Science Fiction

When Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut novel arrived from Tordotcom in July 2023, it carried the unmistakable weight of a writer working at full capacity, someone who had spent years thinking hard about what a fantasy novel could do with the materials of religion, power, and inherited fate. “The Saint of Bright Doors” is set in the…

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, is a novel that disguises itself as a quiet English boarding school story before slowly revealing something far more unsettling. Set in an alternate version of late-twentieth-century England, it follows Kathy H., a thirty-one-year-old “carer” who looks back on her years at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic…

When “Some Desperate Glory” won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2024, it confirmed what readers had been saying since its April 2023 release: Emily Tesh had written one of the most politically serious and emotionally demanding debut novels in recent science fiction. Tesh is not a new voice in the genre; her novellas…

Viv has been an adventurer for most of her life, and she is tired. At the start of Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes, Travis Baldree’s debut novel, this orc warrior arrives in Thune, a mid-sized city that doesn’t know her name or owe her anything, and sets about doing…

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth novel and the one that established her as a major literary force in science fiction. It takes place on Gethen, a planet locked in permanent winter, where Le Guin runs a thought experiment that still feels radical more than fifty years…

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, published in the United States by Harper Voyager in 2016, began its life considerably more modestly: a Kickstarter-funded self-published novel that Becky Chambers wrote during a cross-country road trip in 2014. That leisurely, exploratory spirit made it into the book’s DNA in ways that are immediately apparent…

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…