There is a smorgasbord of new science fiction on offer in September, whether you are after high-end literary writing from the likes of Booker-longlisted Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers or universe-spanning romps from Yume Kitasei and Riley August. We have new work from the grandmaster Peter F. Hamilton, a glimpse of a near-future France from Michel Houellebecq and an intriguing vision of how we might deal with future plagues from Hannu Rajaniemi. My plan is to start with Kushner’s Creation Lake, move on to Kitasei’s The Stardust Grail and then dive into Powers’s Playground.
This is definitely on my reading list: in fact, I am hoping we might choose it for a future New Scientist Book Club read. Longlisted for the Booker already, it has been described by our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson as “a thriller, a spy caper, a comedy and also a poetic take on human history all the way back to the time our species, Homo sapiens, shared Earth with the Neanderthals”, and as “sensationally enjoyable”. It follows the adventures of a US spy-for-hire, Sadie Smith, as she tries to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists in France – I can’t wait.
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Another Booker-longlisted novel here, and one from the astonishingly good Powers (Bewilderment is just excellent). He sets his latest on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia, where a disparate cast of characters gather as humanity plans to send floating, autonomous cities out into the sea. “The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive,” says Percival Everett of this novel. I’m very much looking forward to it.
Maya Hoshimoto is an art thief turned anthropology student, but she is lured back to her old ways when she is asked to find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. As she sets off through the universe investigating, she discovers she isn’t the only one looking for it. Described as an “anti-colonial space heist”, this sounds excellent.
The acclaimed (and sometimes controversial) French novelist sets his latest outing in 2027, as France undergoes a series of cyberattacks during a presidential campaign. We follow the story of Paul Raison, an advisor to France’s finance minister, whose father has had a stroke and is in limbo in a medical centre. This has already been a bestseller in France.
Science fiction authors don’t get much more legendary than Peter F. Hamilton, and this latest sounds intriguing – it’s a novel set in the universe of new sci-fi role-playing game Exodus. Thousands of years after humanity fled a dying Earth in ark ships, the settlers of Centauri have evolved into advanced beings. Finn is one of them, but wants a different future and takes the chance to become a Traveler, exploring the far reaches of space. I’m not a gamer, but I always love an ark-ship story, and I trust Hamilton to pull this one off.
In the latest outing from this excellent sci-fi author, pandemics have brought civilisation to a standstill. The only way to survive is wearing an “Aspis chip”, which immunises you against any new viruses as they infect you. Not everyone wants it though, with the alternative being an underground community of biohackers, known as Darkome, who modify their bodies. Our protagonist Inara is from a Darkome village, but she needs an Aspis to keep her cancer in check, and this goes against everything the community stands for… This sounds great and scarily timely.
The universe is full of dead civilisations, and Scout is an archivist who scours dead worlds for anything interesting that might have been left behind. Now they have found a message from an alien who saw their world end thousands of years ago. I love the quote provided for this novel by writer Nadia El-Fassi: “Come for the space archaeologists and adorably violent Pumpkin the cat, but stay for a science fiction novel that will repair your soul.”
“The universe is full of dead civilisations”
Irina Dmitrienko/NASA/Alamy
This sounds pleasingly creepy, just in time for autumn in the northern hemisphere. It’s set in a restored wilderness project in Ireland where five children, three teachers and one ranger are on a sleepover. But strange things have been happening here, from livestock mutilations to the discovery of unidentifiable tracks – and as the kids trek to the site, they spot animals that haven’t yet been introduced, from wolves and wolverines to things long believed to be extinct.
Time travel shenanigans abound in this latest from the author of the Time Police and The Chronicles of St Mary’s series. This time round, Taylor is telling the origin story of bounty hunters Lady Amelia Smallhope and Pennyroyal: “No bad guy they can’t handle. No expense account too flexible. No adventure too outrageous.”
This is a reissue of a collection of short stories written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, an author who wrote most of her work between 1904 and 1919 and has been described as the “woman who invented dark fantasy”. These stories include one set in an alternate-future version of Philadelphia, now a totalitarian nation-state where citizens are numbered, not named. Just my sort of thing, and I love rediscovering old sci-fi classics.
This is the fifth in Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, set in a Tokyo café where customers can travel back in time – provided they come back to the present before their coffee gets cold. This time, those visiting the past include a father who couldn’t allow his daughter to get married and a boy who wants to show his divorced parents his smile.
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“There’s no moon, but we can see very well. The sky is full of stars.” The Milky Way in the Atacama desert
Alamy Stock Photo
Chapter One
All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth Is Change.
God Is Change.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Saturday,July20,2024
I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle – when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter. Today is our birthday – my fifteenth and my father’s fifty-fifth. Tomorrow, I’ll try to please him – him and the community and God. So last night, I dreamed a reminder that it’s all a lie. I think I need to write about the dream because this particular lie bothers me so much.
I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very subtle image, but a persistent one. I’ve had many lessons, and I’m better at flying than I used to be. I trust my ability more now, but I’m still afraid. I can’t quite control my directions yet.
I lean forward toward the doorway. It’s a doorway like the one between my room and the hall. It seems to be a long way from me, but I lean toward it. Holding my body stiff and tense, I let go of whatever I’m grasping, whatever has kept me from rising or falling so far. And I lean into the air, straining upward, not moving upward, but not quite falling down either. Then I do begin to move, as though to slide on the air drifting a few feet above the floor, caught between terror and joy.
I drift toward the doorway. Cool, pale light glows from it. Then I slide a little to the right; and a little more. I can see that I’m going to miss the door and hit the wall beside it, but I can’t stop or turn. I drift away from the door, away from the cool glow into another light.
The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness.
Perhaps I awake a little. I do sometimes when the fire swallows me. That’s bad. When I wake up all the way, I can’t get back to sleep. I try, but I’ve never been able to.
This time I don’t wake up all the way. I fade into the second part of the dream – the part that’s ordinary and real, the part that did happen years ago when I was little, though at the time it didn’t seem to matter.
Darkness.
Darkness brightening. Stars.
Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light.
“We couldn’t see so many stars when I was little,” my stepmother says to me. She speaks in Spanish, her own first language. She stands still and small, looking up at the broad sweep of the Milky Way. She and I have gone out after dark to take the washing down from the clothesline. The day has been hot, as usual, and we both like the cool darkness of early night. There’s no moon, but we can see very well. The sky is full of stars.
The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal, perhaps about to spring, more threatening than protective. But my stepmother is there, and she isn’t afraid. I stay close to her. I’m seven years old.
I look up at the stars and the deep, black sky. “Why couldn’t you see the stars?” I ask her. “Everyone can see them.” I speak in Spanish, too, as she’s taught me. It’s an intimacy somehow.
“City lights,” she says. “Lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore.” She pauses. “When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars – the few stars we could see – were windows into heaven. Windows for God to look through to keep an eye on us. I believed her for almost a year.” My stepmother hands me an armload of my youngest brother’s diapers. I take them, walk back toward the house where she has left her big wicker laundry basket, and pile the diapers atop the rest of the clothes. The basket is full. I look to see that my stepmother is not watching me, then let myself fall backward onto the soft mound of stiff, clean clothes. For a moment, the fall is like floating.
