6 Science Fiction Books Your Dad Doesn’t Own Yet: A Gift Guide
If you have a science fiction nerd for a parent, then you know it is impossible to shop for them over the holidays. They have read every SF title from the ‘Best of’ lists and have a personal pulp collection from decades past. Here are six recent science fiction titles reviewed by our experts that we think your dad hasn’t read yet (unless he has a Locus subscription), in no particular order:
The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-31652-557-2, $30.00, 423 pp, hc) August 2024.
The longer I review science fiction, the more I notice how it much it depends on recycling tropes – not just repeating but extending and varying and inverting them – and, I suspect, refitting them to reflect current anxieties or hopes, conscious or not. This time the recognition lights have been set flashing by the opening volume of The Captive’s War, a new series by James S.A. Corey (the collaborative identity of Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck). The Mercy of Gods doesn’t encompass quite as extensive a set of subgenres and motifs as their wide-ranging Expanse sequence does – not yet, anyway. It does, however, manage to braid together an apocalyptic First Contact; glimpses of space opera (or the results of one) and Stapledonian galactic history; contrasting human and inhuman psychologies; and a vision of humans defeated and dominated by an alien hegemony. And, as the series title promises, a war of resistance.
Full review by Russell Letson here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
She Who Knows, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW 978-0-75641-895-3, $23.00, 176pp, hc) August 2024.
As with any good fantasy setting, Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death introduced us to a world that seemed far more expansive than what was contained in the text. Set in a far-future Sudan in which the Okeke people face brutal oppression by the Nuru, it combined hints of a bygone technological age with some spectacular supernatural fireworks, in telling of a remarkable young woman named Onyesonwu discovering her own world-changing powers. Okorafor’s 2015 novel The Book of Phoenix, at least in its frame story, was a prequel of sorts, explaining how a few elements of that world came about, such as the ‘‘Great Book’’ which served as a foundational text for that oppressive society. But there are different kinds of prequels and sequels. She Who Knows, the first in a projected trilogy of novellas, focuses not on the broad historical forces shaping this society, but rather on the family at the center of the saga, and in particular on Onyesonwu’s mother Najeeba, whose name translates as ‘‘She Who Knows.’’ Readers of Who Fears Death who remember the harrowing violence visited on Najeeba in the early chapters of that novel might reasonably feel a bit apprehensive, but She Who Knows takes place long before Onyesonwu’s birth, recounting the teenage Najeeba’s discovery of her own hidden powers, while hinting that the trilogy will be a sequel as well as a prequel to the earlier novel.
Full review by Gary K. Wolfe here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1-39961-767-3, £22.00, 320pp, hc) July 2024.
Lake of Darkness begins as your standard Gothic space opera mass-murder first contact tale, and it’s genuinely suspenseful. Two faster-than-light “startships” are orbiting a black hole at a safe distance, when the captain of one of them, acting on messages from a mysterious “gentleman” who seems to be living inside the black hole, violently murders his entire crew. It’s not long before the crew of the other ship gets murdered as well, though the captain is eventually captured, and when a historian specializing in serial killers (interestingly, historians are the only ones in this future who can still read and write) tries to interview him, she seems infected by murderous impulses as well. While the horror/mystery plot wants to move the tale along briskly, the hard-SF elements want to explore the speculative physics of black holes, and, for a long chapter that seems almost dropped in from another novel, the engineering problems of a celebrity adventurer who wants to be the first human to walk on the solid metal core of a more-or-less Earth-like planet. And if that’s not eclectic enough, the novel is also an example of what the critic Tom Moylan once called the critical utopia, questioning the characters’ own views of their society and offering a whole satirical panoply of coinages like “desolatopia,” “committeetopia,” “hobbytopia,” “lobototopia,” and “infantopia.” Roberts is clearly fond of wordplay and literary allusions, from his title drawn from King Lear to occasional phrases dropped into the narrative from Yeats, Joyce, and others.
Full review Gary K. Wolfe here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom 978-1-25086-050-7, $19.99, 176pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by Christine Foltzer.
