Sabaa Tahir Announces the Conclusion to Her Heir Duology
More great 2026 book news! Empire, the conclusion to Sabaa Tahir’s Heir duology, is headed to shelves in September. People got the exclusive and the cover reveal of the second in the YA romantasy duology, which is set two decades after Tahir’s bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series. Heir was a Good Morning America book club pick, and Empire is expected to continue its story of three unlikely companions battling evil in the empire.
Swords and Spaceships
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From the publisher description: “In the crumbling Martial Empire, crown prince Quil Aquilla and his Aunt Helene are losing a battle against the vicious Kegari horde. Quil’s armies dwindle, his faith falters, and the woman he loves vanished months ago, leaving him broken-hearted. Torn between his duty to his people and his desire to discover Sirsha’s fate, Quil embarks on a dangerous quest for aid—from the most treacherous of allies.”
You can read more about Empire, the conclusion to the Heir duology, from People. It will be out September 22, 2026 from G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers.
The Nebula Finalists Have Been Announced!
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association announced the Nebula Award Finalists for works published in 2025. The winners will be announced at the 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference.
Finalists include The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, and Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz.
Read the New Short Story “Cutting Corners” from Yoon Ha Lee!
It’s a great year for Yoon Ha Lee fans! There’s a 10th anniversary edition of Ninefox Gambit out in August, and his new novel, Code and Codex, arrives in October. While we wait, Reactor just published a new novelette, “Cutting Corners.” In this story, everything old is new again: war and machines have become so expensive that companies have started employing human pilots to fly spacecraft.
You can read an excerpt below, and the whole story at Reactor! Ninefox Gambit: Tenth Anniversary Edition is out from Solaris on August 11, and Code and Codex is out from S&S/Saga Press on October 27.
Ten nameless ships and their nameless carrier. Not much of a fleet, but as the captain said, they were all we had.
In other Hausser bases, newly reassigned personnel must have been staring at their own ships, suppressing their qualms about the idea that a human might pilot them.
I wasn’t used to thinking of her as a captain. They’d reconstituted old military ranks along with the ships, like ice cream rehydrated by someone who’d only read a description of it but never seen the real thing. Diadra seemed none too comfortable with the rank herself, nor the other pilots, all of us selected thanks to extravagant tests and tessellations of expendability.
“Do the ships have names, C-captain?” asked the youngest one. Must have volunteered. The draft didn’t take them that callow. I saw it in the way his eyes caressed the ships’ hyperboloid curves. The ships hurt my eye, but they’d never been designed for atmospheric flight, and aesthetics weren’t anyone’s concern before or after they were scorched.
The captain turned, looked like she was going to snap, reconsidered at the sight of the kid’s earnest face. “They used to have alphanumeric IDs,” she said, almost kindly. My gaze followed hers to the ships’ gull-curved hulls, the bright scoured patches where those IDs had once been. “Nicknames sometimes . . . before they turned up brain-burnt. That’s why we’re here.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am.” I recognized the man who spoke, tall despite the stooped shoulders. We must have been the only ones in this group who knew what the hell ma’am meant. “I don’t see how this can be done. They’re ships. They fly themselves. We don’t have the reflexes. The reaction time. We can’t run tensors in our head or neo-Lorentzian correction factors or—”
The captain’s ill temper returned, like a shadow over beaches baked dry. She stalked over to the carrier, sharp and sour, and kicked one of its struts. The clang reverberated like a bullet on a bell. Idly, I wondered if the captain had scared up the only pair of steel-toed boots on the whole damn planet for the purpose. It would be like her.
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