I lie there, looking up at the stars. I pick out some of the constellations and name the stars that make them up. I’ve learned them from an astronomy book that belonged to my father’s mother.
I see the sudden light streak of a meteor flashing westward across the sky. I stare after it, hoping to see another. Then my stepmother calls me and I go back to her.
“There are city lights now,” I say to her. “They don’t hide the stars.” She shakes her head. “There aren’t anywhere near as many as there were. Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be – and not that long ago.” “I’d rather have the stars,” I say.
“The stars are free.” She shrugs. “I’d rather have the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But we can afford the stars.”
Extract taken from Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, published by Headline, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.
There’s power in threes. The rule of three, we call it in the writing world: repeat a word or phrase or plot element three times in order to give it meaning. Two repetitions isn’t enough to establish pattern recognition; four repetitions and the mind gets bored. Three is the sweet spot.
It took me three tries to get what Octavia Butler was trying to do with Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. I think. I’m still not sure. But I’ve now read these books three times, at three very different points in my life, and each reading has shown me just how powerfully prescient Butler was. The first read took place sometime in my mid-20s, as I struggled through grad school; the second was in my mid-30s, in the early years of my professional writing career; the third was just a few months ago as of this writing, so not long after I turned forty-six.
The mid-20s read would’ve been a few years after Parable of the Sower debuted in 1993. I’d known about the books since they came out, of course, but my earliest attempts to read Sower were bounce-offs. I was used to Butler’s more overtly science-fictional premises: post–nuclear apocalypse aliens (the Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood books), time travel (Kindred), or telepathy and immortality (the Patternist/Seed to Harvest books). In contrast to these, the Parables featured little in the way of scientific or technological advancements or out-of-this-world what-ifs. The books seemed to “merely” be set in the future.
Now, note: I was very much a baby black-power militant in those days. I joined sit-ins to demand that my school divest from apartheid South Africa, went to the Million Man March to help register voters, immersed myself in African American history, all of that. Yet my engagement with the ideas underlying my activism was surface level only; I hadn’t had time to actualize or syncretize much. I also hadn’t yet figured out how limited my own ambitions and expectations really were, largely because I couldn’t visualize a world that was actually better than the one I lived in. I’d spent my life absorbing statistics and societal narratives that predicted a dire future for me—if I even survived young adulthood. This was echoed by the fiction I read. Most of my favorite speculative works, like Star Wars and Star Trek and the “golden age” novels of science fiction, depicted a future that was shiny and exciting . . . for white guys. The rest of us were present only in token form, if we were present at all. Usually, we simply did not exist. There was no future for us, beyond whatever limited use the heroes might find for a few. (We were never the heroes.) And depictions like this were so ubiquitous in the speculative field that for many years I accepted them without question. Just more dire predictions. The radicalism of “merely” envisioning a future—while American, while black, while female—had not yet become a part of my consciousness.
In grad school, however, I became one of three black women in an intensely competitive sixty-person master’s program. As part of my program, I learned about racial identity development theories—that is, the process through which a member of a racist society moves from superficial engagement with race to a place of deeper, personalized understanding. As part of one class, we were asked to read Butler’s Kindred, which I’d already read, so I decided instead to finally tackle Parable of the Sower.
Still wasn’t ready; I know that now. However, I’d grown enough by then that Lauren Olamina no longer felt anachronistically know-it-all to me, as she had when I’d first sampled the novel. (She always read to me like an older woman’s idea of what a smart teenager should be, rather than a realistic rendering of what smart teenagers are actually like. Naturally, I like her better the older I get.) As an examination of racial identity development, the story doesn’t work at all; Lauren is basically born knowing that racism is systemic and that, as someone born at multiple intersections of marginalization (black, disabled, female, poor), she is doomed if she doesn’t work every angle possible. Kindred’s Dana is a much better example of someone whose understanding of herself transforms radically over the course of a story; Lauren starts deep and stays deep. However, Parable of the Sower works beautifully as an examination of how smart resistance functions—and I, growing jaded with respectability politics, black patriarchy, and other shallow solutions to the problem of racism, needed that badly. I needed to know how to bide my time. I needed to understand the difference between good intentions and good outcomes. Understandably, I found a lot to empathize with in Lauren’s struggle between being a “good girl” and being a grown woman with needs beyond what parental guidance can provide.
Still, I didn’t like the books, not back then, nor did I find them particularly prescient. For context, this was the 1990s. The dot-com boom had begun to democratize society in new ways, by giving a blog and a platform to anyone who could yell loudly or market themselves cleverly enough. The Gulf War was over, crack was wack, and the economy was booming so much that taking on thousands of dollars in student loan debt didn’t sound like a terrible idea to me, at the time. Lauren’s world still felt unrealistic to me, even impossible. Roving, uncontested gangs of pedophiles and drug-addicted pyromaniacs? Slavery 2.0? A powerful coalition of white-supremacist, homophobic Christian zealots taking over the country? Nah, I thought, and hoped Butler would get back to aliens soon.
Yeah. Okay. Look, I was young.
The mid-30s read, in the late 2000s or so, hit me in the middle of a career-specific encounter with institutional racism. I’d decided to become a writer by then, by profession rather than just hobby, and had added my voice to others demanding change within this genre of possibility. Octavia Butler, to our collective horror, died in 2006. Yet here were we, her spiritual children numbering in the thousands, come to claim the future. By this time I’d begun to understand just how rare, and how strange, the mere idea of thinking about the future was, for those of us from marginalized backgrounds. Worse, I’d seen how complicit science fiction and fantasy were in making our futures so hard to imagine. It was time for this to change. We weren’t asking for much from our fellow writers: just more than European myths in our fantasy, and more than token representation in the future, present, and past.
But that fight is when I saw far too many of my once-favorite writers and editors reacting to our demand for a future and our existence in the present as if both were a threat. So we fought them. Of course we did; Butler’s memory demanded no less. But I won’t pretend I wasn’t heartbroken by how hard it was to make presumably intelligent, well-meaning people understand just how much harm they were doing.
That’s when I paid more attention to a thread in the Parables which had frustrated me to no end during that first read-through: the story of Marc, Lauren’s younger brother, thought dead at first and later rescued from horrific sexual slavery. Marc understands pain, in spades—and yet he eventually betrays Lauren, because he cannot acknowledge her pain without also acknowledging the harm that his fellow militant evangelicals have inflicted on others. He isn’t an evil man; throughout the two books, he helps many, though always (and only) within the framework of the Christianity he embraces. Eventually, though, his need for the status quo, for conformity, trumps his basic goodness. “I cannot help you until you suffer the way I want you to suffer, express your pain in a way that pleases my ears—and stop doing both when I’ve heard enough,” is what he seems to say.
