Score

@dragonne_sandberg, I cannot message you directly, but anyway thank you for adding so many cool books. can you please remove romantasy books? There are many other lists specialized in this genre.

I have to say, I don't think that excluding romantasy from a broader Sci-Fi/Fantasy list is feasible, mostly because there just isn't a concrete definition of "romantasy". There's an interesting article on the topic in Writer's Digest (which GR won't let me link to, annoyingly) titled "What Is Romantasy, Anyway?"

The whole article's worth reading imo, but I'll particularly note the part where the author of the article polled readers and writers about their definition of romantasy and got a wide variety of responses including:

* Romantasy is when the romantic and fantasy aspects of the story are equally important
* Romantasy is just a romance book with a fantasy world as a backdrop
* Romantasy is when the plot would fall apart without the romance
* Romantasy is a fantasy plot with a central romance that follows romance book “beats” (see: Romancing the Beat, by Gwen Hayes)
* Romantasy is just fantasy with “spicy” scenes

So a romantasy book is one in which the romance and fantasy elements are given equal weight...or it's a book in which the romance element is preeminent...or it's a book that follows particular romance novel writing conventions...or it's a book that contains explicit sex scenes...or etc. And based on conversations I've had with bookish friends, even people working with the same definition of romantasy frequently disagree on whether a particular book qualifies. It's all vibes, and not everyone's vibes are going to align.

This is further complicated by the fact (as mentioned later in the Writer's Digest article) that romantasy is a buzzy subgenre, so publishers and authors can have financial incentives to label a book romantasy no matter how tenuous the grounds for categorizing it that way.

I strongly agree with Jain's comment above. I have yet to see any agreed-upon definition of "romantasy," even as publishers have rushed to use it to describe anything they think might be buzzy. Although this list has been created by different Goodreads users over the years, I've been using each iteration to track upcoming genre releases since well before the introduction of the term "romantasy," and ALL other sub-genres of SFF have been included in the past, much to the disgruntlement of those who want all the urban fantasy/YA/whatever-else-was-trendy out of their serious sci-fi list.

I don't want to tell anyone else what their own list should/shouldn't include, so if this one isn't going to be all-inclusive of SFF, I'm happy to create one of my own that is.

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher came out in 2013.

@Stephanie @Jess Nine Goblins was self-published in 2013 but got a trad-pub release this year; Wolf and His King was released in the UK in 2025 but in the US in 2026. So I think it's fair for both to be included, this'll be the first opportunity for many people to read both/either.

@Sara just noted that Fantasy by Decade links (except 1930s) are the same as Science Fiction By Decade ;-)

Dademaru wrote: "@Sara just noted that Fantasy by Decade links (except 1930s) are the same as Science Fiction By Decade ;-)"

Thank you for pointing this out! I will look into it as soon as I can 😊