River of Bones is the new short story collection by Rebecca Roanhorse, best known for the Between Earth and Sky trilogy (2020-2024), which is inspired by pre-Colombian cultures and recently won the 2025 Hugo for Best Series. The collection compiles stories from throughout her writing career, ending with a novella that takes place in the universe ofThe Sixth World (2018-), her debut urban fantasy series to which her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, also belongs, and which is based on Navajo culture and practices. In the introduction to this new collection, Roanhorse discusses how, though her stories are often drawn from her own experience as a person of Indigenous and African American descent, many readers from other marginalized groups have approached her to let her know that these stories resonated with them as well. Indeed, the throughline of these stories is not simply the representation of Indigenous and Black characters, but rather the themes of fraught identity, questions about the right way to address generations of oppression (if there is a right way to address it), and examinations of the instinct for revenge versus the realities of compassion.

The collection begins with one of Roanhorse’s most acclaimed stories, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience.” Told in second person, the story calls for a reader to imagine themself as a performer at a resort in which tourists purchase a VR experience with an “authentic” Native American. The protagonist is incrementally replaced in both his professional and personal life by a white man who, having been steeped in white expectations of what an Indian is supposed to be, is better at performing the “authenticity” that he does not possess. The story recalls Westworld (1973) in its theme-park setup and focus on exploitative recreation, but specifically examines the white desire for “authenticity” in cultural tourism. The tourists crave something that they can call “real,” but the actual realities of being Native do not interest them. Instead, they want the sensation of authenticity—the performance of a culture rather than the truth of living as an Indigenous person. It calls to mind the post-structural concept of hyperreality: What the tourists have come to perceive as reality is actually a collection of cultural symbols that they have come to associate with “real Indians,” which means that the caricatures of Native Americans that the performers embody strike them as more “real” than reality.

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” raises questions that many people who hail from multiple cultures have had to ask themselves: What does it mean to “authentically” represent your people, and what happens when your own people don’t find you “authentic” enough? Who gets to claim a label and who makes those rules? What makes someone [X identity] enough? What makes them a faker? What happens when the distinction is not cut-and-dry? These questions become core to the rest of the stories.

What happens when the lines between in-group and out-group are blurred? So often we force false binaries onto our reality only to find out that the lines between these artificial categories are fuzzier than we’d like to admit. Many of these stories involve a character who is faced with an impossible choice, forced to determine where their allegiances lie. In “The Boys from Blood River,” Lukas is the only Indigenous teenager and the only out gay man in a small town, handling both abuse from bullies and his mother’s terminal illness. He finds allyship (and a potential romance) among a group of vampire boys, all of whom are united by a thirst for revenge—mostly connected to the racially-motivated hate crimes perpetrated against them. Lukas feels seen by the Blood River Boys, but his loyalty to them wavers when he’s asked to sacrifice the life of his white friend in order to join their ranks.

In the same vein of devil’s bargains, “White Hills” follows a white-passing Native American woman who has married into wealth—and who, now that she has escaped the poverty of her youth, will sacrifice anything if it means staying in the haven of security and luxury that she could once only dream of. Her mother-in-law, however, is an adherent of racial pseudo-science, and when she finds out about Marissa’s Native ancestry, she forces her into an ultimatum. She must either sever herself from her past or be exiled from the world of privilege. In “Wherein Abigail Fields Recalls Her First Death, and, Subsequently, Her Best Life,” the titular character seeks revenge on the sheriff who was complicit in the murder of her father, and promises the desert that she will kill him in exchange for a second chance at life. However, when she finds him, he is already starting to decay even in life. The image evokes the work of post-colonial theorists like Fanon and Césaire, who discuss colonialism as a rot that decays the colonizer from within, dehumanizing them just as much as it does the colonized. Seeing that the Sheriff is already festering from his own hatred, Abigail must choose now not whether or not he should die, merely if she wants to be the one to deliver the killing blow.

For me, the stand-out story in this collection was “Falling Bodies.” Set in a far future in which an alien race called the Genteel have colonized Earth, the story follows Ira as he begins his new life as a college student on a space station, following a kidnapping that made him question his worldview. The adoptive human son of a Genteel senator, Ira is grappling with conflicting narratives: those he grew up with and those told to him by his human rights activist kidnappers. He feels he is a traitor to both groups. While he tries to escape his upbringing by starting fresh at school, his history still seems to follow him. Ira is forced to make a drastic choice.

Sociopolitical SF is at its strongest when it is not a cut-and-dry allegory. It allows us to grapple with difficult questions in a concrete way without mapping them to specific real-world analogs. “Falling Bodies” does not, to my mind, refer to one specific case of colonialism and generational trauma, but rather any case in human history. It asks: When you are a member of both the ruling class and the oppressed class yet neither accepts you, what recourse do you have? That being said, I don’t want my focus on the generalizability of the story to diminish the clear parallels this story has to mixed-race identity. Echoing what Roanhorse said in the introduction, this story appears to be drawn from her own life experience while touching on psychological realities experienced by countless other groups.

The collection concluded with the titular novella, told from the perspective of the Sixth World character Kai Arviso. Like many of the other characters in Roanhorse’s stories, Kai is caught between two worlds—that of his ancestry, and the world of privilege that he has an opportunity to marry into (not unlike Marissa in “White Hills”). The novella ties together the themes that are woven throughout the collection: a character who is torn between not only multiple identities but different social strata, forced to make an ethical decision that requires either turning his back on his friends or giving up the chance to play the hero and receive a life-altering reward.

Without spoiling any of these stories, it is important to note: These characters do not all make the same choices. When asked to abandon their roots in favor of comfort and safety, to choose revenge over mercy, or to sell out rather than stick to their principles, each makes a different decision. Roanhorse is not interested in giving us straight answers to the questions she raises, nor should she be. The questions do not have easy answers. The best we can do is sit with them. There are stories in River of Bones to both delight and challenge the reader, calling upon the audience to look inward and see where their own values lie.