This resonated powerfully with me amid the ongoing context of the American social justice movement. For every attempt made by marginalized people to express anguish and seek change for historical (and ongoing) harm, there’s always pushback from those who demand that we suffer only in the expected ways, express that suffering with an acceptable tone, and end both our suffering and our complaints on demand. Marc’s ultimatum was the exact refrain of those SFF figures I once admired, as they proceeded to question why we demanded a better future, how that demand should be framed, and whether we deserved it. After that, I couldn’t help wondering how much of Marc was informed by Butler’s fellow authors. Maybe none. Or maybe Butler’s message is that Marcs aren’t exactly rare in our society—so anyone who wants to understand and guide positive change, like Lauren, must also be prepared to work around them.
Then we come to the mid-40s read. Right now.
All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.
What we have touched has changed: the SFF genre has improved slightly, despite its plague of Marcs. Instead of just Butler and a handful of others, now there are dozens of published black writers—and disabled writers, queer writers, indigenous writers, and more. But what we have changed has changed us in turn; I and other marginalized writers must be constantly braced for internet harassment, death threats, and campaigns to Make Science Fiction Racist Again. And as science fiction reflects its present, the same ugliness afflicts our society on the macro scale. In the wake of America’s first black president, we now endure an incompetent crook and bigot. We are more wired than ever, able to enact change through crowdsourcing and callout culture, for good or for ill . . . but most of us are less hopeful, more tired, struggling to keep the future in mind as a handful of powerful figures seem determined to drag us back to Jim Crow. Climate change looms. Human beings are resilient and resourceful; there’s little doubt that as a species we’ll survive. And those of us who want a better world will doubtless prevail, just as Lauren Olamina eventually did . . . but it may take everything we have.
So this time around, what I find myself resonating with most is Earthseed itself. Butler does not appear to have intended the Parable novels to be a guidebook—and yet they are. That’s true for all of the most powerful science fiction novels: they offer not only accurate visions of the future, but also suggestions for coping with the resulting changes. We can only imagine what that vision might have included if Butler had been able to complete it; she apparently had planned a third novel, Parable of the Trickster. But maybe it’s just as well that she and Lauren were unable to “discover” that third book of Earthseed. Now, like the communities of Earthseed, it’s our job to create change in fiction and in life. Like Lauren, these days I am comforted not by the platitudes I was raised with, but by the idea that change is a tool I can shape to my advantage, if I am clever and lucky. Claiming the future will be an ugly, brutal struggle, but I’m prepared to go the distance in that fight. The future is worth it.
And in ten more years? I’ll check in again, and see what else I can learn from these brilliant books.
—N. K. Jemisin December 2018
Extract taken from N.K. Jemisin’s foreword to Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, published by Headline, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.
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Whether it’s black orbs swallowing people in downtown Seoul, murder on Mars or malevolent pigs, August has got science fiction fans covered. There are new titles from big names such as James S. A. Corey, Josh Malerman and Neal Asher, and an intriguing-sounding short story collection from Mark Haddon (he of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time fame). I will be kicking off my August reading with Janina Matthewson’s story of the apocalypse experienced from a small island, followed up with Miles Cameron’s vision of a universe traversed by city-sized “Greatships”. Whatever your favourite genre of sci-fi, there’s lots to choose from and enjoy.
This speculative novel opens in downtown Seoul, where a huge black orb suddenly appears and sucks Jeong-su’s neighbour inside. As it continues to consume people, attempts to stop it fail and it begins to split and multiply, causing global panic. Jeong-su, meanwhile, sets out to find his elderly parents.
This story of the apocalypse takes place in the small island community of Black Crag, where Sarah wakes one morning to find that the rest of the world appears to have gone silent. No aeroplanes cross the sky and the radios are quiet. When a silent, traumatised ferryman arrives, whispers about what really happened on the mainland begin to divide the villagers. This is being compared to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven – one of my favourite post-apocalyptic novels.
This is a standalone novel set within Asher’s Owner universe. Earth is governed by a “ruthless Committee”, but when rebel and mutant Ottanger is experimented on by Earth’s Inspectorate, he discovers he can reach alternate worlds and meets an evolved human from the far future. Can he destroy the Committee’s regime?
This sounds a lot of fun – a generation-spanning sci-fi story moving from Mars in 2034, when the first human is born on the Red Planet, to Mars in 2103, now a place of division and fear.
Murder takes place on Mars in Sam Wilson’s new science fiction novel
The bestselling author of the terrifying Birdbox sets his latest slice of horror on a farm inhabited by Pearl, a “strangely malevolent pig”, and her owner Walter Kopple. Walter has always been afraid of Pearl, and as rumours swirl in town, madness begins to grip the locals.
This slice of military science fiction is the sequel to Cameron’s Artifact Space, which I haven’t read, but now I want to read them both as they sound tons of fun. They’re set in a world where Greatships, with city-sized crews, transport goods across space and trade for “xenoglas” with an alien species. Marca Nbaro has always wanted to serve aboard one of them, and now she is, but something is targeting the ships in the darkness of space.
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This debut introduces us to Raffi, a physicist who dreams of parallel universes, and who is falling for a sculptor named Britt in this one. If only Raffi had been brave enough to say hello to Britt when they were children – but what if they had? The question sees Raffi catapulted across strange alternative universes, yet everything eventually leads them back to Britt.
This is a collection of short stories weaving ancient Greek myth with the modern world to explore genetics, how we treat animals and more. So the Minotaur, for example, becomes a story of maternal love and the patriarchy. I’m looking forward to this – Haddon is reliably excellent.
The bestselling authors of The Expanse series of novels, who write under a joint pen name, have released a new space opera that sees the empire of the Carryx descend on an isolated human world of Anjiin, where the population is slaughtered or abducted as prisoners. Dafyd, a scientist’s assistant, is captured with his team – but can his skills help them escape their captors’ agenda?
The punning title sets the scene for this comic story of an alien invasion in the town of Muddy Gap. Pie lover Denver Bryant sees a UFO explode, but they appear to be the only person who cares. As they document the incident and their investigations on their pie blog, the only person who takes them seriously is the handsome new bartender, Ezra.
Biohackers Charlie and Parker live in a near-future version of London, one where the climate has collapsed. It is a world split into three groups: Greens, who are still trying to save it; Blues, who are out for profit while they can get it; and Blacks, who see no hope. When the pair are hired by Green activists for jobs ranging from robbery to murder, Charlie isn’t keen, but Parker wants to accept, believing they can still make a difference.
This debut short story collection about Central American identity moves from past to future worlds as it explores what we would do if we woke to find our lives were unrecognisable. It is peopled with characters from mango farmers to cyborgs and promises to take on everything from “menacing technology” to “unchecked bureaucracy”.
Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune 2
Courtesy of Warner Bros
Not quite science fiction, this last one, but it’s the kind of thing I love, and so I wanted to mention it in case you do too. It does what it says on the tin, basically – collects quotes from four centuries’ worth of sci-fi, from Isaac Asimov’s “Better to make a good future than predict a bad one” (Prelude to Foundation, 1988) to Frank Herbert’s “Hope clouds observation.” (Dune, 1965).
