Science Fiction

Alexander Boldizar’s The Man Who Saw Seconds does something that the best science fiction has always done but rarely pulls off with this degree of conviction: it takes a single speculative premise and follows its consequences to their logical, terrifying, and frequently absurd conclusions. The premise is deceptively simple. Preble Jefferson can see five seconds…

Ramez Naam’s Apex concludes his Nexus trilogy with the throttle fully open — a techno-thriller that is also a genuinely serious inquiry into the political, ethical, and existential implications of human cognitive enhancement. The trilogy began with a drug called Nexus that links human minds in a network; Apex traces the global crisis that erupts…

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng is a fascinating and darkly atmospheric debut that reimagines Victorian Gothic fiction through the lens of colonial theology and fae mythology. About the Book Jeannette Ng’s debut novel is set in an alternate Victorian England in which the existence of Faerie—the realm of the fae—is a known and…

Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, published by Saga Press in 2019, begins with a premise that sounds like hardware and turns out to be philosophy. Corporate soldiers fighting an interstellar war against Mars are broken down into light and beamed across space to their combat drops. Most of them arrive intact. One soldier, known throughout…

United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas is a bold, viscerally imagined alternate history thriller set in a world where Japan won World War II — a novel that combines the paranoid atmosphere of Philip K. Dick with the propulsive energy of a noir action film, and arrives at something entirely its own. About the…

A structurally audacious debut from Maud Woolf: thirteen assassins, thirteen versions of one woman, and a sharp satirical investigation into identity, selfhood, and who controls the story of a woman’s life.

In the South Pacific, 1,000 feet below the ocean surface, a United States Navy investigation team discovers a spaceship. It is approximately three hundred years old. It is of American manufacture. And it contains, inside its enormous hull, a perfectly smooth golden sphere that none of them can explain. Dr. Norman Johnson, a psychologist who…

Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and it has since become one of the most important novels in science fiction. Set in a post-nuclear-war San Francisco, the book follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job is to “retire” rogue androids. Six Nexus-6 models have escaped from Mars and…

Arthur Dent’s house is being demolished to make way for a bypass when he learns that the Earth is also scheduled for demolition — to make way for a hyperspace bypass — and that his friend Ford Prefect is not, in fact, from Guildford, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse….

Charlie Gordon is 32 years old and has an IQ of 68. He works as a janitor at a bakery in New York, takes reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, and wants, more than anything, to be smart. When he is selected for an experimental brain surgery — a…