Steven Barnes Books in Order

In a world where sorcery runs on a dwindling natural resource, the magician Warlock learns that every spell is helping drain the future. It is a clever, dangerous fantasy built around scarcity instead of abundance.

Barnes turns to the American West in this historical adventure, where riders and survivors move through a violent frontier shaped by land, power, and old grudges. It has the pressure of a classic western without losing his taste for moral conflict.

A murder during an elaborate live-action fantasy game turns the world's most advanced amusement park into a crime scene. The players came for make-believe, but the investigation uncovers motives that are brutally real.

The fading of magic may not be final after all, but discovering a new source of mana opens the door to fresh danger. This sequel turns survival into a risky search for renewal.

A space-based manufacturing venture is about to ship a priceless cargo when sabotage and hijacking threaten to destroy everything. The crew's wildest option is to bring their shuttle down to Earth on a threadlike tether.

In a diseased, gang-ruled Los Angeles, former weightless boxing champion Aubry Knight wants only to be left alone. The city's crime lords have other plans, and walking away may require becoming something more dangerous than they are.

This collection adds more tales from the Magic Goes Away world, where spells are powerful, costly, and never fully safe. It is fantasy with a built-in sense of decline and danger.

These linked adventures return to a world where mana is running out and every use of magic matters. Sorcerers, rulers, and schemers all fight over what wonder remains.

Underachiever Adam Ludlum commits to changing his life and stumbles into teachings that unlock frightening new powers. As his strength grows, so do his rage, his enemies, and the risk that he will become something monstrous.

Human colonists arrive on Avalon expecting a fresh start and find a planet that looks like paradise, until the native predators strike. Survival depends on discipline, teamwork, and learning the ecology before it kills them all.

Aubry Knight returns to face a fanatic who is building power through faith, fear, and altered bodies. To stop a new tyranny, he has to battle superhuman enemies and the scars of his own past.

As Dream Park's owners chase a bigger future project, a new immersive game and an old suspicious death start to point toward sabotage. The line between performance and real danger gets thinner by the hour.

In a future Olympiad, the best minds and bodies on Earth compete for a place among the ruling elite. The catch is brutal: greatness may require losing your humanity, and most contestants will not survive the bargain.

Another Dream Park adventure turns game design, celebrity culture, and hidden manipulation into a high-stakes puzzle. The players think they are entering a spectacle, but somebody is using the show to play for keeps.

Now stronger and more connected than ever, Aubry Knight becomes the target of enemies who strike at his closest bonds. The attack pulls him toward New Africa, old mysteries, and a fight that is as personal as it is political.

A generation after Avalon nearly destroyed its human settlers, their children have grown up believing the worst is over. Then fresh ecological and political threats prove the planet is still teaching lethal lessons.

When two men lose their daughters to a supernatural fire, they uncover an old evil tied to a slave sorcerer who bought immortality with blood. Barnes turns family history and racial history into the engine of a dark urban fantasy.

Benjamin Sisko finds himself living as Benny Russell, a Black science fiction writer in 1950s Harlem. As Benny fights to tell a story the world says should not exist, the novel turns identity and imagination into the real battleground.

Cat Juvell is hired to pull a wealthy man's sister out of a charismatic cult whose promises of healing hide something much darker. The deeper she goes, the more the case starts to look like a conspiracy powered by real horror.

A visit to the glittering artificial island Xanadu leads student Lenore Myles into secrets her powerful hosts would kill to protect. What starts as curiosity turns into a desperate flight through a near-future world of extreme privilege.

An experiment meant to help vulnerable children may have created something far more dangerous, a generation that can be programmed toward violence. As a journalist starts digging, Barnes turns social engineering into a chilling thriller.

In an alternate America ruled by African powers, an Irish boy is sold into slavery and his fate becomes tied to that of a young Muslim nobleman. Their bond drives a fierce, unsettling rethinking of race, empire, and freedom.

Kai and Aidan return in a Bilalistan edging toward wider war, with Egypt and Ethiopia pulling the New World into conflict. Freedom has changed both men, but it has not freed them from history.

