Barry Sutton, a New York City detective, gets called to a bridge because a woman named Ann Voss Peters is about to jump. Ann is not in the grip of ordinary despair. She remembers an entire life she did not live: a marriage, a child, decades of experience that contradict her actual biography. This condition…
Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is the first novel in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Set in a near-future North America dominated by biotech corporations, the novel opens on a man calling himself Snowman, the last human being on earth as far as he can tell. He lives at the edge of a settlement of…
The Dispossessed, subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, appeared in 1974 from Ursula K. Le Guin and promptly swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novel, making it one of the rare books to take all three prizes in the same year. It belongs to Le Guin’s loosely connected Hainish Cycle, a series of novels…
Summary Four women cross the border into Area X, a government-quarantined coastal wilderness that has consumed eleven previous expeditions. They carry no names, only titles: biologist, anthropologist, psychologist, surveyor. The organization that dispatched them, the Southern Reach, keeps its briefings deliberately vague. Previous teams returned hollowed out, then died of cancer within months. Others committed…
Martha Wells spent two decades writing fantasy and science fiction before she found her signature subject: a heavily armed cyborg with crippling social anxiety and a deep knowledge of serialized space dramas. The result was All Systems Red, published by Tor.com in May 2017 and the first installment in the Murderbot Diaries series. At 160…
There is a moment early in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season when you understand that the rules of this world are not the rules you assumed. The book opens on catastrophe: a rift splits a continent, ash fills the sky, and a woman named Essun comes home to find that her husband has beaten their…
Arkady Martine’s debut novel arrived in March 2019 from Tor Books and immediately announced a writer who had done the homework. Martine spent years as a Byzantine historian before fiction claimed more of her attention, and A Memory Called Empire carries that research openly: the Teixcalaanli Empire, the vast interstellar civilization at the center of…
Kazuo Ishiguro published Klara and the Sun in March 2021, his first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The book tells the story of Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend (AF) who sits in a shop window watching the world outside, hoping to be chosen by a child. When fourteen-year-old Josie, a…
Children of Time, published in 2015 by British author Adrian Tchaikovsky, is one of the most ambitious science fiction novels of the past decade. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016, it spans thousands of years across two parallel storylines that slowly converge in one of the most philosophically rich conclusions in recent…
The Three-Body Problem opens in the worst possible way for Ye Wenjie, a young Chinese astrophysicist. She watches Red Guards beat her father, the physicist Ye Zhetai, to death in a public struggle session during the Cultural Revolution. His crime: teaching the theory of relativity. From that moment, something breaks in Ye Wenjie’s faith in…
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