New sci-fi novels from Becky Chambers, Adam Roberts, and Claire North headline this month's releases, alongside highly anticipated sequels and literary adaptations.
By Adam Makins·
This is genuinely one of the best months for science fiction fans in recent memory. Between new releases from established favorites and ambitious literary reimaginings, there’s enough material here to justify booking serious time off work.
Let’s start with the headliners. Becky Chambers, whose The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet won legions of admirers, returns with a new novel set on Fortune, a planet with a poisonous atmosphere that fundamentally reshapes the nature of life itself. The story follows Cora, a pilot bonded to an alien animal named Colibri, who finds herself facing a dangerous condition. Rather than accept treatment that might sever her connection to Colibri, she seeks out Signy, a botanist who might offer another path forward. It’s the kind of character-driven science fiction that made Chambers’ debut so compelling.
Claire North, whose space opera Slow Gods became a standout for New Scientist Book Club members, is tackling time travel with characteristic ambition. The narrative weaves between Cal, who falls for a French Revolution soldier fated to die, and Fadimatu, who discovers her own mummified remains in a 2018 museum. Time travel in fiction is notoriously difficult to execute with intelligence and emotional weight, but North has earned trust through previous work.
Audrey Niffenegger, author of the beloved The Time Traveler’s Wife, goes even further with a sequel following Alba, the daughter of Claire and Henry. What makes this particularly intriguing is how it diverges from its predecessor’s romantic gentleness. Alba has two loves across time, but the novel tackles larger questions: climate change, democracy, protest. This isn’t a simple romantic romp; it’s ambitious literary fiction dressed in temporal complications.
Adam Roberts, another New Scientist Book Club favorite, has reimagined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in radically different fashion. Rather than the tragic monster narrative we know, Roberts imagines the creature as “a splendid being, in almost every respect superior to humanity,” who goes on to conquer Europe and rule the world. The publisher describes it as a meditation on power itself, which sounds far more philosophically ambitious than your typical reimagining.
Then there’s Annalee Newitz’s wild-sounding debut: a novel featuring Gardenpath, a slime mould from an ancient civilization and graduate student in biology, who travels to a remote planet searching for something “truly novel in the universe.” What Gardenpath discovers is a strange multicellular animal living in a city called Pompeii. The premise alone should tell you this is delightfully weird.
Jasper Fforde continues his Thursday Next series with Dark Reading Matter, the eighth and final outing. Next faces Martians escaped from an H.G. Wells novel and problematic Reality Field Distortion experiments. For readers who’ve followed this series, this is essential conclusion. For newcomers, it’s worth noting that Fforde has built something genuinely unique in literary detective fiction.
For those seeking darker territory, there’s a new novel from the author of Ascension. It centers on an organization beneath London’s streets conducting “strange experiments” that blur the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, life and death. A private investigator named Arlo searches for Sophie Banik, apparently dead, who had been investigating those very experiments. The premise suggests psychological horror meeting detective noir.
Alma Katsu, whose The Hunger brought terror to the Donner party narrative, applies similar treatment to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, Dorothy codes an impossibly beautiful deepfake for social media named Isabella. As Isabella’s fame grows, Dorothy loses the ability to distinguish where she ends and her creation begins. It’s a genuinely unsettling update of Wilde’s themes for the social media age.
Finally, Fitzcarraldo Editions (a press that’s published work by Nobel laureates like Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk) offers The Floating World, about a billionaire building a refuge for the super-rich on an Aegean island. A struggling journalist arrives to work there and discovers, as one might expect, that utopian surfaces hide darker currents beneath.
Source: New Scientist
With this much ambitious science fiction arriving simultaneously, the real question isn’t what to read, but what you might reluctantly leave unfinished.