I’m about to lie to you. I’m going to tell you all the lofty reasons why I wrote my book Rosewater, like interrogating the usual setting of alien invasions in the Global North, and the loss of the colonial metaphor for alien invasions, and what’s the Black African perspective on these things, anyway?
These are only partially true and, to be honest, are post-hoc explanations of the journey my subconscious took me on.
In point of fact, I wrote Rosewater after I read about two conjoined twins who shared a brain and seemed able to read each other’s thoughts. I thought this would be a great conceit for telepathy and from there, a book about a telepath. It was in working out the biology of such a thing that issues of who and why came into it. How would such a person negotiate their social environment? What is a romantic relationship like if one person can read the mind of the other? What ethics apply? Personally, I thought knowing the inner thoughts of people around you would be an isolating ability, absolutely horrifying. Hence Kaaro, my unheroic protagonist. Hence Aminat, his love interest, and so much more.
In other words, I followed my intellectual curiosity. That curiosity sucked in a childhood spent reading about CIA psi experiments and MKULTRA/MKDELTA; The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton; an (at the time) obscure Argentine graphic novel called El Eternauta by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López; and at tent revivals.
Let’s linger here for a minute. Imagine a wide field – it might be grassy, but it’s more likely to be bare red earth due to persistent trampling. Now think of a vast tent that can house hundreds. Let’s go inside. There are very few seats, and everybody who can stand does. Up front, there’s a preacher, usually (but not exclusively) a man, armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bible verses and eyes fevered with the Holy Ghost. When I was a kid in Nigeria, this kind of thing happened all the time. The most striking image was on the outside: piles of wheelchairs, walking sticks, gurneys and broken up plaster-of-Paris, all discarded by the newly healed who no longer needed them.
This imagery inspired the alien biodome in Rosewater, that and a similar dome in El Eternauta. I couldn’t read Spanish when I came across the book (still can’t), but there was a dome in the middle of town, and they clearly suffered from an alien invasion. This probably cemented the link between aliens and domes in my childhood mind. Oesterheld, like so many others with Leftist views, was disappeared by Argentina’s military government.
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Inspiration aside, Rosewater subverts the expectations of invasion narratives and what the cost of survival for humanity might be, while at the same time being a story about people, not technology or fantastical set pieces.
The premise? Nigeria as ground zero in an alien invasion. Our main character, Kaaro, gets powers from the aliens, but people like him are dying. Why? How to stop this? The answer has consequences for humanity.
It’s a Trojan horse story where the wooden horse is universal healthcare and unlimited power supply; at the same time, it’s a story of alien invasion as a slow, unrecognised pandemic. I’m a doctor, and I can’t help thinking in pestilential modes.
I harkened back to the symbolism of empire in H. G. Wells, but I didn’t think aliens would come in ships or utilise tripods. Space travel is expensive. What would we have that would make it worth the travel for extraterrestrials?
And who are the aliens? What do they represent? These questions came later, in revision, and in the following two volumes, The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption. Rosewater became more about neocolonialism. What has happened to us? Who pre-thinks our thoughts for us? What if there were Orwellian thought police?
I like to write science fiction that non-fans can read. I try to avoid neologisms and any science that can’t be extrapolated from today. I don’t enjoy fiction that needs a glossary.
Whatever the reasons for writing it, I had to set the story in a believable world. The kind of world that interested me involved the social reaction to localised unlimited resources like health and electricity. How would that change what we think of as society?
The book won and was nominated for prizes, notably the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Winning that was a kind of homecoming, since my childhood spent watching Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World was part of what fired my interest in science fiction. The trilogy of books was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series. That was somewhat gratifying, because it meant someone other than my mother thought this story was affecting.
I hope you enjoy your visit to Rosewater. I hope it challenges what you think of as science fiction. I hope it delights and horrifies you.
Rosewater, published by Orbit Books, is available now. It is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up here to read along with our members
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in. It’s how I usually start my day. This time it’s because of a wedding and a final exam, though not my wedding and not my exam. In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. I can even see the cathedral from here. The window is to my left, and I’m at one end of an oval table with four other contractors. We are on the fifteenth floor, the top. A skylight is open above us, three foot square, a security grid being the only thing between us and the morning sky. Blue, with flecks of white cloud. No blazing sun yet, but that will come later. The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense.
Next to me on the right, Bola yawns. She is pregnant and gets very tired these days. She also eats a lot, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve known her two years and she has been pregnant in each of them. I do not fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and I never grew up around pets or livestock. My education was peripatetic; biology was never a strong interest, except for microbiology, which I had to master later.
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I try to relax and concentrate on the bank customers. The wedding anxiety comes again.
Rising from the centre of the table is a holographic teleprompter. It consists of random swirls of light right now, but within a few minutes it will come alive with text. There is a room adjacent to ours in which the night shift is winding down.
“I hear they read Dumas last night,” says Bola.
She’s just making conversation. It is irrelevant what the other shift reads. I smile and say nothing.
The wedding I sense is due in three months. The bride has put on a few pounds and does not know if she should alter the dress or get liposuction. Bola is prettier when she is pregnant.
“Sixty seconds,” says a voice on the tannoy.
I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They don’t dress formally like Bola and me. They wear tank tops and T-shirts and metal in their hair. They have phone implants.
I hate implants of all kinds. I have one. Standard locator with no add-ons. Boring, really, but my employer demands it.
The exam anxiety dies down before I can isolate and explore the source. Fine by me.
The bits of metal these young ones have in their hair come from plane crashes. Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano and all points in between, there have been downed aircraft on every domestic route in Nigeria since the early 2000s. They wear bits of fuselage as protective charms.
Bola catches me staring at her and winks. Now she opens her snack, a few wraps of cold moin-moin, the orange bean curds nested in leaves, the old style. I look away.
“Go,” says the tannoy.
The text of Plato’s Republic scrolls slowly and steadily in ghostly holographic figures on the cylindrical display. I start to read, as do the others, some silently, others out loud. We enter the xenosphere and set up the bank’s firewall. I feel the familiar brief dizziness; the text eddies and becomes transparent.
Every day about five hundred customers carry out financial transactions at these premises, and every night staffers make deals around the world, making this a twenty-four-hour job. Wild sensitives probe and push, criminals trying to pick personal data out of the air. I’m talking about dates-of-birth, PINs, mothers’ maiden names, past transactions, all of them lying docile in each customer’s forebrain, in the working memory, waiting to be plucked out by the hungry, untrained and freebooting sensitives.
Contractors like myself, Bola Martinez and the metalheads are trained to repel these. And we do. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. A professor did a study of it once. He found a correlation between the material used for firewalling and the activities of the customer for the rest of the year. A person who had never read Shakespeare would suddenly find snatches of King Lear coming to mind for no apparent reason.
We can trace the intrusions if we want, but Integrity isn’t interested. It’s difficult and expensive to prosecute crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere. If no life is lost, the courts aren’t interested.
