This is a really good month for everyone who is both a science-fiction fan and a reader. Not only do we have a new sci-fi novel due from the magazine’s columnist Annalee Newitz (with a slime mould as its protagonist), but new books from New Scientist Book Club alumni Adam Roberts and Claire North to look forward to. And there’s more: Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) is returning to her world of causal loops in a sequel to her bestselling 2003 novel, while Becky Chambers is here to bring us some more sci-fi fun. Time to book a few days of holiday to binge through all this…
Fans of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, rejoice: this month, there’s a new novel out from the mighty Becky Chambers, and it sounds great. Set on the planet Fortune, where a poisonous atmosphere alters the nature of life, we follow the adventures of Cora, a pilot who has a dangerous condition thanks to her bond with an alien animal, Colibri. Then Cora, in need of treatment but unwilling to seek it if it means losing her connection to Colibri, meets a botanist, Signy, who might be able to help her.
I have chortled over Jasper Fforde’s literary detective novels ever since the first, , starring Thursday Next. The publication of marks Next’s eighth and final outing, in which she’s up against some Martians who have broken out of their H.G. Wells novel, as well as problematic Reality Field Distortion experiments. The title, by the way, refers not so much to the hypothesised physical phenomenon but to the “realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up”.
The author of the excellent turns to an organisation beneath the streets of London for his latest novel – an organisation conducting “strange experiments” that “blur the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death”. Arlo is a private investigator out to find Sophie Banik, who is apparently dead – but who had been digging into those strange experiments, and who might not be as dead as he thought.
We are big fans of Adam Roberts at : his novel, Lake of Darkness, was a relatively recent pick for the New Scientist Book Club. This latest sounds very different. It’s a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s , in which the monster, “a splendid creature, in almost every respect superior to humanity”, goes on to conquer Europe, and rule the world. It is, says the publisher, “a meditation on the nature of power”, and I can’t wait.
Another new novel from a New Scientist Book Club alum (Claire North’s space opera, , has been a top read this year for members). This time, North is tackling time travel, moving from Cal, who falls in love with a soldier in the French revolution who is fated to die – unless he tweaks history to save him, to Fadimatu, who finds her mummified corpse in a museum in 2018. Honestly, fictional time travel is tricky to get right, but I trust North to handle it wisely and well so this another book I’m really looking forward to.
If there’s another author I trust to handle time travel wisely, it’s this one. Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, has written a sequel to that bestseller, following the life of Alba, the daughter of Claire and Henry. Like her father, Alba is a time traveller, but instead of having one great love like Henry does, she has two: Zach, handsome, beloved, living his life in the normal order; and Oliver, a time traveller from the future with whom her life crosses and circles repeatedly, at different ages. I’ve read the book already, because I will be chatting to Niffenegger about it for , and I urge you not to miss it. It’s wildly different from the gentle and romantic air of its predecessor – this is a book tackling big questions: climate change, democracy, protest. I finished it last week and want to discuss it with people, so get reading!
A new novel from ’s tech columnist? And a wild-sounding one at that? We are spoiled for sure. The book follows the adventures of Gardenpath, who is a slime mould from an ancient civilization as well as a graduate student in biology. Gardenpath wants to discover something “truly novel in the universe” to obtain the highest possible honour in their exams, so travels to a remote and dangerous planet and discovers … a strange multicellular animal living in a city they call Pompeii. Newitz has written about the research they did for this book in a recent column – you can check it out here to see if it tempts you.
This comes to us from the small literary publisher Fitzcarraldo, a press that punches way above its weight in terms of choosing incredible writers – think of literature Nobel winners Annie Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Elfriede Jelinek). tells of a billionaire called Morel, who is building a refuge for the super-rich on an island in the Aegean. A struggling journalist is asked to come and work there, but – and I imagine you’ll be as unsurprised as I was by this next plot line – discovers dark currents below the surface of this apparent utopia. I very much enjoyed the last “billionaire builds a refuge that turns out to have major issues” novel I read, Naomi Alderman’s , so I’ll definitely be trying this one.
Just a little alert that this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Ernest Cline’s bestseller is out this month. A recap for those who haven’t read it (or seen the adaptation) yet: set in 2045, it follows Wade Watts, who along with most of humanity spends most of his time jacked into the virtual reality of the OASIS. When OASIS’s creator dies, he leaves behind a series of puzzles, and whoever solves them is set to inherit control of the virtual reality. Wade makes a start – and finds himself up against some deadly rivals.
If you like your fiction tinged with history and horror, then Alma Katsu is for you. I still shudder happily when I remember reading , her twist on the story of the Donner party, which brings added terror to an already terrifying real-life tale. This time, she’s applying scary twists to The Picture of Dorian Gray with the tale of Dorothy, who codes an impossibly beautiful deepfake for social media, Isabella. But as Isabella’s fame grows, Dorothy stops being able to tell where she ends and her creation begins.
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