The Sci-Fi & Fantasy Trends of 2018

A medical student grappling with the afterlife. A misfit demigod who can turn her rivals into monsters. An office drone clocking in during the apocalypse.

These aren't your mother's science fiction and fantasy heroes.

Catch up with the big trends in the genre before the new year begins. And put your thinking caps on, please: We want to hear your predictions for 2019 trends in the comments!


Haven't I heard this one before?
Trend #1: Retellings and reimaginings of beloved stories.
< br/>
No, the human species is not running out of new ideas—we just really love our old ones.

While readers have always had a soft spot for retellings, this year was something special. Take a look at the top three fantasy books in the 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards: Madeline Miller's Circe, a reimagining of Homer's The Odyssey from the perspective of a misunderstood side character; The Shape of Water, the novelization of Guillermo del Toro's evocative movie; and Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, a clever retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.


Of scientific fantasies and magical futures.
Trend #2: Books that blur the line between fantasy and science fiction.
< br/>
This year's Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science Fiction went to V.E. Schwab's Vengeful, a dark tale about scientific experiments pushed to the edge, resulting in a transformative exploration of the afterlife and supernatural abilities.

A bit of science and a bit of magic? There's long been a foggy realm between sci-fi and fantasy, but for the most part, readers could categorize their favorites without much strain. That job proved more difficult in 2018 (especially for Goodreads editors!).

Take Peng Shepherd's dazzling debut, The Book of M, which is set on our world in the near-future, a postapocalypse dystopia, where trees sing, wolves talk, and shadows can disappear. Then there's Rosewater by Tade Thompson, a thriller set in Nigeria where an alien biodome and mystical healing powers draw in hopeful outcasts.

As always, it's the stories that matter in the end, not the genre categorization. Spaceships landing in Westeros and witches on Mars? We could be persuaded.


The future is female.
Trend #3: More fantastical stories about women, by women.

More than half of the nominees for Best Science Fiction and Fantasy in this year's Goodreads Choice Awards were written by women, and both categories' winning authors were women (Miller for Circe, and Schwab for Vengeful).

And it wasn't just the authors getting in on the action. "Behind every great man is a great woman," the old saying goes, but in 2018, female characters stepped into the spotlight, even if they had to go to another timeline to do it. In Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, Elma York hushes her detractors to become the first female astronaut in an alternate 1952 United States.

Rin, in R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, defies societal conventions, escaping marriage to join a military academy. And when she gets there, she is no wallflower or even Hermione-esque "smart best friend." Rin is the one in charge of her story and her trajectory in the world. And like so many of the other heroines from this year's best fantasy and science fiction books, she's standing in no one's shadow.