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 ...Read More
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The Nightward, R.S.A. Garcia (Harper Voyager US 978-0-06-334575-1, $19.99, 448pp, tp) October 2024.
The Nightward is R.S.A. Garcia’s first traditionally published novel. From the outside, it looks like a work of epic fantasy in the classic mode, in which a small team of heroes must outwit and stand against a nebulously defined threat to all they know and love. A closer examination, however, finds it taking this classic form ...Read More
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An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, Anna Moschovakis (Soft Skull 978-1-59376-783-9, 208pp, $16.95, tp) November 2024. Cover by Gregg Kulick.
I’m continually interested in how the coronavirus pandemic does – or commonly doesn’t – make its way into fiction. It’s such a huge event, but one that “realistic” novels, movies, and television series seem hesitant to engage with, opting instead for a kind of hazy ...Read More
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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0063315785, $18.99, 384pp, tp) October 2024.
There are a lot of different ways of assembling an anthology, but none seem quite so programmatic as John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its tenth year. Adams describes his methodology with admirable clarity: As series editor, he compiles a list ...Read More
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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
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A Hunger With No Name, Lauren C. Teffeau (University of Tampa Press 978-1-59732-207-2, 156pp, $28.00, hc) September 2024. Cover by Madeline M. Eisele.
Lauren C. Teffeau’s novella A Hunger With No Name might take place on a far-future Earth, or in a similar secondary world; regardless, it’s told by a people who have survived some vast disaster, a ‘‘Great Scatter’’ that has receded into a mythic past. The Astravans have ...Read More
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The Tapestry of Time, Kate Heartfield (Harper Voyager 978-0-00-856781-1, £16.99, 384pp, hc) October 2024.
Sometimes a trope seems so familiar that it begins to feel like a tire that’s lost its tread, even though it’s still fun to drive on. The Nazi preoccupation with occult powers has itself been a preoccupation for writers from all over the spectrum – horror (F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon), fantasy (Katherine Kurtz, Ian ...Read More
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A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall (Orbit 978-0-316-56553-0, $18.99, 352pp, tp) April 2024. Cover by Raxenne Maniquiz.
Sylvie Cathrall starts off her Sunken Archives series with the charming epistolary novel A Letter to the Luminous Deep. Set on a watery planet long after a catastrophic event that dramatically impacted the landscape, Luminous Deep is a romance and mystery spiced with some eye-rolling family moments that gently ...Read More
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Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins (Sourcebooks Landmark 978-1-72825-603-0, $16.99, 336pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Erin Fitzsimmons.
After reading Manuela Draeger’s fascinating novel Kree, about afterlives and reincarnation, and translator and anthologist Anton Hur’s excellent debut novel Toward Eternity, in which artificial intelligences and nanite-transformed humans have found a strange immortality, the centrality of mortality in Eden Robins’s Remember You Will Die is almost refreshing. While ...Read More
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Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-426-9, $15.95, 224pp, tp) October 2024.
Story collections almost never sell as well as novels, but maybe they ought to. A novel is the end product of processes that may have unfolded over months or years, while a collection offers us glimpses into those processes themselves. All of the sixteen stories in Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions were published ...Read More
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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
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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 ...Read More
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The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball (Catapult 978-1-64622-140-0, 256pp, $27.00, hc) Cover by Sara Wood. September 2024.
I first came across Jesse Ball back in 2007 when his debut, Samedi the Deafness, was shortlisted for the Believer Book Award (a terrific prize that introduced me to authors as varied as Bennett Sims, Keith Ridgway, Valeria Luiselli, and Danielle Dutton. I miss it… and the magazine). I bought the novel ...Read More
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Full Speed to a Crash Landing, Beth Revis (DAW 978-0-756-41946-2, $23.00, tp, 192pp) August 2024.
Beth Revis gives readers an action-packed science fiction adventure in her latest novella, Full Speed to a Crash Landing. Opening with a literal bang, she introduces space salvor Ada Lamarr, who is clinging to life in her space suit after an accident onboard her ship blew a hole in its side and forced ...Read More
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Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, Indrapramit Das, ed. (The MIT Press 978-0-26254-908-0, 229pp, $24.95, tp). October 2024. Cover art by Diana Scherer.
Of the ten stories collected in Deep Dream that aim to, as editor Indrapramit Das has it, “both embody and visualize the future of art,” only one offers an explicit definition of what art might be. Many millennia in the future, the twinned ...Read More
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Kree, Manuela Draeger (University of Minnesota Press 978-1-51791-512-4, $21.95, 280pp, tp) October 2024.
Manuela Draeger’s Kree is so immediately violent that I wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. Somehow, though, within just a few chapters, the novel’s mix of haunting imagery and almost humorous unpredictability grew so compelling that I found myself wanting to track down everything else the author has written. A midapocalyptic story set ...Read More
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State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37461-220-7, $27.00, 224pp, hc) July 2024.
I move from one instance of weird Florida (Area X is a distorted version of North Florida) to another: Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise. I’d say that reading VanderMeer and van den Berg back-to-back (alliterative surnames aside) is a remarkable coincidence, except that Florida, to outsiders such as myself, has ...Read More
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The Ancients, John Larison (Viking 978-0593831168, hardcover, 400pp, $30.00) October 2024
Writers from outside our genre seem to have fixed upon four major themes or topics that they find congenial to their arguably more “literary” way of writing.
Time travel. Robots and Androids. Dystopias. And Apocalypse or After the Collapse scenarios.
You don’t see many “mainstream” folks writing about, say, “talking squids in outer space,” or starship troopers or ...Read More
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A Jura for Julia, Ken MacLeod (NewCon Press 978-1-91495-383-5, 220pp, £26.99, hc) August 2024. Cover by Fangorn.
I don’t think it’s entirely unrecognised that one of the most notable qualities of Ken MacLeod’s fiction is its dry humour, but I’m not sure it’s much discussed. So here’s a moment from “The Shadow Ministers”, one of a baker’s dozen of enjoyable stories collected in A Jura for Julia, that ...Read More
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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 ...Read More
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Ultra 85, Logic (Simon & Schuster 978-1-98215-827-9, $18.99, 304pp, tp) September 2024.
I’d never heard of the rapper Logic (AKA Sir Robert Bryson Hall II) or his work (both musical and literary) until I was sent a copy of Ultra 85. That’s not an indictment of Logic but instead speaks to my narrow, stunted musical tastes. Ultra 85 is Logic’s sophomore effort, the follow-up to his debut Supermarket ...Read More
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Nether Station, Kevin J. Anderson (Blackstone 979-8200688449, hardcover, 316pp, $27.99) October 2024
The crew of a small survey spaceship voyages out to investigate a spacetime anomaly, and encounters deadly supernatural (?) entities. Am I about to take a second pass at reviewing Adam Roberts’s recent Lake of Darkness? Not at all! But by phrasing the plot of that novel generically, I can point out that although certain adjacent ...Read More
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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
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Dakini Atoll, Nikhil Singh (Luna Press Publishing 978-1-91555-634-9, £22.99, 252pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Elena Romenkova.
Nikhil Singh has carved out a niche within African SF by bringing the full range of his artistic talents into play in his worldbuilding. The dystopian underworlds explored in his earlier works create the unique effect of falling into a sensorial swamp, an enticing feature that is only enhanced in Singh’s third ...Read More
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The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball (Catapult 978-1-64622-140-0, 256pp, $27.00, hc) Cover by Sara Wood. September 2024.
We have such a cornucopia of dystopias right now, fictional and otherwise, that they’ve really got to do something different to catch my attention. The Repeat Room, the latest novel from the prolific Jesse Ball, captured it thoroughly: haunting, spare, and inventive, it’s a bleak tale that’s nonetheless rich with sparkling turns ...Read More
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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 ...Read More
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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
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Napalm in the Heart, Pol Guasch (Faber & Faber UK 978-0571375257, £6.99, 256pp, hc) July 2024. (FSG Originals 978-0-37461-295-5, $18.00, 256pp, tp) August 2024.
Reading Pol Guasch’s debut, Napalm in the Heart, right after Helen Phillips’ Hum is a disorientating experience. Both authors present us with dystopias, but while Phillips cleaves to our reality, Guasch gives us something more symbolic and experimental, a dystopia unmoored from time and ...Read More
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Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316578974, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) September 2024
If Michael Bishop and Tom Disch had collaborated to script an episode of the Aliens franchise, and then the result had been filmed by Toho Studios, the result might have well come to resemble Adrian Tchaikovsky’s newest kick in the pants, Alien Clay. This is one of three great books Tchaikovsky has released in 2024; similar ...Read More
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Hum, Helen Phillips (Marysue Rucci Books 978-1-66800-883-6, $27.99, 272pp, hc) August 2024.
The novels I review for this column are not chosen with a theme in mind. If one does pop up, it’s purely coincidental. That goes for this month. I had no idea Hum, Napalm in the Heart, and Ultra 85 would all be dystopian novels. The good news is that they’re very different in tone, ...Read More
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No/Mad/Land, Franceso Verso (Flame Tree Press 978-1787589278, hardcover, 384pp, $26.95) September 2024
Even when deploying familiar tropes of the genre in totally au courant ways, science fiction by non-Anglo authors always reveals an idiosyncratic slant or attitude or worldview. This has been evident at least since Stanislaw Lem burst onto the English-language publishing scene, and is witnessed more recently in works from such accomplished authors as Cixin Liu, Hannu ...Read More
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Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24 Nightmare 7/24
Reactor continues to present top-quality fiction. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constellations” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.
In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (June 12) by TJ ...Read More
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