Imagine a future where the Earth has gone so completely belly-up that people have moved to Jupiter. But humans being humans, they’re not prepared to accept that as the end of the old world. So they set up a university and encourage research in Classics, which focusses on understanding Earth, its ecosystems and geography and so on; it’s the most prestigious area of research because that’s how Earth might be reclaimed. Next in the hierarchy are the Speculatives, considering what might be; and at the bottom of the pile are the Moderns: people who research the place where humans are actually currently living.
This is the backdrop for Malka Older’s new novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes – a very different location from the work she’s recently done for Realm’s Orphan Black and Ninth Step Station seasons. A similarity exists with the latter, though, in that the narrative is centred around a mystery: a man has gone missing, and Investigator Mossa must figure out how, and why, and who else was involved. Doing so leads her to the university where she once studied, and where her ex-girlfriend is now an academic – a connection that may prove useful, if also fraught.
Full review by Alexandra Pierce here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
The Tongue Trade, Michael J. Martineck (Edge 978-1770532410, hardcover, 224pp, $34.95) October 2024
Michael Martineck has had the kind of respectable bubbling-under career that many writers enjoy—but which they also might ambitiously seek to surpass. (Has any writer ever been truly satisfied with his or her current status?) He sold his first story in 1999, then several novels, with the most recent being The Link Boy in 2017. Good track record and productivity, but not quite enough to get on award ballots and the must-buy lists of fans.
So it’s wonderful to discover that his newest, The Tongue Trade, seems to me to be a breakout book, apt to get much well-deserved exposure and plaudits. (It’s already got a rave from PW.) It’s witty, clever and fresh. It’s got a great stefnal novum. Its first-person narrator is engaging and real. It moves like Wile E. Coyote wearing Acme Rocket Skates (without encountering any of the Coyote’s disasters). The telling is masterful. In sum, a near-perfect package.
One simple premise: in the future about a century or so from now, the English language has splintered into a babel of jargons, each dialect barely understandable by outsiders. Bankers speak one lingo, firemen another, and dancers another. And so forth through a thousand classes of citizens. Naturally enough, a corps of professional interpreters has sprung up to mediate between citizens. The client speaks only medico, his interlocutor speaks only car repairman, but the interpreter handles both easily. Also, like priests or psychiatrists or lawyers of old, the interpreter is forbidden by oath from divulging anything he learns during a session.
Full review by Paul Di Filippo here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, £16.99, 400pp, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.99, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.
In Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to build fantastical worlds on sturdy non-fantastic-fictional foundations. Where the secondary-world fantasies of The City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds make use of occupied-city (say, Alan Furst’s The World at Night) or comic-ironic antiwar tropes (say, Catch-22), Alien Clay combines SF with prison-camp and resistance-to-tyranny narratives – both of which are strongly rooted in real-world 20th-century traumas that have fed many a thriller and historical account. And as a kind of reviewer’s bonus, the science-fictional side has uncanny echoes of Greg Egan’s very recent Morphotrophic, with an exotic alien biology that also carries metaphorical-thematic freight.
The novel’s through-line hangs on the first-person experiences (and the bitter, knowing, smart-ass voice) of dissident professor Arton Daghdev, transported to a Labour Colony (a research station/prison camp) on the extrasolar planet nicknamed Kiln. His crime: political activities and opinions contrary to the rules of the Mandate, an inflexible, monolithic, totalitarian ‘‘global superstate’’ in some indeterminate future. He is one of a batch of offenders who have been freeze-dried and hauled away from Earth via disposable sublight starship, to be dumped off over (not on) Kiln. There, if they survive the hazards of thawing out and atmospheric entry, they will be put to doing all the dirty work in support of the Mandate’s efforts to solve the puzzle of who built the abandoned structures that dot the planet’s jungles.
Full review by Russell Letson here. Purchase at Bookshop.org or Amazon.
These titles are filled with alien planets, futuristic murder mysteries, black holes, techno-wizardry, and intergalactic civil wars. If none of these titles seem perfect for the SF expert in your family, maybe a subscription to the magazine is! Find everything you need to know about new SF releases in Locus magazine.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.
