Novelas y relatos de Best Sci Fi Fantasy Books 2020

Man, thinking back to 2020, I completely missed 'The Vanished Birds' by Simon Jimenez when it came out. Found it a year later because I was browsing a used bookstore with a weird 'lonely space' vibe shelf someone made. The tech here is this interstellar travel via 'corridors,' but the real heart is the music, which feels like a soft, ritualistic magic that bridges time and trauma.

It’s not your typical spell-and-wand mashup. The fusion is so subtle that for a while I wasn’t even sure if the fantastical elements were literal or just metaphor for connection. The writing has this melancholic, drifting quality that perfectly fits the setting. I see it pop up on 'quiet sci-fi' lists more than genre-blend lists, which is a shame because the way it handles memory and loss through its almost-magical system is more impactful than a lot of flashier hybrids.

I’d argue it leans more sci-fi in setting but achieves a fantasy novel's emotional resonance. The character of Nia, the ship captain bound by time dilation, and the mysterious boy with his song—their relationship builds so slowly. It’s the kind of book you sit with after finishing, not because of explosive plot twists, but because the atmosphere lingers like a tune you can’t quite place.

There's been this massive push in the genre towards books that feel like complex ecosystems, worlds so real you could smell the rust in the air or feel the grit under your nails. For that pure, unadulterated epic scale, 'The Once and Future Witches' by Alix E. Harrow blends suffragette history with a re-imagined magical sisterhood in a way that builds a whole societal structure from the ground up. The magic is woven into the very bones of the city and its politics, not just a tool characters use.

On the far other end of the spectrum, 'The House in the Cerulean Sea' by T.J. Klune constructs its epicness through intimacy. The world-building is in the meticulously crafted rules of the orphanage and the subtle, aching loneliness of a magical bureaucracy. It’s a quieter epic, but the emotional landscape it builds feels just as vast and complete. I’ve re-read it twice just to live in that feeling for a while longer.

A book that honestly left me a bit cold but absolutely nails the requested scope is 'The Bone Shard Daughter' by Andrea Stewart. The magic system based on bone shards and command-powered constructs, and the archipelago setting with its lost emperor and revolutionary secrets, is staggeringly detailed. I found some characters a bit distant, but the world itself is the undeniable star, operating on a logic you have to piece together like a puzzle. The sheer architectural imagination is worth the price of admission alone.

Those 'best of' lists from 2020 always bring me back to a few that genuinely stuck. For me, the standout was Tamsyn Muir's 'Harrow the Ninth'. It's a wild sequel that completely inverts everything you thought you knew from 'Gideon the Ninth'. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is a protagonist defined by staggering, self-destructive grief and obsessive magical intellect. She's not 'strong' in a conventional, physically powerful sense; her strength is a fractured, terrifying will to impose her reality on a universe actively unspooling around her. The narrative itself is famously challenging, mirroring her fractured psyche, which makes her eventual moments of clarity so devastatingly earned.

A more accessible but no less brilliant pick is 'The Once and Future Witches' by Alix E. Harrow. It's a historical fantasy set in an alternate 1890s where witchcraft is a suppressed, folkloric memory. The three Eastwood sisters—James, Agnes, and Beatrice—each wield a different kind of strength: scholarly grit, righteous fury, and healing resilience. Their fight to reclaim magic is deeply intertwined with the suffragist movement, making their strength explicitly collective and political. The prose is incantatory and beautiful, and the sisters' flawed, fraught relationship is the real heart of the power here.

I'd also toss in 'Network Effect' by Martha Wells, the first full-length Murderbot novel. While Murderbot is agender, its narrative voice—cynical, anxious, and fiercely protective—resonates with many readers seeking protagonists who defy traditional heroic molds. Its strength is in its capacity for connection despite its programming, a deeply relatable arc. And for pure, world-shaking scale, 'The City We Became' by N.K. Jemisin features multiple protagonists, but the women like Bronca and Neek are incredible forces of cultural memory and defiant creation, literally battling cosmic existential threats. That book is a manifesto in narrative form.