The best scifi and fantasy romance that will sweep you away to other worlds

Fenn’s Orc Sworn series transports the reader to a world both familiar and utterly strange, where gray-skinned, monstrous orcs show courage, kindness, and compassion to the human women they desperately need to continue their race while being hunted by human men. It’s a world of darkness, oppression, and fear, but also wonder, beauty, and hope. Fenn’s world building is utterly immersive—you will hear, feel, smell (and only rarely see, because it’s dark under Orc Mountain!)—what it is to be Orc Sworn.

I’m always enamored of a truly dark, gritty setting. I want to see the dirt under the hero’s nails. Smell his sweat and hear his harsh breaths as he fights or...does other things. Aimes’s world in the Ruthless Warlord series is visceral. It grabs you by the throat, shakes you, throws you down, and smothers you. It’s brutal and in some ways unbearably harsh. But Aimes’s books are always tempered with humor, warmth, and ultimately, triumph of the human spirit. I may shiver and shudder my way through Nikolai and Dahlia’s story, but I feel hopeful by the end, and that’s why I return to Aimes’s books again and again—to be, ultimately, uplifted.

This book made me completely shift my frame of reference. Why? It’s set in the modern world. It should be familiar to me as a reader. But it’s not. It’s wholly “other.” It’s a world in which moth fae and succubae use a dating app to set up their monstrous rendezvous. It’s a world in which they work side by side with humans, one of them “out” and public in every way, the other closeted and fearful, and it’s not the ones you might expect. It’s a world of deep needs almost too ugly to be expressed which drive behavior in a way I immediately recognized, and sympathized with, but only when seen through the lens of these very alien characters in a very familiar world. It’s a world that requires you to completely open your mind, and you will come away much richer for it.

“What if?” That’s the question sci-fi and fantasy authors have been asking for over a hundred years. What if humanity was dying and aliens offered salvation, but only at a terrible price? That’s the question this book poses, and it does it so compellingly. The story’s set on a poisoned world, and in a dying race’s spaceship. There is no escape here except death. There are no familiar, comfortable spaces. Nowhere left to hide. There is only the smallest spark of hope: that the humans can somehow connect with the aliens who are “not squid” but absolutely not like us. To do so, they have to overcome the basest squeamishness of human nature, and that they do makes for not just brave characters, but an extremely brave book.

Is this a book about a human woman and a space lizard? Absolutely. Put that aside and immerse yourself in the magnificence that is The Last Hour of Gann. This is a world unlike any I’ve read before. It’s post-apocalyptic, brutal, complex, and yet deeply devout. It’s a world that not only shapes the characters but shapes the way they learn to love each other. It’s an ugly world, and they are initially ugly to each other. But it’s also a world that’s finally beginning to bloom again after a great catastrophe, and that opens the way for the heroine and her space lizard to forge an incredible, unforgettable connection.