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.
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.