If The Poppy War blew your expectations apart and Babel made you rethink the entire fantasy genre, these 13 authors like R.F. Kuang write fiction that hits just as hard.
R.F. Kuang published The Poppy War in 2019, when she was 22 years old. The novel — inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanjing — starts as a military academy fantasy and becomes a brutal, unflinching war novel. Its sequels, The Dragon Republic and The Burning God, completed a trilogy that established Kuang as one of the most important fantasy writers of her generation. She wrote the entire thing while completing a degree at Georgetown, then an MPhil at Cambridge, then a PhD at Yale.
Babel (2022) shifted gears entirely: a dark academia novel set at Oxford in the 1830s about a Chinese student drawn into the British Empire’s exploitation of translation magic. Yellowface (2023) abandoned fantasy altogether for a literary satire about a white author who steals her dead Asian American friend’s manuscript. Across three completely different styles, Kuang’s core concern stays the same: who controls stories, who profits from them, and what violence that control requires.
For more recommendations, explore our guides to best fantasy authors, best science fiction authors, and authors like Brandon Sanderson.
Authors Like R.F. Kuang
1. Ken Liu
Ken Liu is the bridge between Chinese and English-language speculative fiction. His short story “The Paper Menagerie” is the only work to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards simultaneously. His epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty, starting with The Grace of Kings, reimagines the founding of the Han Dynasty through a “silkpunk” lens — a world of airships, submarines, and political philosophy.
Liu shares Kuang’s deep engagement with Chinese history and philosophy, but his approach is different. Where Kuang is confrontational and angry, Liu is more meditative. His translation work — he translated Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem into English — has reshaped how English-speaking audiences understand Chinese science fiction. The Dandelion Dynasty is a masterwork of politically sophisticated fantasy.
“All bookserta about other books.”
Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
2. Nghi Vo
Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle, starting with The Empress of Salt and Fortune, tells the story of an empress’s rise to power through the objects she left behind, catalogued by a wandering cleric decades later. The novellas are short, precise, and devastating — each one uses storytelling itself as a weapon.
Vo shares Kuang’s interest in how history is recorded, who gets to tell it, and what gets erased. The Singing Hills Cycle is about archives, memory, and the political power of narrative. It’s quieter than Kuang’s work but no less pointed. Vo’s prose is elegant without being fussy, and the Asian-inspired world-building feels lived-in rather than decorative.
“Stories are both the way we lie and the way we truth.”
Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune
3. Fonda Lee
Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga, starting with Jade City, is a gangster epic set in a fantasy world inspired by mid-20th-century East Asia. Two rival clans control the supply of magical jade, and the series follows their decades-long war through multiple generations. It won the World Fantasy Award, and for good reason — it’s one of the best fantasy series of the last decade.
Lee shares Kuang’s ability to write politically complex fiction grounded in Asian history and culture. Jade City has been compared to The Godfather meets wuxia, and the comparison is earned. The family dynamics, gang warfare, and drug politics are as gripping as anything in crime fiction, while the jade magic system adds a fantasy layer that elevates the whole thing.
“A jade warrior is only as good as his training. His jade is only as good as his heart.”
Fonda Lee, Jade City
4. Shelley Parker-Chan
Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun reimagines the rise of the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor as a gender-bending story of ambition, identity, and survival. A peasant girl steals her dead brother’s identity and destiny, climbing through the ranks of a rebel army to challenge the Mongol Empire.
Parker-Chan shares Kuang’s interest in Chinese history as raw material for fantasy, and both writers refuse to romanticize the violence that empire requires. The prose is gorgeous, the battle scenes are brutal, and the protagonist’s willingness to sacrifice everything for greatness mirrors Rin’s arc in The Poppy War. If these novels inspire you to write historical fiction of your own, Grammarly can help polish your drafts.
“Nothing is more dangerous than a person with nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun
5. N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin made history by winning three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel with her Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season is set in a world plagued by catastrophic seismic events, where people with the ability to control earthquakes are enslaved by an empire that fears them.
Jemisin and Kuang share a rage at systemic oppression that powers their fiction. Both write about colonized peoples, stolen agency, and the terrible cost of revolution. Jemisin’s second-person narration in The Fifth Season is one of the boldest stylistic choices in modern fantasy, and it works because the emotional stakes justify the technique. The Broken Earth trilogy is essential reading for anyone who wants fantasy that grapples with real-world power structures.
“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another.”
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
6. Tamsyn Muir
Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, starting with Gideon the Ninth, is “lesbian necromancers in space” — and that description barely scratches the surface. The series combines sword fighting, bone magic, a murder mystery, and an irreverent narrator into something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Each sequel gets more structurally ambitious and more emotionally devastating.