On Ord Cestus, Obi-Wan Kenobi is pulled into a crisis involving the exploited X'Ting and the corrupt powers controlling their world. The mission turns into a perilous descent beneath the planet's surface and into its buried injustices.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is sent to Ord Cestus to stop the sale of deadly bio-droids to the Separatists, but diplomacy quickly unravels. As he and Kit Fisto dig deeper, the mission becomes a test of strategy, loyalty, and Jedi ideals in wartime.

Thirty thousand years ago, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, two unusual children grow up under the watch of a visionary medicine woman. Their separate lives begin to converge as disaster approaches the people of the Ibandi.

Actor and ex-gigolo Tennyson Hardwick is barely holding on in Hollywood when his father's stroke and a rapper's murder shove him into the role of suspect and sleuth. Solving the case may be his only path to redemption.

After marauders destroy his village and kill his parents, Abdul Wahid sets out for revenge and is drawn toward the secretive Hashassin. What begins as personal vengeance becomes a test of faith, discipline, and purpose.

Tennyson Hardwick tries to stay focused on his acting career until a football star who feared for his life turns up dead. The case pulls Ten back into danger, and his own past starts closing in around him.

After a volcanic catastrophe shatters the Ibandi, Sky Woman leads desperate survivors across a harsh African landscape in search of a new home. Another survivor chooses vengeance instead, and the split may doom them all.

In Cape Town, Tennyson Hardwick takes a bodyguard job that seems glamorous enough, until a child becomes the center of a much darker mystery. The chase forces him to choose between love, loyalty, and survival.

A live-action game on the Moon becomes a real fight for survival when terrorists seize the facility. Suddenly the skills meant for play are the only thing standing between the players and disaster.

A strange infection tears civilization apart, and a small band of survivors has to cross a ruined Northwest in a battered school bus. Kendra, Terry, and the others face freaks, raiders, winter, and the harder problem of learning who they can trust.

While filming in South Beach, Tennyson Hardwick is drawn into a murder case tied to missing women and a relentless killer. Soon the threat turns personal, and he faces an impossible choice involving the people he loves most.

This Heorot novella sends a younger generation into unknown waters and toward a mysterious island with its own predators. On Avalon, curiosity and courage are never far from catastrophe.

The survivors from *Devil's Wake* reach a fortified refuge that looks like salvation from the outside. Inside, they find hierarchy, secrets, and proof that human communities can become as frightening as the freaks outside the walls.

The cargo ship *Tsunami* takes dangerous jobs because its crew is built for trouble. When a routine run turns into a mystery with no simple cargo at all, the whole mission starts to come apart.

In this short nonfiction piece, Barnes reflects on how Star Wars, myth, and discipline can help people survive trauma and keep moving. It is part personal testimony, part toolkit for resilience.

Mortal enemies Aros of Azteca and the sorcerer Neoloth are forced into an uneasy alliance when a kidnapped princess must be rescued. Their only chance lies in deception, necromancers, and a mission neither can survive alone.

Journalist Olympia Dorsey is trying to hold her family together when a seductive promise of healing for her autistic son opens the door to something much bigger. The countdown thriller that follows mixes mysticism, manipulation, and global stakes.

A later generation on Avalon must reckon with old grudges, hard leadership choices, and a world that remains biologically hostile. The colony has survived, but survival has never meant safety.

After losing her parents, young Aisha is sent to Detroit to live with her failing grandmother, who summons a dark spirit to protect her. The protector means well at first, but it can only survive by taking life from others.

T'Challa tries to lead Wakanda into a more open future when the dead begin returning and the past comes back with them. As old secrets surface, he has to defend both his throne and his father's legacy.

After Qui-Gon Jinn's death, Mace Windu answers a final request by traveling to the glass-scarred world of Metagos. There he faces rival clans, dream-weavers, and a mission that pushes his beliefs as hard as his combat skills.

In a domed future city powered by a massive fusion plant, security chief Carver Reeves is counting down to retirement when saboteurs move to destroy everything. An elusive assassin known as Spider may be the only person who can help stop the catastrophe.