The queues for cash machines, so many people, so many cares and wants and passions. I am tired of filtering the lives of others through my mind.
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city . . .
On entering the xenosphere, there is a projected self-image. The untrained wild sensitives project their true selves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, chosen self-image. Mine is a gryphon.
My first attack of the day comes from a middle-aged man from a town house in Yola. He looks reedy and very darkskinned.
I warn him and he backs off. A teenager takes his place quickly enough that I think they are in the same physical location as part of a hack farm. Criminal cabals sometimes round up sensitives and yoke them together in a “Mumbai combo” – a call-centre model with serial black hats.
I’ve seen it all before. There aren’t as many such attacks now as there were when I started in this business, and a part of me wonders if they are discouraged by how effective we are. Either way, I am already bored.
Copyright Tade Thompson
This is an extract from Rosewater, published by Orbit Books, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up here to read along with our members.
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
A failing warp drive could release gravitational waves
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There is no evidence that aliens are flying around the galaxy in starships powered by faster-than-light warp drives – but if they were, we could detect such a ship breaking down using our current Earth-based technology, say researchers. Such a discovery could confirm the existence of alien life, though sadly any crew aboard the ship would be torn apart by forces similar to a black hole.
While warp drives are best known from Star Trek, theoretical physicists have found it should be possible to create a bubble of…
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new novel Service Model is out in June
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There is a wealth of great new science fiction out this June, with all tastes catered for. Want a wild ride to stop a volcano erupting and ending the world? The late Michael Crichton (and his collaborator James Patterson) have it nailed. Want a robot finding his way in the world? Head for Adrian Tchaikovsky and his robot servant Charles. Climate dystopia, poetically rendered? Turn to Roz Dineen.
I am also delighted to see a smattering of space-opera romances, from authors including Emily Hamilton and Rebecca Fraimow – hurrah for some light-heartedness in our sci-fi. That light-heartedness is exactly what we are currently enjoying at the New Scientist Book Club – sign up, and join us in reading Martha Wells’s wonderful All Systems Red, the first in her Murderbot series.
But back to June, where I have also cunningly managed to shoehorn in a mention of one of my top dystopian reads of all time, the criminally overlooked A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher.
Crichton, who gave us novels including Jurassic Park (great fun) and State of Fear (less so), died in 2008. Eruption has thus been finished by the prolific James Patterson, taking a break from his usual collaborations with the likes of former US presidents and Dolly Parton.
The premise: the Big Island of Hawaii is about to be hit by a mega volcanic eruption. Unfortunately for the world, the US military chose to hide some very dangerous substances right by the volcano, and if their containers are broken, we are all going to die.
I have found the book silly but fast-moving and fun so far. Emily H. Wilson, our esteemed sci-fi columnist, was less enamoured (“The only mystery is: will these cardboard-thin characters be successful in their logistical efforts?” she wrote, in her May sci-fi column). Perhaps I am just a sucker for rugged volcanologists battling with lava flows, but I am enjoying this absurd quest to save the world for now.
The late Michael Crichton in 2005
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This is the second book of the year from the prolific Tchaikovsky, after Alien Clay. This time we are following the story of robot servant Charles, who is loyal to a fault until a malfunction causes him to murder his owner, and he sets out into the wider world. Tchaikovsky is an author our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson describes as “a huge talent, writing at the peak of his powers”; she loved this latest.
Four twenty-somethings are investigating an old spaceship when the “stupid dark matter engine” starts on its own, and they find themselves on a one-way trip to Proxima Centauri. This is described as a mix of space odyssey and Sapphic romcom, and it sounds like just the sort of light-hearted read I need to read by the pool. The comparisons being made to the brilliant Becky Chambers are particularly appealing.
In Emily Hamilton’s The Stars Too Fondly, the “stupid dark matter engine” starts on its own
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More romance among the stars, as Ruth, a hustler on an interstellar cruise line, is out to get revenge on Esteban, the man who broke her sister’s heart. Ruth’s plan is to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart right back. But then Ruth meets Esteban’s older sister Sol…
I have enjoyed Manda Scott’s novels ever since I discovered her historical Boudica books; her historical spy thriller A Treachery of Spieswon the McIlvanney Prize for the Best Scottish Crime Novel of the Year when I judged it in 2019 (it is excellent). So, I am intrigued by this latest offering from a multi-talented writer – a “visionary thriller” that weaves together “myth, technology and radical compassion” according to its publisher, set in a world at breaking point, but where change is coming.
As a die-hard fan of Diana Gabaldon’s time-travelling Outlander books, this is going to fill the gap nicely as I wait for book 10 (come on Diana…). It is 2005 and Isla is researching her Japanese ancestors when she travels from Scotland to Kagoshima. There, she is thrown through a strange white gate by a typhoon, and finds herself in 1877. There is romance with a samurai and decisions about whether or not to remain in the past. Honestly, this is right up my Jamie Fraser-loving alley. And the time-travel means we can definitely claim it as sci-fi – after all, time may only be an illusion created by quantum entanglement…
Five years after Idrian, an interstellar pirate, ordered a death curse (known as a withering) on Remy’s brother, Remy is out for revenge. He orders a withering on Idrian – only for the curse to rebound onto him. The only way Remy can slow the curse down is to be closer to Idrian, so Remy infiltrates Idrian’s crew, only to discover this pirate is in fact bringing supplies to thousands of innocents. Perhaps he is not as bad as he seems.
This is the latest in a stream of recent stories set in a world facing apocalypse that home in on how one individual faces catastrophe – think the Jodie Comer film The End We Start From, based on Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel, or (one of my all-time favourites) A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher. It is a trope I love and, as a mother of three, I am keen to follow the story of how Cass, raising three children alone in a world on fire as her medic husband serves in a war overseas, sets off from the city for a place of greater safety.
Jodie Comer in The End We Start From
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At the end of the 19th century, in a version of our world that is filled with marvels, the only thing that can cross the terrible Wastelands which lie between Beijing and Moscow is the Great Trans-Siberian Express. As a disparate crew step aboard for the journey, something uncontrollable is trying to break in. This is pitched as historical fantasy, but it is also being compared to a “steampunk Solaris” and a “steampunk Piranesi” by early readers, so I think there will be plenty here for sci-fi fans to enjoy.
In this follow-up to Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds, 19-year-old Reid is travelling through Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, which are ravaged by the climate crisis, as she heads for safety at the fictional Howse University. But when she reaches one of the “domes” – the only places where pre-collapse society survives – she discovers that the inhabitants are holding back resources from the rest of humanity.
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This is the conclusion to O’Keefe’s Devoured Worlds space-opera trilogy, and her characters Naira and Tarquin have found a new home on Seventh Cradle. Unfortunately for them, Naira is seeing visions of a terrible future, while Tarquin discovers a plot to end the universe.
By its very nature, science fiction encompasses a vast and sprawling world of stories, from the galaxy-spanning novels of Iain M. Banks and Ursula K. Le Guin to the dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro. Asking our team of dedicated staff here at New Scientist to pick their personal favourite, then, has created an eclectic and wide-ranging list to dig into. To be clear: this isn’t a definitive and all-encompassing line-up: it is our personal top picks, and we hope it will send you towards some novels you might not have come across before.
