When the Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi (Tor 9780765389091, $29.99, 336pp, hc) March 2025.
In When the Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi posits a question: What will humanity as a whole do when forced to confront something truly impossible happening right before their eyes? And because this is Scalzi, that impossible thing also needs to be thoroughly ridiculous. In the blink of an eye, the moon ...Read More
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Future’s Edge, Gareth L. Powell (Titan 978-1-80336-863-4, $17.99, 352pp, tp) February 2025. Cover by Julia Lloyd.
Gareth L. Powell’s Future’s Edge exists in a universe where aliens have contacted humans recently and human/alien interaction has been going along quite merrily, right up until it isn’t. In his first book since 2023’s equally space-operatic Descendant Machine, Powell gives us an adventure featuring alien technology, sentient spaceships, and human derring-do. ...Read More
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Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1-0350-1379-1, £22.00, 448pp, hc) February 2025. (Orbit US 978-0316579025, $19.99, 416pp, tp) June 2025.
I find it impossible not to think of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud as a companion piece to its 2024 predecessor, Alien Clay. The novels are unconnected and freestanding, but in both, humans encounter alien life so different in its basic makeup that it is nearly unrecognizable as highly organized and ...Read More
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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
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The Black Orb, Ewhan Kim (Serpent’s Tail 978-1-80081-572-8, £14.99, 368pp, tp) August 2024. (Mira 978-0-77838-734-8, $28.99, 304pp, tp) February 2025.
There’s little written in English about South Korean science fiction author and critic Ewhan Kim. A brief profile of Kim written by the author on the ‘‘Science Fiction Writers Union of the Republic of Korea’’ tells us he became ‘‘a writer after reading Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles’’ and ...Read More
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Luminous, Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster 978-1-66802-166-8, 400pp, $29.99, hc) March 2025.
The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and long blond hair, the kind that shone with each brush. She was falling apart. Her face had been shredded into confetti, held together by one bleary blue eye, while her torso was a smooth bioplastic vest, translucent as a milk carton. Ruijie had tried pressing ...Read More
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Death and Other Speculative Fictions, Caroline Hagood (Spuyten Duvvil 9781963908503, $18.00, 116pp, tp) January 2025.
Caroline Hagood’s Death and Other Speculative Fictions is an astonishing read, comforting and discomforting in equal measure. A philosophical, poetic meditation on the death of a parent, it’s a whirl of reflections on what fantastic stories can say about death, and vice versa. Don’t be dismayed by the fact that this doesn’t look like ...Read More
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Transmentation | Transience, Darkly Lem (Blackstone 979-8-21218-599-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Kathryn English.
I came to this novel with no knowledge of what I was going into. I had heard that Darkly Lem was a collaboration between five authors – Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm – but I hadn’t read any of their individual work. On top of that, ...Read More
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The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami (Pantheon 978-0593317600, $29.00, 336pp, hc) March 2025.
This may sound like an odd question, but are algorithms starting to take over the narrative function that psi powers once served in SF? The idea of preventing crimes by pre-emptively arresting supposed perpetrators has been around at least since Orwell’s notion of ‘‘thoughtcrimes,’’ and in the 1950s this became the province of psionically gifted folks like ...Read More
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We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler (Atria 9781668049594, $28.99, 336pp, hc) January 2025. Cover design by Laywan Kwan.
The ingredients of Erika Swyler’s We Lived On the Horizon are familiar enough: embodied AI, a highly stratified society, a postapocalyptic city ossifying from techno-utopia to classist nightmare. But Swyler’s combination feels fresh; the main characters here move almost, though not entirely, outside the “real” plot, the revolution planners and ...Read More
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The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth 2, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-276-3, $19.99, 275pp, tp) December 2024. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
With anthology series that focus on robots and AI, and on space and time, I was surprised to come across Infinivox and Allan Kaster doing a series about science fiction on Earth itself; it seemed too mundane. Kaster addresses this in the first line of his introduction, ...Read More
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Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion, Paul Kincaid (Palgrave Macmillan 978-3031715662, $37.99, 86pp, hc) November 2024.
For the past couple of years, Palgrave has been publishing a series of short “critical companion” monographs each focusing on a single title of what it calls the “new canon”; books covered so far include The Last Unicorn, Dune, The Hobbit, Neuromancer, Neverwhere, The Stars My Destination, ...Read More
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Juice, Tim Winton (Picador 978-1-76134-489-3, AUD$45.00, 528pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Adam Laszczuk.
Here’s an admission that would elicit a gasp from the Australian literary elite: I have never read a Tim Winton novel. Worse, I read the opening of one of his most famous novels and I hated it. But then I read Juice. And if all his novels hit like that for people who like realism… ...Read More
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One Level Down, Mary G. Thompson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-430-6, $16.95, 176pp, tp) April 2025.
Mary G. Thompson is another middle-grade and young-adult author now venturing into adult SF with One Level Down, an efficient VR thriller with some fairly familiar elements skillfully handled and given additional punch by a memorable narrator, a megalomaniacal villain who echoes the ‘‘mad scientists’’ of yore, and a persistent undertone of psychological horror. While ...Read More
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We are so happy to release our fourth episode of The Storytellers, our series of Zoom-recorded author readings! Previously, we had Samantha Mills read the first chapter of The Wings Upon Her Back. Today we are pleased to show Daniel Abraham reading “The Wind”, a short story written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who together make up the pseudonym responsible for The Expanse, James S.A. Corey. “The Wind” ...Read More
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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
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Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Gollancz 978-1-39961-679-9, £20.00, 336pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Jordan Wolfe. (Harper Voyager 978-0-06343-082-2, $19.99, 368pp, tp). January 2025. Cover by Janelle Barone.
