It has been a good year for science fiction, with a novel set on the International Space Station winning the 2024 Booker prize. Orbital is a beautiful, sublimely written, hopeful book that takes place over 16 orbits of Earth.
One might argue that it isn鈥檛 science fiction. After all, the ISS is a real place and the book is simply a novelisation of ordinary life upon it. Author Samantha Harvey describes it as 鈥渟pace pastoral鈥�. But then what is or isn鈥檛 sci-fi is an argument that will rumble on forever (see below) and so I am claiming Orbital and its Booker win for Team Science Fiction.
That novel actually came out last year. So what about the new sci-fi in 2024? I have read a great deal of it in order to find books to recommend to you.
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That said, I haven鈥檛 read every piece of sci-fi published this year, so the list below is already a less than fully rigorous exercise. To add to that, reading a book is an extremely subjective experience. Anyway, here, unscientifically, subjectively, is my list of the five best sci-fi novels out this year (that I have read).
This book is a heavyweight piece of work from a much-admired novelist. It imagines life in Australia in a few centuries鈥� time, post-climate collapse. Juice is what is now known as 鈥渃limate fiction鈥�, but it could also be called dystopian or speculative. Whatever: it is a vision of life in the far future, an examination of blame and retribution after the end of the world as we all now know it, and also a gripping yarn.
Like Orbital, this story, involving an undercover operative infiltrating eco-activists, isn鈥檛 really science fiction. I think a better description of it would be 鈥渁 novel of ideas masquerading as a spy caper鈥�. However, it is also arguably climate fiction and has a lot of palaeoarchaeology in it. It somehow wound up on sci-fi lists this year and then in the New Scientist Book Club.
At a New Scientist creative writing weekend in the Brecon Beacons, UK, earlier this month, the distinguished author Adam Roberts (mentioned again below) claimed that sci-fi is only sci-fi if it plays around with big ideas, i.e. it has to push the thought envelope in some fashion. So a story set in space that could as easily be set on Earth wouldn鈥檛 count as sci-fi. But then Roberts also, in the same lively discussion, claimed that all fiction is science fiction. On the basis of that second claim, then, I will add (the completely brilliant) Creation Lake to this list. Regardless of genre, it is a wonderful work of literature.
Juice is a vision of life in the far future, an examination of blame and retribution after the end of the world
Now this is a book that really does play with big ideas. It is a time travel thriller where if you move between valleys in the world of the novel, you travel backwards and forwards in time. It is beautifully written, original and masterfully plotted, and I have found myself thinking back on it many times this year.
This underrated book is an exploration of artificial intelligence, freedom of will, abuse in relationships and lots more. It is a tightly drawn, at times very funny, portrait of a relationship between a second-rate human and his first-rate sexbot, Annie Bot.
This is a bold novel of ideas set in a space-travelling future. Two spaceships turn up to study a black hole, but then one of the ships鈥� captains starts to believe he is communicating with something inside it. But how can that be? Shortly afterwards, this scientific mystery shifts to the back burner when the captain begins killing his crew. Has he been contaminated by something in the black hole?
Roberts, who is also a professor of 19th-century literature, sets out to do something different with each of his novels. In his author鈥檚 note at the end of Lake of Darkness, he explains that the book is influenced by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and that it follows on (intellectually) from his Kantian novel, The Thing Itself, and his Hegelian novel, The This. I am going to have to take his word for all that, but regardless, this is a really interesting piece of work from a great author.
Emily H. Wilson is the author of聽the聽Sumerians trilogy, set聽in聽ancient聽Mesopotamia
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
