The Mountain in the Sea

Ray Nayler

Dr. Ha Nguyen has been summoned to the remote archipelago of Con Dao, where there are rumors of an octopus that walks upright on land and may have taken to murdering local poachers.

The Water Knife

Paolo Bacigalupi

In what reads like a plausible present (rather than the near future), the enforcer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority cuts a bloody fight over the little water that remains in the Colorado river.

Babel

R. F. Kuang

In the nineteenth century, the British empire has achieved exceptional power through its dominance of silver-working: an art that locates and exploits the magic in the gaps of meaning between languages.

Starfish

Peter Watts

A group of people “preadapted” to danger and stress have been recruited to run a power station at the bottom of the Pacific.

The City and the City

China Miéville

Inspector Tyador Borlú serves on the Extreme Crime Squad in the city of Besźel.

Nona the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

In the third book of the Locked Tomb series, Nona lives with her friends Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha in a cramped apartment in a tall building in a city menaced by a great hulking creature in the sky.

The Gone-Away World

Nick Harkaway

A world-ending weapon that makes its targets “go away” has, perhaps predictably, gone awry and left large parts of the world uninhabitable.

Hokuloa Road

Elizabeth Hand

Grady Kendall is biding his time in Maine, living with his mom as the pandemic swirls around them.

Nova

Samuel R. Delany

Mouse is a young cyborg stud who plays a stolen sensory syrynx—an instrument that projects sights, smells, and sounds all at once.

The Factory

Hiroko Oyamada

Three workers reluctantly take jobs at the factory.

Matrix

Lauren Groff

Marie is seventeen and a giant of a woman, taller and broader and stronger than those around her.

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel

It’s 2203, and Olive Llewellyn has traveled from her home on the moon to earth, where she is on a book tour.

The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel

Late one night, at a luxury hotel reachable only by boat, someone scrawls Why don’t you swallow broken glass on a huge picture window.

Spear

Nicola Griffith

An unnamed girl lives in a cave with her mother, in a wild wood warded against danger and those who would seek them out.

Babel-17

Samuel R. Delany

Rydra Wong is a poet, a captain, an erstwhile cryptographer, and a burgeoning telepath.

Black Sun

Rebecca Roanhorse

On the solstice, in the city of Tova, there will be a convergence—a total eclipse of the sun.

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich

Tookie works in a bookstore, and Flora—her most annoying, and most loyal, customer—has just died. This does not mean she has left the bookstore.

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.

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