Niall Harrison

The Mune, Sue Dawes (Gold SF 978-1-91598-324-4, $19.95, 329pp, tp) March 2025.

The Hampdenshire Wonder, J.D. Beresford (Sidgwick & Jackson 412pp, hc) 1911. (The MIT Press 978-0-26255-141-0, $19.95, 282pp, tp) March 2025. Cover by Seth.

Who speaks in a novel, and how, is always important. In The Hamp­denshire Wonder (1911), a lightly starched scientific romance about superhuman intelligence (and near-superhuman cricket), reis­sued by The MIT Press with a ...Read More

Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0-7564-1934-9, $28.99, 309pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Faceout Studio, Tim Green.

From a novel in which voice overmasters genre we move to one in which genre more or less overmasters voice. Erin K. Wagner’s debut novel, Mechanize My Hands to War, isn’t badly told or badly imagined per se, but most of what is imagined is familiar and, ...Read More

Private Rites, Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate 978-0-00-860803-3, £16.99, 208pp, hc) June 2024. (Flatiron 978-1-250-59376-611-5, $27.99, 304pp, hc) December 2024.

I don’t know what the weather has been like this year where you live, but in the UK it has been wet. As I write in October, I think we are just about to exceed the 1991-2020 average for annual rainfall; in September, Southern Eng­land saw 233% of that average. ...Read More

Gliff, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton 978-0-24166-557-2, £18.99, 288pp, hc) October 2024. (Pantheon 978-0-59370-156-0, $28.00, 288pp, hc) February 2025.

If one definition of literary voice is that it is the combination of what a writer’s sentences pay at­tention to and how they pay attention to it, then Ali Smith’s voice is one of the most distinctive of the twenty-first century. What her sentences pay attention to are the political and ...Read More

Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Hiromi Kawakami (Soft Skull 978-1-59376-611-5, $27.00, 278pp, hc) September 2024.

Hiromi Kawakami is one of those authors whose long and decorated career has, thanks to the vagaries of translation and market dynamics, appeared in English in a slightly scrambled form. Almost certainly her best-known novel in English is Sensei no kaban (2001), first released as The Briefcase in 2012, and then re-edited ...Read More

A Simple Intervention, Yael Inokai (Peirene 978-1-90867-087-8, 187pp, £12.99, pb). October 2024. Cover by Tessa Mackenzie.

There are different ways of writing medical SF. One, as in the case of Rajaniemi above, or Greg Egan occasionally, is to crank up the verisimilitude and extrapolate specific diseases or treatments in the best net-up hard-SF fashion; another is to lean into medicine as a system rather than a sci­ence and build ...Read More

Darkome, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz 978-1-47320-332-7, 245pp, £18.99, tp). September 2024.

Mind you, better an ending that fades than no ending at all. I’ve had a good run recently, but it turns out that I was overdue an encounter with that frustrating species, the unmarked Book One that cannot be read as a standalone. Hannu Rajaniemi’s Darkome is the offender: After 250-odd brisk pages of biohackers vs. capitalists it ends ...Read More

Playground, Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Company 978-1-32408-603-1, 383pp, $29.99, hc). September 2024.

Richard Powers is another writer whose work – omnivorous, full-bodied novels of both character and idea – you would think difficult to replicate via generative technologies, but his new novel Playground suggests the man himself is not convinced that will always be the case. Genera­tive tools owned by one of the protagonists, the tech billionaire Todd ...Read More

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, 400pp, £16.99, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.999, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.

Sometimes the way into a story is through another story. Probably the most familiar route is through a genealogical relationship, in which a new story attempts to extend or argue with an old one: All those works unpicking the cold equations or at­tempting to ...Read More

The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.

The story of The Jaguar Mask does not start on the first page, in which the artist Cristina Ramos relives the murder of her mother in a garish vision – four tattooed mareros with machine pistols, haloed by angels of death, gunning down two government employees, a foreign lobbyist, and Eufemia ...Read More

Shanghailanders, Juli Min (Spiegel & Grau 978-1-95411-860-7, 270pp, $28.00, hc). May 2024. Cover by Charlotte Strick.

In the first chapter of Juli Min’s Shanghailanders, another novel-in-stories, Leo Yang, a successful real estate developer, boards the maglev train from Pudong International Airport to downtown Shanghai. It is January 2040, and he is returning home after seeing off his wife, Eko, his eldest daughter, Yumi, and his middle daughter, Yoko, ...Read More

In Universes, Emet North (HarperCollins 978-0-06331-487-0, 240pp, $26.99, hc) April 2024.

Much like time travel, the multiverse, as a scientifi­cally originated but unproven theory, can be used as a narrative conceit with varying degrees of rigour. For every Timescape a Doctor Who; for every Anathem an Everything Everywhere All at Once. I don’t think a work’s placement on this spectrum is a predictor of its quality, but ...Read More

Beyond the Light Horizon, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51482-6, £10.99, 336 pp, tp) May 2024. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-066-6, $21.00, 336pp, tp) June 2024.

Are Ken MacLeod novels realistic? Twenty-five years ago I would have said no. Reading the Fall Revolution series (1995-1999) as a teenager, part of the thrill (I see now) was the vivid granular depiction of a world that (I thought then) didn’t work that ...Read More

Jumpnauts, Hao Jingfang (trans. Ken Liu) (Saga 978-1-53442-211-7, 368pp, $18.99). March 2024.

Deep in the bowels of Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, an alien guide reveals to the human protagonists that what defines civilisational progression, from their elevated perspective, is ‘‘the capacity for information exchange.’’ The development of writing, which allows information to be transmit­ted widely in space and time, was the necessary precondition to reach the ‘‘zeroth rank’’ of ...Read More

The Mars House, Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury US 978-1639732333, 480pp, $29.99, hc). March 2024.

If, a century from now, there are enough readers and enough academic presses to warrant reprint­ing early 21st-century Anglophone science fiction, editors in search of candidates might do worse than considering Natasha Pulley’s The Mars House for their list. In its style, its intellectual interests, and the strengths and weaknesses of its execution, Pulley’s sixth novel ...Read More

Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber 978-0-57133-687-6, £20.00, 496pp, hc) October 2023. (Scribner 978-1-66802-545-1, $28.00, 464pp, hc) February 2024.

Francis Spufford’s enthusiasm for science fiction, and the variants of it that engage with historical process, is hardly a secret, but it’s taken a while for him to move from observer to participant. As long ago as 1996 he published a thoughtful essay on William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The ...Read More