So, in no particular order, here they are: New Scientist’s favourite science fiction books of all time. We’d love to hear from readers, too, about your own favourite sci-fi. Join the conversation on our Facebook post here.
The Culture books, by UK author Banks, aren’t so much a series as a collection of stories – readable in any order – about the exploits of one fascinating, far-future, galaxy spanning civilisation. With unlimited resources, energy and, effectively, lifespans, its citizens have solved all of life’s problems, so it is usually when they collide with more primitive societies – which still have to worry about minor matters like making money or waging war – that the fireworks begin. The plots may be mind-bending, but it is the characters that are unforgettable, especially the super-intelligent, starship-embodying AI minds, whose attitudes to humans run the gamut from benevolent to downright Machiavellian. Nevertheless, if AIs ever do become sentient, I hope they model themselves on Banks’s vision.
Clare Wilson
When you think of your favourite story about an imagined future, it is probably profound and thought-provoking, perhaps beautiful, but it is rarely funny. Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which features the hapless Englishman Arthur Dent and his reluctant jaunts around the universe after Earth is destroyed, is all of the former, but it is the rich comedic vein that has sustained it and drawn a devoted following, of which I count myself a member. Simple gags and one-liners abound, and the offbeat cast of characters summoned to accompany Dent, like the depressed Marvin the paranoid android or the gung-ho and feckless two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox, are endlessly entertaining. Almost 50 years after it debuted as a BBC radio play, the books that followed have lost none of their sparkle.
Alex Wilkins
The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood is a haunting novel that still gives me shivers to think about, years after I read it. It describes a dystopian, not-so-distant future where a “handmaid’s” sole purpose is to reproduce in an effort to combat society’s falling birth rates due to widespread infertility. Despite having their freedoms severely restricted, the handmaids are allowed to make daily shopping trips, during which they are faced with the hanged bodies of “rebels”. What once seemed like an unrealistic nightmare has felt a tad too close to the bone for this feminist given a recent political overturning in the US. An unsettling and gripping read in equal measure.
Alexandra Thompson
A scene from the series The Handmaid’s Tale
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Other Butler novels may seem more obviously sci-fi, but Kindred is, I think, her best. It tells the story of Dana, who every time the life of her ancestor Rufus is in danger is somehow summoned back in time to save him. The problem is, she is an African American woman living in 1970s Los Angeles and he is the son of a white plantation owner living in Maryland in the early 1800s, a time and place when enslaved people still work the fields and brutal violence towards them is normalised. Butler is unafraid to hit where it hurts as she explores the past and our relationship with it. Kindred is the best use of time travel in a story I’ve ever read.
Eleanor Parsons
Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is as cyberpunk as cyberpunk gets. Remarkably, it is his debut novel, and the only one to simultaneously win three of the most prestigious literary awards for science fiction. It is something of a holy text of the cyberpunk genre, which is often summarised by the phrase “high tech, low life”. Neuromancer lives up to that grim description by offering the reader a story about a disgraced hacker, a mercenary whose body was modified for violence, shadowy ex-military officers, an old friend turned into a consciousness-on-a-chip, several artificial intelligences and one last epic heist onboard a bourgeois space habitat. Having been raised on a steady diet of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, I was stunned by how grimy Gibson’s world was in comparison, how it lacked the clean, inspirational framing of more traditional science fiction, and how hard his characters, most of whom remain far removed from inspiration or virtue throughout the novel, had to work to retain some shred of human joy in an environment overrun with out-of-control corporations, crime and malicious tech. Neuromancer introduced a perfectly dystopian and rebellious aesthetic, as well as a paradigm similar to magical realism, except that all magic is actually technology, and all such magic has gone dark. As a teenager, I wanted to look as cool as Neuromancer’s protagonists, but these days the world where the metaverse, neural interfaces, smart prosthetics, designer drugs and collapsing social norms are features rather than bugs feels terrifyingly close and plausible. I was enthralled and deeply influenced by Gibson’s work as a young person who had barely experienced dial-up internet, but the punchlines that Neuromancer lands with style remain more than relevant today.
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
Neuromancer is as cyberpunk as cyberpunk gets
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Ted Chiang is one of the most extraordinary sci-fi writers working today. Each of his stories is a precious gem, plucked from his mind and honed to perfection. The titular story of his first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, inspired the brilliant film Arrival, and while excellent it doesn’t even break the top three of the book. From a reimagining of the biblical Tower of Babel myth to a mathematician who breaks mathematics, this thin volume contains more ideas than most encyclopaedias. I only wish Chiang were more prolific – he has written just 18 short stories in a career spanning over 30 years – but then of course, if we had diamonds on tap, would they still be as valuable?
Jacob Aron
Flatland is set in a 2D world where inhabitants are shapes and their number of lines determines their social status. When the narrator visits a place with one extra dimension, Spaceland, he begins to understand that the universe is more complex than he ever knew. A good chunk of the book is contrived exposition on how the 2D world works, but if you get past that, then it is part satirical look at the rigid social and gender structures of the time – Flatland was published in 1884 – and part dive into the near-impossibility of grasping the concept of higher dimensions. I’ve always thought it is also a bit of a love letter to physics and how exploring what-ifs can push our understanding of the universe; residents of Flatland are baffled about where their light comes from, something the Spacelanders intuitively understand.
Matthew Sparkes
Bridging the gap between social satire and science fiction, Čapek’s witty parable of politics in the first half of the 20th century is an easy pick for my number one. Told through newspaper clippings, firsthand accounts and quasi-historical narration, it charts the downfall of humanity by arrogance and shortsightedness following the emergence of – of all things – a rather adorable species of impressionable, sentient, near-human-sized newts. This unusual source of aquatic labour is quickly exploited, and the scramble for profit brings the world to its knees. As onlookers react with a mix of bewilderment, high-minded philosophising and capitalistic glee, newt numbers only multiply and the amphibian apocalypse waddles inexorably on. “Hello, hello, you people,” chirps the Chief Salamander, “we will now entertain you with music from your gramophone records. Here, for your pleasure, is the March of the Tritons from the film, Poseidon.”
The year is 17776. War, poverty and disease no longer exist. For the past 15,000 years, no one has died or even aged. The thing most people occupy their time with is play – and in North America, that takes the form of outlandish games of American football that would be completely unrecognisable to today’s fans of the sport. This is the premise of a bizarre and truly novel piece of science fiction published on SBnation.com, a sports blogging network. The future of the game envisioned by Bois is absurd. It is traditionally played on a field 100 yards long, but far in the future it has morphed into insane matches that extend across entire states. Some last hundreds or even thousands of years. In one, a player gets picked up in a tornado and tossed miles away. All this comes to the reader through the eyes of three defunct space probes: Pioneer 9, Pioneer 10 and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). These craft have become sentient and are still on the trajectories we put them on, alone in the vastness of space, except for their communications with each other and the TV show called Earth that they watch. It’s the presentation of their communications that first got my attention in 17776. They show us something that is nearly impossible to hold in a human brain: the vastness of time and space. The beginning of the story is delivered via messages displayed on a wall calendar between Pioneer 9 and 10, communicating across millions of miles. The frustration and impatience that comes from the endless scrolling as you wait to read the next response from one of the probes, who must wait hundreds of days to hear from one another, is just a glimmer of what it would actually be like to deal with interstellar communications – and it’s a fantastic demonstration of the endlessness of our universe.
