as the world’s finest violin teacher, but her students are bound for hell through an infernal contract.
While preparing her final pupil, a talented runaway, Satomi becomes distracted by a romance with a doughnut-shop owner who was once a starship captain. Each woman carries secrets, and their alliance may offer a way to alter the futures that seem to have been decided for them.
Why science fantasy works so well
These books share no single setting or formula. Some explain magic through lost science; others place ancient rituals beside advanced spacecraft, or use game-like systems to examine survival and power. That range is the appeal: science fantasy can be intimate, comic, political, frightening or wildly inventive without choosing one side of the genre divide.
For more hands-on genre blending, see RETROCADE’s arcade machine buying guide before planning a home setup.
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