Echopraxia

Peter Watts

Daniel Brüks is a baseline: a human with few enhancements, no cortical inlays, no way to blink and see subtitles in his vision.

Blindsight

Peter Watts

Siri Keeton, missing half his mind, is sent out on a mission to discover the source of thousands of probes that surrounded Earth and screamed an unintelligible alien signal before burning up in the atmosphere.

The Word for World Is Forest

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Robinson writes science fiction that aspires to be a New Yorker essay. This is not entirely bad.

The Unreal and the Real

Ursula K. Le Guin

The titles of the two parts of this selected edition of Le Guin’s stories are Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands—Le Guin leaves it to the reader to decide which of these is real and which unreal.

A Stranger in Olondria

Sofia Samatar

As he travels to Olondria to sell the family harvest, Jevick meets a young woman on the verge of death.

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine

Mahit Dzmare is abruptly ordered to report for duty as the new ambassador to the Teixcalaan empire—with no word as to what might have happened to her predecessor.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

When young Jonathan Strange sets it upon himself to become a magician, he ends up as Mr. Norrell’s only pupil—but it’s a dry sort of magic Norrell preaches, absent any of the mystery or terror of the old days.

The Book of Lamps and Banners

Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary needs to get home, but a string of suspicious deaths has accumulated behind her, and she isn’t sure where is safe.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

“I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”

The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa

Objects are disappearing: not the things themselves, although that is soon to follow, but the memory of them, the recognition and understanding of what they are and have been.

Harrow the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

In this sequel to the completely badass Gideon the Ninth, Harrow has become an immortal lyctor by consuming Gideon’s soul. Or has she?

The Invincible

Stanislaw Lem

Arriving on a distant planet in search of a sister ship that has disappeared, the crew of The Invincible discover a new form of life: tiny, autonomous robots that seem to have evolved into expert killing machines.

Terra Nullius

Claire G. Coleman

In Australia, a young boy escapes from the settler-run school where he and other children are trained for a life of enslavement.

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Decades after a pandemic has ravaged the planet, a roving group of actors and musicians called The Symphony return to a small town and find that things are not as they were before.

The Shadow King

Maaza Mengiste

Set in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, The Shadow King centers Hirut, an orphan living as a servant in the home of Kidane, and his wife, Aster.

The City We Became

N. K. Jemisin

This latest tome from N. K. Jemisin tells the story of New York—specifically, of the six people who must become the city of New York in order to save themselves and their city from destruction.

Agency

William Gibson

In this sequel to The Peripheral, Gibson returns to a world with multiple futures, and a newly rewritten past.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree, Jr.

Under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., Alice Sheldon wrote dozens of award-winning and influential stories, some of the best of which are included here.

The Water Dancer

Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a story of the underground railroad, of memory, and of magic—all told with Coates’s exquisite prose.