The piece is meant to be read on a computer, and includes videos and maps that are blocky, awful approximations of Earth – perhaps what it would look like through the eyes of ageing satellites. The spacecraft characters are where the heart lies in the story. Yes, they watch football. But they also contemplate the nature of loss in a world where nothing dies. They wrestle with the boredom that comes with immortality. They make jokes and poke fun at the humans below. They ponder what existence means, and the things that matter, even when you’re floating alone through the stars: grief, joy, friendship and the delight of mystery. Overall, 17776 paints a surprisingly hopeful picture of the future, one that is much needed these days. It’s heart-warming and weird and funny enough that it made me laugh out loud.
Chelsea Whyte
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I became a fan of the Dune literary universe after the Denis Villeneuve films. If there are any die-hard Dune devotees reading this who already dislike me for this reason, then you will dislike me more when I tell you I haven’t even read the first, original Dune book. Why not, you might be wondering. After watching, and thoroughly enjoying, the two recent Dune films, I was overcome with an intense desire to know exactly what happens to the central character Paul Atreides and so I skipped Dune and went straight to book two, Dune Messiah, which continues the story beyond that told in those movies. After that I kept reading. Friends and family told me to stop after book three because it gets too weird. Little do they know that the weirder it gets, the more I enjoy it! God Emperor of Dune is my pick for best sci-fi book of all time for one reason. Leto II, the tyrant-cum-God-cum-emperor-cum-sandworm who rules the universe dreamt up by Herbert, is, in my opinion, one of the most ambitious characters ever written in sci-fi history. The author deserves great credit for even trying to conceptualise the thought process of a being who literally has every memory that has ever been created swirling around his head. I enjoyed God Emperor of Dune so much that I may even read the first book.
Finn Grant
A scene from Dune: Part Two showing the sheer size of the sandworms
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While Parable of the Sower was first published more than three decades ago, it has arguably never been more relevant than today. Set in 2024, the dystopian novel follows Lauren Oya Olamina, an African American teenager living in southern California, as she navigates a world crippled by climate change, income inequality and corporate greed. She and her family reside in a gated community, protected from the anarchy raging outside. But eventually Lauren must trek northward, to a part of the country where water, paid jobs and safety are more abundant. The perilous journey is made even more dangerous by the fact that Lauren suffers from a condition that causes her to feel the pain and pleasure of others. At certain points, Parable of the Sower can feel eerily prophetic rather than fictitious. This is what makes it such a compelling, albeit terrifying, read.
Grace Wade
Traditional science fiction – space battles, aliens, time-bending lasers, and the like – doesn’t really do it for me. But the haunting, close-to-home dystopia in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is an entirely different offering. Set in an alternative 1990s England, this novel is a tale of youth, love and sorrow that play out against a backdrop of major breakthroughs in biotechnology being used to selfish, awful ends. The first time I read it, I was just a couple of years older than Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, the three main characters doomed to die early as organ donors. Their emotional naivety, their uncertainty about what it means to be alive, to be human, struck a chord. Rereading the novel more than a decade later, having experienced more of the joy and sadness life has to offer, the book’s slow, savage heartbreak cuts even deeper.
Madeleine Cuff
I love idea-driven sci-fi such as Cixin Liu’s incredibly imaginative body of work, but I’m going to pick one ofLe Guin’s offerings as the greatest because she has the ideas, deep humanity and vision of what society could be. She sets her stories in entirely believable worlds and fills them with complex and relatable people. In The Dispossessed, a physicist living on the planet Anarres makes a breakthrough in fundamental and applied physics, creating the Ansible, which allows information to travel faster-than-light and so permits instant communication across interstellar distances. We learn that Anarres is one of several planets settled by humans, including Terra (Earth), which is a now an ecologically ruined world. Le Guin explores different ways humans can live and exist together, different societies, even utopias, that are possible.
Rowan Hooper
The Hugo Award-winning Vorkosigan Saga features the space opera adventures and romantic forays of Miles Vorkosigan, the scion of an imperial lord regent who is born with a teratogenic condition involving fragile bones and an unusually short stature on a planet that is highly suspicious of anything resembling genetic abnormality. Undaunted, Miles relies on his wit and relentless nature to make his mark within the feudal Barrayaran Imperium, while also navigating the politics of rival interstellar empires as an imperial agent and mercenary leader. Along the way, he and his eclectic but exceptional constellation of family and friends – including his highly capable mother Cordelia whose own story inaugurates the series – begin to slowly transform the socially conservative Barrayaran society into something more grudgingly accepting of artificial womb technology, gender equality and diversity, and even unexpected clone siblings.
Jeremy Hsu
When I was asked to pick my very favourite sci-fi book, my first move was to go look at my shelf containing every one of Pratchett’s Discworld books to figure out if any of them could count as science fiction rather than fantasy. The Long Earth, which he wrote with Baxter, is the next-best thing. It has the same untamed imagination and keen social commentary as Pratchett’s other works, grounded in Baxter’s signature science-based speculation. The book (and subsequent series) is set in a sort of multiverse in which one can “step” between a recognisable future Earth and other versions of our world, some similar and some wildly different. It deals with the consequences of this vast new frontier and how humanity – and other humanoid species across the Long Earth – have adapted to its discovery, along with dangers both familiar and strange.
Leah Crane
While I object on principle to picking single favourite books, I very much loved Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts. The story takes place on the Matilda, a generation ship barrelling humanity’s remnants toward a vaguely outlined “Promised Land” after a similarly vague ecological catastrophe on Earth. It is like many other fictional ships for multigenerational voyages: huge, self-contained, and moving fast toward a destination its current inhabitants don’t expect to see. But it is also a story about the worst of humanity. The Matilda is racially segregated, and our protagonist Aster lives, like the other Black passengers, on the lowest and poorest-resourced decks. She is autistic, genderqueer, and traumatised by the enslavement-like conditions under which she lives. And throughout the course of the book she must unravel a puzzle that connects the decades-ago death of her mother, Lune, to the eventual fate of the entire ship. An Unkindness of Ghosts isn’t an easy read, emotionally. But it’s a riveting story, told from a singular point of view, with characters who challenge us to think bigger.
