14. Charlie Jane Anders
Maybe it’s a little unfair to call a newer author a “master” of science fiction… except Charlie Jane Anders is seriously that good. No matter that her (so far) best novel, All the Birds in the Sky, was published in 2016. A quick side note for the skeptical, however: it did indeed win Best Novel at the 2017 Hugo Awards.
Anders published her first novel, Choir Boy, in 2005. Over her writing career, she’s also released over 100 short stories and made a name for herself as editor-in-chief of popular sci-fi website io9. Even more important than that, her work is in many ways forging a new path ahead for science fiction.
The genre-crossing All the Birds in the Sky follows Patricia and Laurence, a witch and a nonconformist inventor geek, respectively. In this near future time, the pair meet after each being ostracized at their school. All of this takes place in a world that is experiencing the “Unraveling” — a series of catastrophes, from massive storms to human-caused wars — that threatens to tear the Earth apart.
Patricia is accused of being a witch and subsequently runs away. She’s quickly found by her fellow witches and enrolled in a magical school. Laurence, meanwhile, is enrolled in and then escapes a military reform school. The pair meet a decade later and must learn to combine their abilities in order to prevent the Unraveling and the subsequent end of their species.