Tim Winton’s new novel Juice is being compared to the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven and The Road
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We science fiction fans are going to have our work cut out for us to make it through all the riches on offer this month. There are at least four books published in October that are must-reads for me, including the new Stephen Baxter, an epic story of a future destroyed by climate change from Tim Winton, time travel from Alan Moore and J. Lincoln Fenn’s tale of a creepily mysterious plant on a remote island. I’ve also included some interesting-sounding new spooky sci-fi reads, because it is October, after all – which reminds me, time to crack out my Shirley Jacksons for their annual reread…
Juice by Tim Winton
Our sci-fi columnist Emily Wilson, whose judgement is impeccable, tells me this is stunning (her review will be out later this month) – and it sounds it. It follows a man and a child in a climate-ravaged future, travelling across a stony desert until they find an abandoned mine site and decide to take refuge. Comparisons are being made by its publisher to Station Eleven and The Road.
Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter
This is the story of Rab, whose mother cut off his hand as a 2-year-old to prevent him having to work in the mines of Mercury. An adult now, he lives on the Mask, a huge structure hiding the Solar System from aliens to keep it safe – but then a spaceship, which has travelled for 100 years from a forgotten colony planet, arrives… I have many old Stephen Baxter novels filling up my shelves, and this latest outing from one of the UK’s top sci-fi writers sounds like it’ll have to nestle in there too.
Pride and Prejudice in Space by Alexis Lampley
Remember when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out, and us literary types thought “whatever next?”, and then it was all actually rather fun? Well, now we have the adventures of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy – in space. Elizabeth, in this version of Jane Austen’s classic tale, lives on a small moon in the “Londinium lunar system” with her sisters and parents, only for their lives to be shaken up by the arrival of Mr Bingley on the Netherfield StarCruiser.
First we had the Bennet sisters facing off against zombies…now they’re in space
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The Nightmarchers by J. Lincoln Fenn
Journalist Julia is offered a lot of money to travel to a remote Pacific island to collect samples of a peculiar flower – an island where her sister, botanical researcher Irene, died in 1939. Julia will also be digging into the island’s secrets, and the rumours that ghosts rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. Fenn’s publisher has compared this to The Last of Us, which makes me think that flower is going to have some disturbing properties…
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Tipped by our podcast editor Rowan Hooper as “fascinating”, this is the latest in top literary author Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels, set in a town in southern Norway over which a bright new star has risen. People, it turns out, have stopped dying ever since the star’s appearance. “The books are concerned with meaning, of life in the modern world, and of reality,” says Rowan in his write-up.
Alan Moore
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The Great When by Alan Moore
In 1949, 18-year-old second-hand bookseller Dennis stumbles upon a novel that is fictitious – a figment from another book – yet it is there, in his hands. It turns out Dennis has found a book from a version of London beyond time and space, known as the Great When, but this magical London needs to remain a secret, and Dennis must take the book back to where it belongs. A time-travelling epic from the mighty Moore? Yes please.
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Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
I have thought often about Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and the eery strangeness of Area X, a zone on the US coastline where anyone who enters disappears, since its publication 10 years ago. Now we are being gifted a surprise fourth volume in the Southern Reach series – a prequel, which opens decades before the formation of Area X, and then jumps to follow the first expedition after the border comes down around the dangerous zone. I absolutely can’t wait to find out more about a world I thought VanderMeer was done with.
Natalie Portman in the film adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation
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William by Mason Coile
This sounds like my perfect Halloween read – an AI twist on Frankenstein , in which engineer Henry creates an artificially intelligent consciousness he names William. Henry is fixated on his project, staying away from everyone but William, including his pregnant wife Lily, but when Lily’s coworkers show up, Henry’s smartest of smart homes starts to go (scarily) wrong.
Run by Blake Crouch
Blake Crouch is the author of the pleasantly crazy (and now adapted for TV) sci-fi thriller Dark Matter. This month his publishers are reissuing an initially self-published early novel, Run, in which everyone who witnesses strange aurorae (echoes of John Wyndham with fewer deadly plants) becomes filled with a murderous rage for everyone who didn’t see the mysterious lights. Our perspective is narrow and rather thrilling, following Jack, his wife Dee and their kids, as they flee for their lives. I’ve read this already, and I can attest that it is just as pleasantly crazy as Dark Matter.
Of the Flesh by Various
As we’re heading into spooky season (my favourite season), I’ve indulged myself a little and included this anthology of horror writing: after all, there’s often a lot of crossover between sci-fi and horror, and there are some great names here, including Michel Faber and James Smythe, who have both written some excellent pieces of speculative fiction (if you haven’t read Faber’s Under the Skin or Smythe’s The Explorer, then please do so). The stories sound deliciously creepy – a long-dead parent’s corpse being perfectly preserved decades later; disfigured girls “willing to pay any price to fit in”. Happy Halloween to us all.
Dark Space by Rob Hart and Alex Segura
This co-authored sci-fi thriller follows pilot Jose Carriles as he sets out on the first mission to outside our solar system – only for a series of strange malfunctions to occur and people to start turning up dead. As events escalate, Carriles finds himself “face-to-face with a reckoning that could destroy humanity as we know it”.
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
This isn’t science fiction, but I’m mentioning it because I am an Ursula K. Le Guin completionist, and I thought others might be interested in this revised and updated edition of this master of her craft’s guide to “sailing the sea of story”. Telling us “how – and why – to write”, it sees the author of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed give us her guide to narrative, with a new introduction from Kelly Link (check out her awesome short story collection Magic For Beginners), Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss and Le Guin’s son, Theo Downes-Le Guin. I’ll definitely be reading it.
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