Science Fiction

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…

Summary Five Pebble is an unremarkable planet. It has no particularly interesting geography, no great natural phenomena, nothing to draw visitors except its position at a junction of transit lanes that makes it a convenient waystation for travelers moving between more significant destinations. Ouloo, a Laru innkeeper, has built her life here with her child…

Summary The Power begins with a premise that sounds like wish-fulfillment and delivers something considerably more complex. Women and girls around the world discover they have developed a biological ability: they can conduct electricity through their bodies and release it at will, ranging from a mild shock to a lethal charge. The ability can be…

Summary In the world of Panga, robots became sentient centuries ago. They asked for their freedom politely. They got it, because the humans of Panga were reasonable people who recognized that a sentient being asking for freedom has made a sufficiently compelling argument. The robots walked into the wilderness that humans had left largely untouched,…

Summary Two agents are at war across time. Red serves the Agency, a technological utopia that controls the future through careful manipulation of historical threads. Blue serves the Garden, an organic, biological civilization with an equally determined vision of what the future should be. Their respective civilizations have been fighting across centuries and millennia, altering…