New Books In Science Fiction

Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (Redhook, 2020) begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairytale. Yes, there are witches. But there are also suffragists. Yes, there are spells. But there are also women who fall in love with each other. While Harrow loves fairytales “because they give us this shared language,” she hates them for the limits they impose. Through her main characters, the Eastwood sisters, she turns the familiar archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone on their heads. “The Maiden-Mother-Crone triptych is something that I have always hated. It's pretty gross to define a woman's existence by her reproductive state at that moment,” Harrow says. “I wanted to be embodying and subverting it at the same time.” As the story unfolds, women’s demands to rediscover and use magic parallel their demands for political power and social freedom. In the guise of a fairytale, The Once and Future Witches explores the long afterlife of family trauma,

P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout (Tordotcom, 2020) is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. The story follows three monster hunters: Maryse Boudreaux, who wields a magic sword; Chef, who had previously disguised herself as a man to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters during World War I; and Sadie, a sharpshooter who calls her Winchester rifle Winnie. The monsters are Ku Kluxes—member of the KKK who have transformed into huge, six-eyed, pointy-toothed, flesh-eating demons. The idea to turn hate-filled racists into larger-than-life demons came from Clark’s work as a historian. (In addition to an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.) When reading narratives of formerly enslaved individuals collected by the Federal Writers' Project, he’d been struck by the way they described the KKK. “They often talk about them … wearing simply a pillowcase, somet

In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ. Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters keep hating. Fforde is an accomplished satirist and uses humor to spotlight some of our ugliest impulses, including racism and xenophobia. In The Constant Rabbit, a populist party known as TwoLegsGood has parlayed leporiphobia (fear of rabbits) into a successful political movement. In control of the government, TwoLegsGood is planning to segregate the nation’s more than 1 million rabbits in a “MegaWarren” where they will be under round-the-clock surveillance and their freedoms curtailed. TwoLegsGood’s treatment of rabbit h

Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote some of The New Wilderness while trekking across the high desert of Oregon. “There is something about the expansiveness of lands that are empty that make my imagination feel a lot freer than it usually does in a city,” she says. For Cook’s protagonist Bea, the Wilderness State offers the only hope for saving the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes. But as Agnes’ lungs heal from the city’s smog, her relationship with her mother grows strained, suffering rifts that might be typical for a mother and daughter but are magnifi

In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art. Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of

Writers and readers of science fiction love stories about artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical beings whose sentience mirrors, matches or exceeds that of humans. The stories stay fresh for the reasons stories about humans do—sentience confers individuality, which provides endless permutations for character and plot. Madeline Ashby’s trilogy, The Machine Dynasty, explores the limits of sentience, the meaning of free will, and what it means to look, act, and feel like a human but be denied basic human rights. Published in July, the third book, ReV (Angry Robot, 2020), shows readers the results of a final face-off between self-replicating humanoid robots and humans. That the robots, known as vN, want their freedom, is natural. What isn’t natural is the failsafe programmed into their consciousnesses that requires them to aid humans in distress or danger—or self-destruct. With the failsafe in place, humans use and abuse the vN as they please—as mates, sex objects, laborers. “The failsafe became a way to

Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) came out in March, but don’t call her a new writer. “I find it funny that people refer to people who have just started to get published as new writers. I finished my first novel when I was 12. I'm not a new writer. What I am is new to publishing, and it's so weird to me that people conflate the two, as if you just started writing at the moment you started getting published,” Mohamed says. She’d completed the first draft of Beneath the Rising in 2002, around the time she’d received her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she decided to try and publish it. Until then, writing was “very much my private little hobby.” Beneath the Rising combines horror, science fiction and fantasy in its portrayal of the complicated friendship of Nick and Joanna (Johnny). They’d been close since they were young children despite many differences (she’s a rich, white, world-famous scientist; he’s a poor, brown, ordinary guy). But

Few science fiction writers have their vision of the future tested upon publication. But that’s what happened to Ilze Hugo, whose novel about a mysterious epidemic, The Down Days (Skybound Books, 2020), debuted in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. “For it to be published right in the middle of all this is the most surreal experience,” Hugo says. Many of the book’s details are spot on: masks, online funerals, elbow bumps in lieu of handshakes. But the South African writer is frustrated that she missed a few nuances like “the way that your glasses fog up when you're wearing a mask … or the fact that you get acne.” “Something that you can't really understand until you’ve experienced it is how at the beginning of [the Covid-19 pandemic], everyone was taking it fairly seriously, and they were quarantining and self-isolating. Now if you go to the shop, you have people acting as if we're not in a pandemic at all. It's as if people can only emotionally stress about it or think about it for a certain period of time

Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020) tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistance to systemic racism earns him a one-way ticket to jail. Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults is as much a tale of the siblings’ bond as it is a portrait of white supremacy, police brutality, and the anger of Black Americans at centuries of injustice. The book’s publication just months before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic might seem prescient, yet the novel could have been written at any point in the last several decades (or centuries) and still felt timely. Kev is born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. A few years later, the police killing of Sean Bell leads Ella to run away from home, afraid that her anger, harnessed to the supernatural powers she can’t yet control, might cause her to hurt those she loves. “She's c

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

In his new book, Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Brian Crim explores the diverse ways in which the Holocaust influences and shapes science fiction and horror film and television by focusing on notable contributions from the last fifty years. The supernatural and extraterrestrial are rich and complex spaces with which to examine important Holocaust themes - trauma, guilt, grief, ideological fervor and perversion, industrialized killing, and the dangerous afterlife of Nazism after World War II. Planet Auschwitz explores why the Holocaust continues to set the standard for horror in the modern era and asks if the Holocaust is imaginable here on Earth, at least by those who perpetrated it, why not in a galaxy far, far away? The pervasive use of Holocaust imagery and plotlines in horror and science fiction reflects both our preoccupation with its enduring trauma and our persistent need to “work through” its many legacies.

Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sister, Sanda, a gunner who finds herself waking 230 years after her last battle on an empty, enemy spaceship, believing she’s the last human alive. O’Keefe’s characters search for truth in a universe where the secrets are centuries old and where A.I.s depend on humans as much as humans depend on A.I.s. Among the many themes O’Keefe’s space opera explores are the limits of human perception. In Sanda’s case, her reality is controlled by a spaceship. “They are elements of horror when you can’t trust the environment you live in, when the only thing keeping you alive might be dishonest,” O’Keefe says. O’Keefe challenges Tolstoy’s claim that “all happy families are alike” by giving Biran and Sanda an upbringing in their two-dad home that is as happy as it is unique. “I enjoy taking the opportunity to explore a family that is

Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship. The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home and family. “As a little girl, I thought sexism was on the way out. And in the last few years, I’ve realized, ‘Oh no, it’s definitely not,’” Lam says, discussing her motivations to write the book. When NASA confiscates the spacecraft of Valerie Black, a billionaire entrepreneur who Lam describes as a “cross between Elon Musk and Sigourney Weaver,” Black steals it back. She and her crew “know they’re the best people with the skills and training to find this new planet, which is humanity’s last hope because Earth has only 30 years left of habitability due to climate change,” Lam says. Lam found inspiration in the unsung

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few). So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his

Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children. Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—they struggle with the age-old task of forging identities that set them apart from the definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents. “We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu says. On the episode, he discusses several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) and talks about the art of translation and the role Liu has played in introducing English-speaking readers to some of today’s great Chinese science fiction writers. Liu was on New Books in Science Fiction in 2015 to discuss the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty. Rob

In Docile (Tor.com, 2020), the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy. Tor describes the book as a “science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power.” Szpara describes the book as "really gay." As it turns out, both descriptions are true. Szpara could have kept the story relatively simply by making Docile a tale of exploitation and rebellion, but he isn’t content to portray the wealthy Alex simply as an abusive patron who brainwashes his compliant docile, Elisha. Instead, their relationship is complicated by society’s efforts to make servitude more palatable by providing dociles with rights (like the right to adequate food and medical care, the right to vote, etc.) and a drug (which Elisha scandalously refuses) that helps dociles forget their suffering. Szpara also dares to have Alex and Elisha fall—or at least think they are falling—in love. This raises a host of questions. Who is Alex falling in lo

To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games. But Sura Neelin soon discovers that the LARPs are more than games. They’re also an underground economy that meets players’ needs for food, shelter, services and everything else the non-virtual world also provides. Among the concepts she encounters is the idea that software can provide inanimate objects with self-sovereignty, allowing them to take charge of their own destinies. Sura discovers that self-sovereignty can apply to things like a river or a forest, giving them the ability to advocate for their own health and well-being—essentially putting them on an equal footing with humans who might try to exploit them. For Schroeder, who is both a writer and professional futurist, science fiction can be both entertainment and a laboratory to explore ideas like self-sovereignty. He’s been hired by go

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Cipri was scrambling for a literary agent, negotiating a contract, and reaching a wider audience. “I wasn't really planning on writing a short story collection for probably another decade,” Cipri says. “I don't have the kind of output that a lot of other short story writers do. I was publishing maybe one or two stories a year.” Cipri’s modestly belies the maturity of their writing. The stories in Homesick: Stories (Dzanc Books, 2019) combines science fiction and horror to create complex tales about everything from ghosts and alien seedpods to difficult mothers and falling in love. Structurally, the stories vary. In addition to using third-person narration, there’s a story built on letters, a multiple-choice quiz, and a transcript of a series of recordings. What all the stories have in common is an interest in the mean