Paul Tsabo is not the kind of person you would expect to save the world. He is an insurance adjuster in an alternate New York where people whose obsessions burn hot enough can reshape reality. These people are called ‘mancers, and their magic is illegal. Paul has a daughter with severe burns, a prosthetic foot,…
In 1988, the western half of North America belongs to Japan. The war ended differently here: the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany divided the globe between them, and the territory once called the United States became the United States of Japan, a colonial state where citizens are expected to worship a living Emperor, giant mechas…
If you have ever watched a screwball comedy where the husband and wife team banter their way through a murder investigation while maintaining perfect cocktail etiquette, you already have the emotional blueprint for The Spare Man. Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2022 novel is a loving, unapologetic tribute to Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, transplanted onto a…
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is the debut science fiction novel from Eddie Robson, published by Tordotcom in June 2022. Robson is primarily known in the UK for his television and radio work, including the BBC comedy Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully and his extensive contributions to the Doctor Who audio…
Published on January 31, 2023, Annalee Newitz’s third novel takes on the kind of question science fiction does best: what do we owe the world we inherit, and who gets to decide? The Terraformers is set roughly 60,000 years in the future, on a privately owned planet called Sask-E that has been undergoing terraforming by…
Shannon Chakraborty built her reputation on the Daevabad Trilogy, three dense novels of Islamic mythological fantasy set in a hidden city of djinn. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in March 2023 and a finalist for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, moves earlier in the same fictional universe and does something notably different…
Percival Everett has been writing fierce, funny, philosophically ambitious novels for more than four decades, but James, published in March 2024 by Doubleday, is the book that made the wider literary world pay attention all at once. It won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize…
Ann Leckie’s Translation State is the fifth book set in her Imperial Radch universe, and the first to put new protagonists at the center. Published by Orbit in June 2023, it runs 432 pages and arrives about seven years after Ancillary Mercy closed out the original trilogy. The setup, once Leckie has established her three…
Martha Wells spent the better part of a decade writing the science fiction novella series that made her a household name in genre circles. The Murderbot Diaries gave readers a socially anxious, TV-addicted security construct who would do anything to avoid human interaction, and it won Wells multiple Hugo Awards. So when she announced a…
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital begins somewhere above us. Six astronauts orbit Earth aboard a space station, completing sixteen circuits of the planet in the course of a single day, and the novel follows them through each pass: the dark side and the lit side, the weather systems and the coastlines, the slow political disasters visible from…
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