Science Fiction

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…

Thornhedge is a 2023 novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name of Ursula Vernon, published by Tor.com in August of that year. At 128 pages, it is a slim book with an ambitious premise: a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale told entirely from the perspective of the creature who put the princess to…

The Hexologists, published by Orbit in September 2023, is the first book in a new fantasy mystery series by Josiah Bancroft, an American author who made his name with the self-published debut Senlin Ascends before finding a wider audience through Orbit Books. Where the Books of Babel quartet was disorienting and epic in scale, The…

Adrian Tchaikovsky published Service Model in June 2024 through Tordotcom, and it arrives knowing exactly what it wants to be: a dark comedy about a robotic valet who murders his master and then wanders through the ruins of human civilization, trying to get his malfunction diagnosed. The premise sounds comic, and it is, but Tchaikovsky…

John Scalzi has built a career on science fiction that moves fast, treats its readers as intelligent, and makes serious arguments inside a package that is easy to enjoy at the beach. Starter Villain, published by Tor Books in September 2023, is one of his sharpest works in years. The novel follows Charlie Fitzer, a…