Niall Harrison

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

Wish I Was Here, M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail 978-1-80081-297-0, £16.99, 224pp, hc) May 2023. (Saga Press 978-1-66806-304-0, 224pp, $26.99, hc). September 2024.

It’s hard to know where to start writing about a book that knows exactly what it is and knows that knowledge doesn’t help much. “When [a piece of writing] has been assembled like this one,” writes M. John Harrison, “from so many layers of your life… ...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

Elephants in Bloom, Cécile Cristofari (NewCon Press 978-1-91495-367-5, 240pp, £26.99, hc) Janu­ary 2024. Cover by Enrique Meseguer.

Cécile Cristofari’s debut collection El­ephants in Bloom is, as debut collections so often are, exciting but uneven. Perhaps my favourite story, “Soaring, the World on Their Shoulders” (2020), demonstrates the combination of imagination and precision that she can bring to bear. What begins as a relatively standard dystopian setting, with France voting ...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

The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction, Bodhisattva Chatto­padhyay, ed. (The MIT Press 978-0-26254-761-1, 162pp, $19.95, tp). March 2024. Cover by Seth.

For about 15 years now, Joshua Glenn has been banging the drum for the historical and literary value of “proto-SF” published between roughly 1900 and 1935. He dubs this period, with a touch of dark whimsy, the “Radium Age,” on the grounds that ...Read More

Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta (HarperCol­lins India 978-93569-94188, 412pp, INR599.00, tp). September 2023. Cover by Upamanyu Bhat­tacharyya.

Towards the end of Tashan Mehta’s scin­tillating second novel, Mad Sisters of Esi, there is a single-page chapter titled “Breathe”. “We pause here,” the narrator tells us. “We sit down. We rest…. There is no rush.” It comes at exactly the right time. The “we” speaking at this point (this ...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

The Future, Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster 978-16680-25680, $28.99, 432pp, hc) November 2023.

Early in Naomi Alderman’s latest novel The Fu­ture, the protagonist, Lai Zhen, falls in lust, and perhaps love. A sardonic survivalism vlogger who escaped ‘‘the fall of Hong Kong’’ and then did a significant amount of growing up in an offshore British refugee camp, she finds herself at a confer­ence in London a couple of ...Read More

Nefando, Mónica Ojeda (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-689-4, $17.95, 184pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Kyle Hunter.

Describing the scenario that confronts the reader in Nefando is easy enough. Six people who were sharing an apartment in Barcelona have had their lives upended by the titular, highly disturbing video game. “El Cuco” Martinez helped to design the game for “the siblings,” Irene, Emilio, and Ce­cilia. Iván Herrera and Kiki Ortega, ...Read More

All the Hollow of the Sky, Kit Whitfield (Jo Fletcher Books 978-1-52941-493-6, 622pp, £25.00, hc) May 2023.

All the Hollow of the Sky earns its 600 pages because Kit Whitfield gets the voice right. Like her earlier and World Fantasy Award-nominated novel In Great Waters (2009), it is set in an alternate medieval England, but where In Great Waters was a densely argued alternate history of European politics (with merfolk), ...Read More

In Ascension, Martin MacInnes (Atlantic 978-1-83895-624-0, 496pp, £16.99, hc) February 2023. Cover by Carmen R. Balit.

Towards the end of Martin MacInnes’s cerebral third novel, Helena Hasenbosch recalls a moment shared with her older sister Leigh, when they were children. It’s the end of a long summer day, and Helena is sent to call Leigh home for dinner. Leigh doesn’t want to go, and “gently, softly,” she grabs Helena ...Read More

Taty Went West, Nikhil Singh (Jacaranda 978-1-909762-61-9, £9.99, 408pp, pb) October 2017. (Rosarium Publishing 978-0-998705-90-3, $17.95, 400pp, tp) January 2018.

In search of reference points for Nikhil Singh’s energetically transgressive first novel, perhaps cued by the 40-odd black-and-white illustra­tions scattered throughout the text, I find my­self reaching as much for graphic novels as the prose kind. Think of Grant Morrison circa The Invisibles or Alan Moore circa Lost Girls ...Read More