Muir shares Kuang’s willingness to demolish genre expectations. Just when you think you understand the rules, both writers change them. Muir’s humor is darker and more absurd than Kuang’s, but the underlying intelligence is the same — these are books written by someone who has thought deeply about how stories work and decided to take them apart.
“One flesh, one end. Bitch.”
Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth
7. Seth Dickinson
Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant is about a brilliant accountant from a colonized island who infiltrates the empire that conquered her homeland, intending to destroy it from within. The novel is devastating — a story about the personal cost of resistance, told with mathematical precision.
Dickinson shares Kuang’s laser focus on colonialism and its mechanisms. Baru Cormorant is one of the most intellectually rigorous fantasy novels ever written, examining how empires use economics, eugenics, and cultural erasure to maintain control. The protagonist’s willingness to sacrifice everything — including the people she loves — makes for deeply uncomfortable reading. It’s brilliant and it hurts.
“She would remake the world. First, she would have to break it.”
Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant
8. Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards — a space opera narrated by a warship AI trapped in a single human body, seeking revenge against the ruler of a galaxy-spanning empire. Leckie’s use of a single pronoun (she/her) for all characters, regardless of gender, was one of the most discussed stylistic choices in recent science fiction.
Leckie shares Kuang’s interest in empire, identity, and the language used to justify domination. The Radch Empire in Ancillary Justice annexes cultures and erases their individuality, which parallels the British Empire’s exploitation of translation in Babel. Both writers understand that empire isn’t just military power — it’s the control of language, culture, and meaning.
“If you’re going to do something, you should do it properly.”
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
9. Xiran Jay Zhao
Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow is a mecha sci-fi reimagining of Chinese empress Wu Zetian, featuring giant robots, a polyamorous love triangle, and a furious heroine who refuses to accept the patriarchal system that consumes women as fuel for male pilots. The sequel, Heavenly Tyrant, continues the revolution.
Zhao shares Kuang’s combination of Chinese history inspiration and white-hot anger at systems of oppression. Both writers use genre fiction to examine real power structures, and both create protagonists who are willing to do terrible things to destroy those structures. Zhao’s YouTube channel, which critiques Western adaptations of Asian culture, shows the same analytical sharpness as their fiction.
“I will not be the one to die for a man’s war.”
Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow
10. Samantha Shannon
Samantha Shannon’s Bone Season series, starting with The Bone Season, is set in a dystopian future London where clairvoyants are persecuted. Shannon published her debut at 21 — the same precocious timeline as Kuang — and has built a world that combines alternate history, supernatural abilities, and revolutionary politics.
Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree showed her range in epic fantasy, but the Bone Season series is where the Kuang comparison is strongest. Both writers create oppressive systems with institutional specificity (not just “evil empire” hand-waving) and protagonists who must navigate those systems before they can dismantle them.
“We are the dreamers who refuse to wake.”
Samantha Shannon, The Bone Season
11. Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun is a pre-Columbian Americas-inspired epic fantasy featuring a blind god-touched man, a sea captain, and a city preparing for a celestial convergence. The Between Earth and Sky trilogy draws on Indigenous mythology to create a world that feels fundamentally different from European-derived fantasy.
Roanhorse shares Kuang’s commitment to centering non-Western perspectives in fantasy and science fiction. Her Hugo-winning novella Trail of Lightning launched the Sixth World series, set in a post-apocalyptic Navajo Nation. Both writers demonstrate that the most interesting fantasy being written today draws on traditions outside the Tolkien-derived mainstream.
“All gods are hungry. It is what makes them gods.”
Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun
12. Erin Morgenstern
Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is about two young magicians who are pitted against each other in a mysterious competition, waged through the medium of an enchanted circus that appears without warning. It’s lush, atmospheric, and structurally intricate — a puzzle box of a novel.
Morgenstern is a different kind of writer than Kuang — she’s more interested in beauty and wonder than in political rage. But both share a fascination with systems of control (the competition in The Night Circus is as oppressive as any empire) and with characters trapped by institutions that claim to serve them. Her second novel, The Starless Sea, pushes even further into metafictional territory, exploring how stories contain and imprison us.
“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it.”
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
13. Zen Cho
Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown is a Regency-era fantasy about England’s first African Sorcerer Royal and a young woman with dangerously powerful magic. The novel uses the conventions of Regency romance and comedy of manners to examine race, colonialism, and power in a magical version of the British Empire.
Cho shares Kuang’s interest in how the British Empire used cultural institutions (like Oxford in Babel, or the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers in Sorcerer to the Crown) to maintain racial hierarchies. Both writers use fantasy to make the mechanisms of colonialism visible. Cho’s Malaysian-inspired The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water shows her range beyond British-set fantasy.
“Civilisation is only a thin veneer over a great deal of barbarism.”
Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown