New Books In Science Fiction

It’s no coincidence that one of the main characters in S. Qiouyi Lu’s In the Watchful City carries with ser a qíjìtáng, or cabinet of curiosities. Lu’s novella is, itself, a cabinet of unusual mementos, with many smaller objects carefully folded into the larger structure. On one level the plot is simple. The qíjìtáng is full of stories, and its owner, Vessel, who hovers between life and death, needs to add one more story to ser collection in order to have a second chance at life. (Vessel’s pronouns are se, ser and sers). So se asks Anima, one of eight people who provide surveillance for the city-state of Ora, for aer story. (Anima’s pronouns are ae, aer and aers). But Anima’s life isn’t so simple. Ae serves as a node in the city’s Hub, which aer monitors by entering the consciousness of animals (including a gecko, raven, and wild dog during the course of the story). In this way, Ae can travel anywhere and yet aer body is fastened by a stem to a tank of amniotic-like fluid. Lu likens Anima’s experience of bein

Jackson Ford has some things in common with his protagonist, Teagan Frost. Both use nom de plumes. And both can move sh*t. With her telekinetic powers, Teagan can move inorganic objects while Ford (aka Rob Boffard) uses his creative powers to move plots at a rapid clip. Ford, and his publisher, Orbit, have also moved the cultural needle—specifically, by bringing three books with sh*t (asterisk and all) into the world. The most recent contribution, Eye of the Sh*t Storm (Orbit, 2021), is the third in Ford’sThe Frost Files series and continues Teagan’s attempts to learn about her origins while managing her government handlers and keeping Los Angeles safe from those with strange psychic powers like hers. “Teagan is not a typical superhero because she resents her ability to move things with her mind,” Ford says. “She would much rather learn how to cook, be a professional chef, and own her own restaurant… Her ability has forced her into a life she has no desire to be a part of.” In his New Books interview, Ford di

Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel The Wall (Harper Collins, 2020) is set in Sumer, a city enclosed in an impenetrable, unscalable barrier that seems sky high. To its inhabitants, whose ancestors have lived there for 2,000 years, the place is more than a city or even a country—it’s their universe. Sumer’s residents know something is on the other side but have no desire to explore beyond the wall. They are content with what they have, living comfortably with the resources, rules and hierarchies that have sustained them for centuries. But every couple generations, some people crave more. In this generation, a group calling themselves the Young Tarafians are determined to breach the wall once and for all. “It's not that there is some kind of very visible and wretched oppression that's keeping people down,” Bhatia says. “At the end of the day, the resources are distributed in a way that everyone has enough for at least a decent standard of life. So it's not meant to be a dystopia, and that's part of the point. … Rebelli

Where does DNA end and the soul begin? It’s a question that Evelyn Caldwell, the brilliant genetic researcher at the center of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, never asks as she develops her award-winning technique for human cloning, which takes DNA from “sample to sentience” in 100 days. In The Echo Wife, clones are tools, created for specific time-limited purposes—to serve as a body double to draw fire from potential assassins, for example, or to provide donor organs. The question of a soul never enters into it. “Clones aren’t people. …They’re specimens,” Evelyn explains. “They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable.” Evelyn’s attitudes evolve when her ex-husband, Nathan, secretly uses the Caldwell Method to create Martine—a new wife scaffolded from Evelyn’s DNA but modified to be more docile and easy going. Because of Martine’s compliant nature (and complete reliance on Nathan for her knowledge of the world), Martine is eager to provide Nathan with the

A story about an alien invasion typically revolves around diplomacy, military strategy, technological one-upmanship, and brinksmanship. But the invaders in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2021) are anything but typical. Rather than a scheming sentient enemy, Weir gives us Astrophage, an opponent who is mindless—and microscopic. Astrophage, which is similar in its biology to a mold, lives on—and taps energy from—the surface of stars. “It’s not intelligent in any way. It doesn’t care about us. But it gets to the point where there is so much of it on our sun that the sun is starting to lose luminance—it’s getting dimmer. And a four or five percent dimming of the sun would be fatal to life on Earth,” says Weir, who was a guest on New Books in Science Fiction in 2014 to talk about his runaway bestseller The Martian. An unlikely antagonist deserves an unlikely hero. Enter Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher, who long ago authored a scientific paper that declared water isn’t a pre

In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden (Orbit, 2020) the multiverse is filled with parallel Earths where evolution takes different twists and turns. The forks in the road and the paths species take vary from Earth to Earth, seeding sentience in a wide variety of organisms. In one, giant mollusks “understand and communicate profound truths about the nature of existence.” In another, a creature twice the size of the average human with traits of fish, salamander and slug creates a permanent ice age and must upload its citizens to supercomputers to survive. Toddler-sized rats pave the planet with Industrial Age warrens in a different Earth. And in still another version of our planet, giant immortal spacefaring trilobites establish themselves at the top of the evolutionary heap for all eternity. Tchiakovsky’s characters learn about the existence of other Earths because the boundaries between them have sundered, necessitating urgent action. No single species has the smarts or technology to fix the problem by its

Space operas take readers far from Earth with stories about alien cultures and battles between good and evil. But while usually set in distant galaxies in the far flung future or past, they inevitably tell us, like any good science fiction, about our lives today. Ginger Smith’s debut The Rush's Edge (Angry Robot, 2020) takes place when humanity is spread across the galaxy and soldiers are born in labs, but it touches on subjects we grapple with now: blind loyalty to authority, the ethics of genetic science, and the prejudices that divide humans. Halvor Cullen is a VAT—a member of the genetically engineered Vanguard Assault Troops who are programmed to be loyal to their commander and addicted to the rush of battle. VATs are released from duty after seven years of service, but their bodies burn out quickly, and they die young. But it’s when they’re released from duty that things get interesting. How does a person programmed to be a soldier find purpose or meaningful relationships when they’re no longer a soldie

At the end of its life, the phoenix bursts into flames and a younger bird rises from the ashes. The roc is large enough to carry an elephant in its claws. The caladrius absorbs disease, curing the ill. The rain heron, which can take the form of steam, liquid or ice, controls the climate around it. Unlike the first three mythical birds, whose legends are hundreds or thousands of years old, the rain heron is a new entry in the library of imaginary beasts, introduced in the novel bearing its name by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. Set in an unnamed country beset by a military coup and climate disruptions, The Rain Heron (FSG Originals, 2021) is a story of survivors searching for peace but finding violence in both nature and society. The characters are tested and exposed by the titular creature, which exacts a price from those who dare covet it. “What I was really trying to do was create a mythical creature that embodies both the beauty and the savagery of nature,” Arnott says. “I wanted something that is totally

Sometimes you come across a book that pulls you in from every angle. It offers you the space to explore your own fears and hopes all while taking you on a perilous adventure into the unknown with a character you feel you’ve met in real life. That’s a good novel, to me. That’s Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller (Mira Books, 2020). In the novel, Wylodine is a marijuana farmer watching everyone she loves leave her small town. As climate change has devastated her world, she chooses to find her own way out of Appalachia. What she finds along the way is more than new faces to call family, more than new freedom and strength, despite the snow and hard earth, she finds a way to grow. Described as “Urgent and poignant, Road Out of Winter is a glimpse of an all-too-possible near future.” Listen in as Ali and I talk about Wylodine’s dystopia, our own pandemic-strained year, and the writerly life. And check out Appalachian singer-songwriter Liz Pahl’s song, “Wylodine,” inspired by the novel. Ellee

The title of S. B. Divya’s debut novel, Machinehood (Gallery/Saga Press, 2021), refers to an underground band of rebels (or terrorists, depending on your view) who threaten to unplug the world from the tech essential to modern life unless all intelligences—human and man-made—are given equal rights. The book opens with Welga, the story’s hero, ordering black coffee from a bot in Chennai, India; the bot puts milk in the coffee while insisting that the drink is still “black.” A human vendor across the street fills Welga’s order properly, without milk, and then summarizes her experiences with the two vendors in a tidy lesson: “Bots work faster, but human mind is smarter.” The vendor’s words foreshadow the fault line that runs through the book. On the one hand, humans rely on bots to run their homes and economy, on the other, humans compete with bots, constantly afraid of falling physically and mentally behind. “Once upon a time, we harnessed animals to help us,” Divya says. “Now we've turned to machines and, as t

Humans have found many ways to divide and stratify—by skin color, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, health status, body type or size, and so on. The list is so long that it’s hard to imagine it getting longer, and yet debut author Chris Panatier has found a way. In The Phlebotomist (Angry Robot, 2020)t, society is divided (as the title suggests) by something invisible to the naked eye: blood type. Universal donors—those with Type O negative—are the most valued. Universal recipients—those who are AB positive—are the least valued. With incomes based on the market value of their blood, universal donors end up at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy and universal recipients at the bottom. Meanwhile, those running the show—executives of the company Patriot—are the richest of all, living in exclusive enclaves. It is vampiric capitalism in more ways than one. The name of the company is a reference to the Patriot Act—a real-life example of creeping authoritarianism that parallels th

Arranged marriages have been around for centuries, and in The Light Years (Angry Robot, 2020), R.W.W. Greene imagines they’ll be around for centuries more. With the addition of speed-of-light travel, Greene’s character Adem Saddiq can sign a contract with the parents of his wife-to-be before she’s even born, take to space on his family’s freighter and return several months later to find his 26-year-old bride, Hisako Sasaki, waiting for him. Because time dilation allows him to jump 26 years into the future, he can have his bride made-to-order, specifying what degrees and skills she’ll need to play a productive part in the family business. He can even require that she receive genetic modifications to make her a genius. Greene imagines that the same considerations that shaped arranged marriages in the past will shape them in the future. Hisako’s “parents are very poor. They’re refugees,” he explains. “Their only way to get out of this situation is to sign the contract. It's going to allow Adem and his family to

The first chapter of Rebecca Roanhorse’s new novel, Black Sun (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020), features a mother and child sharing a tender moment that takes an unexpected turn, ending in violence. It’s a powerful beginning to a story whose characters struggle with the legacies of family expectations, historical trauma, and myth. These three strands are most powerfully manifest in Serapio, the child in the opening scene, who is raised to fulfill a legacy on the day of the convergence, a solar eclipse on the winter solstice. His sole purpose is to avenge a massacre of his mother’s clan, drawing upon magic to carry out the mission. And yet he has never lived among his mother’s clan, nor was he alive when the massacre occurred, raising complex questions about duty, history, and how individuals find meaning in their lives. “Serapio has always been on the outside,” Roanhorse says. “He feels like he has a purpose, a destiny tied up with something pretty dark, that he's doing on behalf of people that don't even know he e

The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) is a sweeping novel about climate change and how people of the near future start to slow, stop and reverse it. The story opens with a devastating heat wave that kills thousands in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. From there, Kim Stanley Robinson pulls back to show us the world’s reaction, taking readers from the eponymous Ministry for the Future (which advocates for new laws and policies, like carbon quantitative easing) to scientists in Antarctica, where glaciologists pump out water from under glaciers to slow their slide into the ocean. The book’s kaleidoscope of viewpoints goes beyond humans to include animals, inanimate objects and abstract concepts, like caribou, a carbon atom and history. Robinson also uses multiple forms, from traditional first- and third-person narratives and eyewitness accounts, to meeting notes and history lessons, to riddles and dialogues. The effect is epic, conveying both the complexity of the problem and a wake-up call. “I want to make

Over the last ten years, Paul Kingsnorth has become recognised as one of the most extraordinary of contemporary writers. After The Wake, which was listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and its follow-up, Beast, Kingsnorth was hailed as "a furiously gifted writer," his prose suggesting "Beckett doing Beowulf." In his outstanding new novel, Alexandria, just published by Graywolf Press in the US and forthcoming in the UK from Faber, Kingsnorth completes his Buccmaster trilogy, conjuring our world one thousand years into its future, in which the last surviving humans come to terms with some very ancient fears - and hopes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (Redhook, 2020) begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairytale. Yes, there are witches. But there are also suffragists. Yes, there are spells. But there are also women who fall in love with each other. While Harrow loves fairytales “because they give us this shared language,” she hates them for the limits they impose. Through her main characters, the Eastwood sisters, she turns the familiar archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone on their heads. “The Maiden-Mother-Crone triptych is something that I have always hated. It's pretty gross to define a woman's existence by her reproductive state at that moment,” Harrow says. “I wanted to be embodying and subverting it at the same time.” As the story unfolds, women’s demands to rediscover and use magic parallel their demands for political power and social freedom. In the guise of a fairytale, The Once and Future Witches explores the long afterlife of family trauma,

P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout (Tordotcom, 2020) is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. The story follows three monster hunters: Maryse Boudreaux, who wields a magic sword; Chef, who had previously disguised herself as a man to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters during World War I; and Sadie, a sharpshooter who calls her Winchester rifle Winnie. The monsters are Ku Kluxes—member of the KKK who have transformed into huge, six-eyed, pointy-toothed, flesh-eating demons. The idea to turn hate-filled racists into larger-than-life demons came from Clark’s work as a historian. (In addition to an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.) When reading narratives of formerly enslaved individuals collected by the Federal Writers' Project, he’d been struck by the way they described the KKK. “They often talk about them … wearing simply a pillowcase, somet

In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ. Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters keep hating. Fforde is an accomplished satirist and uses humor to spotlight some of our ugliest impulses, including racism and xenophobia. In The Constant Rabbit, a populist party known as TwoLegsGood has parlayed leporiphobia (fear of rabbits) into a successful political movement. In control of the government, TwoLegsGood is planning to segregate the nation’s more than 1 million rabbits in a “MegaWarren” where they will be under round-the-clock surveillance and their freedoms curtailed. TwoLegsGood’s treatment of rabbit h

Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote some of The New Wilderness while trekking across the high desert of Oregon. “There is something about the expansiveness of lands that are empty that make my imagination feel a lot freer than it usually does in a city,” she says. For Cook’s protagonist Bea, the Wilderness State offers the only hope for saving the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes. But as Agnes’ lungs heal from the city’s smog, her relationship with her mother grows strained, suffering rifts that might be typical for a mother and daughter but are magnifi

In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art. Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of