I love a heist story. Getting the conspirators together, finding out the plan, overcoming obstacles, finding out the real plan, watching it all unravel and then neatly come back together… I know the beats of the story, and that’s part of what ...Read More
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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
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Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34224-9, $21.99, 112pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Feifei Ruan.
Olivia Waite is deservedly well-known, at least among my circles, for her queer historical romances featuring women from a wide range of social classes who overcome obstacles while falling in love with other women. In addition to her skills as a novelist, she is also a talented reviewer with a particular focus on ...Read More
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Picks and Shovels, Cory Doctorow (Ad Astra UK 978-1-8045-4783-0, £20.00, 400pp, hc) January 2025. (Tor 978-1-250-86590-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) February 2025.
Cory Doctorow’s novels about forensic accountant Martin Hench are playing out as a trilogy-in-reverse: We first met Hench as a wealthy 67-year-old freelance investigator in Red Team Blues (2023), then as he recalled a case from 2006 in The Bezzle, when he was probably approaching 50. Now, ...Read More
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How to Steal a Galaxy, Beth Revis (DAW 978-0-756-41948-6, $23.00, 192pp, hc) December 2024.
Beth Revis follows up her decidedly enjoyable Full Speed to a Crash Landing with the second in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, How to Steal a Galaxy. This time, the action surrounding protagonist Ada Lamarr is more compressed, with the bulk of the novella taking place over a single evening at the Museum of Intergalactic ...Read More
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The Sentence, Gautam Bhatia (Westland IF 978-9-36045-152-3, ₹599, 396pp, tp) October 2024.
A hundred years ago, the city-state of Peruma emerged from a bloody civil war between its landowning elites and its working classes with a legal compromise. A charter that divided the city into High Town, ruled by the corporate-controlled Council, and Low Town, ruled by the anarchistic Commune. In between are the Guardians, an order of lawyers ...Read More
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The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fifth Annual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-259-6, $18.99, 234pp, tp). October 2024.Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
In my review of The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, I noted that AI was gaining more presence in our lives – something that has increased over the last year. I also noted that the stories in that anthology were overwhelmingly ...Read More
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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
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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
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Edge of the Known World, Sheri T. Joseph (SparkPress 978-1-68463-262-6, $18.99, 328pp, pb) September 2024. Cover by Kathleen Lynch.
In her debut novel, Sheri T. Joseph mixes frustratingly messy politics with painfully messy personal affairs to create a riveting novel of the not-far-enough-away future. It’s a future of familiar challenges – displaced people, xenophobia, technologies that threaten individual privacy. Joseph uses three key characters, and their love triangle, to ...Read More
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Fortress Sol, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1-39961-461-0, £25.00, 480pp, hc). October 2024.
Fortress Sol is classic Stephen Baxter. It’s driven by big ideas: Humanity’s response to a perceived existential threat includes both dispersing to the stars and mind-boggling engineering projects. Like 2021’s Galaxias, the focus is not so much on the alien threat as on humanity’s response. There’s a relatively small cast of characters, who are engaging enough but ...Read More
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The Shutouts, Gabrielle Korn (St. Martin’s 978-1-2503-2348-4, $29.00, 304pp, hc) December 2024.
As climate change has become an ever-growing and more insistent presence in our lives, it has also begun inflecting and informing works of fiction, whose authors imagine how the remainder of the 21st century will play out. Interestingly, it is writers coming from outside the traditional venues of SFF writing and publishing who have most readily embraced this ...Read More
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Crows and Silences, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean 978-1-64524-217-8, $60.00, 520pp, hc) December 2024.
When discussing Lucius Shepard, it’s inevitable to bemoan that despite his abundant talent, his work received little mainstream recognition. I observed this when I reviewed The Best of Lucius Shepard: Volume 2, quoting an obituary of Shepard penned by Christopher Priest for The Guardian. Priest felt that Shepard’s preference for the novella and his association with ...Read More
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And the Mighty Will Fall, K.B. Wagers (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-311524-8, $19.99, 464pp, tp) November 2024.
And the Mighty Will Fall is K.B. Wagers’s tenth and latest space opera novel, the fourth book in the NeoG continuity after 2023’s The Ghosts of Trappist. And the Mighty Will Fall brings the action back to our solar system and the long-running conflict between advocates for an independent Mars and the central ...Read More
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Breath of Oblivion, Maurice Broaddus (Tor 978-1-25026-512-8, $30.99, 400pp, hc) November 2024.
Breath of Oblivion is the second instalment in Maurice Broaddus’s highly anticipated Astra Black trilogy. The first book in the series, Sweep of Stars, was a Locus Award finalist in 2023 and garnered favourable reviews for his Afrofuturist space adventure. Sweep of Stars clearly displays Broaddus’s admirable worldbuilding, as he imagines the year 2121, long after ...Read More
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The Escher Man, T.R. Napper (Titan 978-1-80336-815-3, $17.99, 368pp, pb) September 2024. Cover by Julia Lloyd.
It’s 2101. Macau is filled with casinos and run by gangsters; Endel (aka Endgame), an Australian, is an enforcer for the main cartel, sent to kill traitors and anyone else who threatens the gang’s livelihood. Endel is a drunk and a gambler, and separated from his wife and child because of his behaviour. ...Read More
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