It’s the end of the year, the time when companies, magazines, and bloggers flood the airwaves with Year’s Best lists. Why do they bother? Because we love them! Lists, lists, lists. They’re the best.

One of my favorite genre sites, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, is out with their annual Editor’s Picks for the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016, including Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, and a debut novel, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Palmer’s long-in-coming debut crafts a distinctly unique vision of a future world — a 25th century where technology has created abundance, where religion is outlawed but personal spirituality is encouraged, where criminals are sentenced to wander the world making themselves useful. It’s an imagined outcome rooted in threads visible all around us even today. The story involves an unlikely meeting between a convict serving a family named Mycroft Canner; a “sensayer,” or spiritual guide, named Carlyle Foster; and Bridger, a young boy who seems to possess the power to make his every wish come true — a power that could completely destabilize a world that is the very definition of stability. With lush prose that recreates the feel of a period novel, this is one of the year’s most striking debuts. Read our review..

The list also includes several novels we’ve recently covered at Black Gate. Here’s a partial list.

Borderline by Mishell Baker
Four Roads Cross by Max Gladstone
Roses and Rot, by Kat Howard
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas

See the complete list of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016, written by Joel Cunningham and with links to full reviews, here.

See last year’s list here.

Interested in hearing more about the best books of the year? Black Gate has you covered. Here’s our picks for the top lists so far.

Amazon Selects the Best Books of 2016
Kirkus Selects the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Novels of 2016
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Horror Books of 2016
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Collections and Anthologies of 2016

See all our coverage of the best New Treasures here.