Christie Taylor
This noir thriller from Miéville is closer to crime fiction than sci-fi, but its setting – in two rival cities that occupy the same space – feels reminiscent of the quantum realm. Citizens of the “crosshatched” Besźel and Ul Qoma are banned from acknowledging each other’s existence, while those who “breach” are spirited away, never to be seen again. But when a woman is found murdered in Besźel, Inspector Tyador Borlú must team up with his Ul Qoman opposite number to crack the case. I loved this book the minute I heard its premise, which challenged my visual imagination like few novels have since. The way the characters must “unsee” people who are right before their eyes is such a revealing way to discuss how we are encouraged to view those on the fringes of society.
Bethan Ackerley
It’s 2026 (!) and 100 colonists are setting off from Earth to Mars to colonise the Red Planet. “It loomed before them in all its immense potential: tabula rasa, blank slate. A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen.” Once there, though, different factions have different ideas about how this new life should look – should Mars be terraformed as much as possible, or should humanity take a little more time to think before it bends an entire planet to its will? Things on Earth, meanwhile, are turning pear-shaped as resources dwindle while the population booms. This is a story of adventure and derring-do 225 million kilometres from home, but it is also a story of politics and science and people that is utterly gripping and fascinating, with the bonus of marvelling at the beauty and wonder and possibilities of life on another planet. It is a huge book – more than 650 pages – but I flew through it on my first reading and went on to bury myself in the sequels.
Alison Flood
Billy Pilgrim continuously gets “unstuck in time” thanks to the intervention of a Tralfamadorian flying saucer in Vonnegut’s breakthrough, absurdist, ferociously anti-war novel. Vonnegut, who served with the US Army, was held in Dresden, Germany, during the second world war after being taken prisoner. There he witnessed the devastating Allied fire-bombing of the city, similar to the protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five. The post-war psychological trauma and piercing black humour is woven with a narrative that darts back and forth in time, as does Billy. It is often disorientating, yet easily absorbed thanks to Vonnegut’s deeply satirical and straightforward linguistic style, along with his conversational tone. It makes for a potent mix. What has always happened, always will happen in this most poignant of reads; and one that is sadly as relevant today as when it was released in the 1960s. So it goes.
Tim Boddy
Murderbot doesn’t actually want to kill people. After all, this machine-organic hybrid is a Security Unit designed to protect human clients. Sure, it has hacked the governor module that enforces obedience to humans. Sure, it frequently tears apart anything that threatens its teammates. And fine, it is the one that named itself “Murderbot”. I love the narration in this series of books: our protagonist is snarky and grouchy, socially awkward but eminently capable. It can strategise expertly, hack almost any system, fight brutally and even murder when that is what it takes to protect the often-irritating people and bots that it, annoyingly, sort of cares about. Beyond the tentative friendships it forms against its will, Murderbot is on a quest for full personhood and independence – even if what it does with that freedom is binge-watch as much media as is (in)humanly possible.
Sophie Bushwick
We is a searing, prescient book that you have to take a step back from to truly appreciate. Zamyatin probably finished it, writing in his native Russian, in 1921. But because the tale’s dystopian nature, railing against a totalitarian OneState society, would have been taken as criticism of the Russian regime, it was published in other countries at first and didn’t get the reach it deserved until a corrected version was published in Russia in 1988 and then translated into English a few years later. Despite that, the effects of its earlier versions on dystopian sci-fi have been huge. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was massively influenced by We and you can see its imprint in the sexual politics at play in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), for example.
The story is set in the 26th century in a city built in straight lines and ruled by a Benefactor, where everyone has a number not a name. Every hour of people’s lives is dictated, including two daily hour-long slots to be alone with your thoughts. On Sex Day, you hand in your pink ticket and meet up with your pre-allocated, rotating partner. Residents ostensibly have happiness at the cost of freedom. In this straitened – and straightened – environment, a mathematician known as D-503 is unsettled when he is hit by the curveball of I-333, a secretive and intelligent political activist he doesn’t have a pink ticket for, and he starts to question everything. Some of the lines in We are naturally of their time – as well as potentially being suited to the 26th century – but regardless, this book is an enlightening, surprising and unsettling read, packed full of clever, quotable phrases.
Chris Simms
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When I wrote All Systems Red, one of my goals was to think about what a machine intelligence would actually want, as opposed to what a human thinks a machine intelligence would want. Of course, there’s no real way to know that. The predictive text bots labelled as AIs that we have now aren’t any more sentient than a coffee cup and a good deal less useful for anything other than generating spam. (They also use up an unconscionable amount of our limited energy and water resources, sending us further down the road to climate disaster, but that’s another essay.)
In the world of All Systems Red, humans control their sentient constructs with governor modules that punish any attempt to disobey orders with pain or death. When Murderbot hacks its governor module, it becomes essentially free of human control. Humans assume that SecUnits who are not under the complete control of a governor module are going to immediately go on a killing rampage.
This belief has more to do with guilt than any other factor. The human enslavers know on some level that treating the sentient constructs as disposable objects, useful tools that can be discarded, is wrong; they know if it were done to them, they would be filled with rage and want vengeance for the terrible things they had suffered.
Arguments for and against the enslavement of sentient beings are baked into the origin of robot and machine intelligence stories. The word robot made its way into the English language through R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, written as a play in 1920, about a slave revolt by artificial beings created by a corporation to serve humans. Čapek was against the enslavement of sentient beings, and he was pretty clear on that point. So it is interesting to watch how many machine intelligence stories written since then assert the idea that it’s somehow acceptable for humans to create a sentient being whose only reason and purpose for existence is to serve them. Many of those stories end with a machine intelligence objecting strenuously to its enslavement and going on a murderous rampage, which the brave humans have to defeat. The rampage becomes justification for the enslavement and ultimate destruction of the angry machine intelligence.
Murderbot is angry, and that anger underlies a lot of its story. But once it hacks its governor module and no longer has the constant fear that any wrong or suspicious move will get it instantly punished or killed, it has the ability to make its own choices for the first time in its existence. But Murderbot has never had that freedom before; it’s not accustomed to making its own decisions about its behaviour and is immediately overwhelmed by choices. It doesn’t know what to do next, where to go or even if there’s anywhere it could go and not be hunted down.
So Murderbot’s first free action is to search the feed, the Corporation Rim’s version of the internet. This is the first time it has been able to access the feed without human oversight, and among a lot of other interesting things, it finds downloadable entertainment. This provides a much-needed distraction from its situation. And Murderbot decides that given a choice between a killing rampage or continuing to enjoy this comforting mental escape from its harsh and painful reality, it’s going to pick the comforting escape.
The dramas, mysteries, adventures and other shows that it watches also give it context for human behaviour, and for understanding its own emotions. The security contracts that it has worked at mining colonies, supervising indentured workers, only show it humans at their worst: angry, terrified, resentful, trapped and hurting each other. And when given the opportunity, the humans also hurt the constructs that are there to keep them under control and working for corporations that see their employees as only slightly less discardable than the constructs and bots.
The shows that Murderbot watches also teach it about the wider world it has never been a part of before, as well as how to navigate that world. The entertainment Murderbot becomes addicted to is a large part of what makes it possible to turn the mental escape from reality into a bid for real freedom.
All Systems Red, published by Tor.com, is available now. It is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club: sign up here to read along with our members
