I am currently deeply engrossed in the November read for the New Scientist Book Club, a piece of classic science fiction (well, from 2012) from Chris Beckett, Dark Eden. But I’m also in the mood for some fresh writing, and the new sci-fi on offer this month is an exciting and eclectic range. I’m keen to check out Benjamin Percy’s audio drama Exoplanet, produced by none other than Andy Weir, as well as books from some old favourites: Michael Moorcock, Carole Hailey, John Scalzi and Andrew Hunter Murray. And for all those still in the mood for scares after Halloween, there’s some space horror from SA Barnes in the deliciously named Cold Eternity.

by Benjamin Percy

This is something a little different – produced by Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, and written by Benjamin Percy, this sci-fi thriller is a full-cast audio drama from Audible, and it sounds really exciting. It follows the fallout when a quantum anomaly tears a starship apart, leaving its crew in different eras on the same deadly exoplanet – one in a machine-ruled future, for example, another in a past peopled by hostile aliens. I’m a recent (only this year) audiobook adopter, and this sounds right up my street.

by Andrew Hunter Murray

I really enjoyed Andrew Hunter Murray’s speculative novel The Last Day, in which the world stops turning, leaving half the planet in scorching sunlight and the other half permanently dark. This latest book sounds equally interesting. A young woman, Esme, escapes her dull job by taking tiny potions known as The Elsewheres, which allow her to visit alternate versions of herself. But then an “incident” turns her into the most important person in this, or possibly any, universe. How will she handle it?

by John Scalzi

Sci-fi legend John Scalzi’s latest speculative adventure has a Lovecraftian tinge, as the locals in Richland, Ohio, take offence to the actions of a predatory private-equity firm – and develop some unexpected tentacles. The local police chief, and former resident Mike, get entangled in what’s going on and in events that are likely to change humanity forever.

by Carole Hailey

I always appreciate a good “asteroid hitting Earth” story (my recent-ish reads include Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s , a classic from 1977, and by Temi Oh, a twist on the tale). Carole Hailey’s previous book, The Silence Project, was great, so I’m looking forward to her take on this story. It follows Cassie, who grew up with a father obsessed with an impending apocalypse. Now she’s middle-aged and discovers that his teachings might have some use after all when an asteroid is found in the solar system, heading for northern Europe.

by Michael Moorcock

There aren’t many names in science fiction and fantasy bigger than Michael Moorcock, and this is the final part of his “fictional autobiography”. It sees, if I understand the blurb correctly, the author tell the story of both his real life (from the impact of his science fiction to the music of the sixties) and of a fantasy world only he can see (the example given: “the Carmelite Monks must protect their latest multiverse-spanning invention”). Intriguingly weird, as you’d expect from this wonderful writer – I’m keen to see how, as we’re promised, “Moorcock meets ‘Moorcock’ and together they produce a remedy for the world’s pain!”.

by SA Barnes

If I were SA Barnes, I would be pretty pleased with the moniker laid on me by my publisher: she is, apparently, “the queen of space horror”. In this latest, Halley Zwick (who is on the run) boards the spaceship Elysian Fields. This was sold to the super-rich as a place to enter cryo-sleep until their immortality could be assured, but it has been silent and dark for decades… although is it really?

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

by Solvej Balle, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith

My colleague Gerardo loved previous instalments in this series, which follows a protagonist living the same day on repeat. Tara has now spent 12 years reliving 18 November, while her partner Thomas, to whom she has returned, repeats his own identical day. Tara sets off with her friends for a community where other time-stranded people have come together and begins to see a life beyond Thomas on the horizon.

by Jared Throne

This is a graphic novel in which four thieves travel to an abandoned colony planet (Bridge Planet Nine) with plans to rob one of the uncrewed freighter ships that land there. But it turns out this apparently deserted outpost isn’t as empty as they thought…

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir, translated by Larissa Kyzer

This speculative crime novel was shortlisted for the Icelandic Crime Book of the Year award. It’s set in Reykjavík in 2052, where an artificial intelligence manages society and ensures it is almost crime-free. Sabína discovers that her brother, a dissident who lives outside the controlling AI’s reach, has been murdered, and she begins investigating his final days. I’ve enjoyed Sigurdardóttir’s straight crime novels, so will definitely be exploring this one.

by Dan Moren

Ex-con Z is asked to help locate the tomb of Ikanto, which is hurtling through space towards a black hole. It’s a strange job offer – especially when it’s made by a floating brain in a jar. But Z is desperate and up for the challenge. This is an irreverent sort of caper, according to its publisher, and comparable to Guardians of the Galaxy – no bad thing in my eyes.

by Chloe Gong

Humans have moved to virtual reality to escape a world that is falling apart, in the second dystopian novel in The Strangeloom Trilogy. We follow those working against megacorporation NileCorp to bring it down. Sounds like some cyberpunky, futuristic fun.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

After a deep dive into particle physics in September with cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s non-fiction title The Edge of Space-Time, in October the New Scientist Book Club stuck with physics but made it fictional, with Emily St. John Mandel’s new speculative fiction novel Exit Party.

Set in the near future, this is a tale involving quantum entanglement and parallel worlds, but Mandel being Mandel, it’s much more a tale of the people who live in those worlds than the physics that makes them possible. Our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson gave it a glowing review, saying Exit Party was “as elegant and brilliantly executed as [Mandel’s] fans will have grown to expect”.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

The book starts in Los Angeles in 2031 in the aftermath of civil war, as the curfew lifts and our protagonist Ari, recently released after years in prison, sets out for a party. She and her friends see some mysterious doppelgangers at the party, but the mystery isn’t really resolved until the second half of the book. By then, we’ve followed Ari through the anarchy and chaos of this lawless version of the US, and we discover that another version of the future is also unspooling.

I asked Emily (Mandel, that is) what it was like to write about her imagined near-future US when we chatted. “By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was struggling to stay ahead of the American news cycle,” she told me. “In 2022 [when she started writing], the notion of masked police seizing people off the streets or shooting civilians in broad daylight would have seemed quite fantastical, but those were literally the ICE raids in Minneapolis.”

I adored the novel Mandel is most famous for, Station Eleven, another imagined near-future but this time set in the aftermath of a flu pandemic. I agree with Emily (Wilson, that is) that this latest is just as beautifully and brilliantly written, but I wasn’t quite as compelled by it, at least for the first half of the novel. By the time we got to the second half, the drama and the science fictional elements ramped up and I ended up really enjoying it, but it’s never that great to press a book on a friend with the words “just give it 100 pages…”.

Book club members, chatting on as they read, were equally conflicted. “Just finished Exit Party. Not, IMO, Mandel’s best book,” wrote Tethysnz. “When I finished Sea of Tranquility, I went back and reread it right away to understand all the connections and undercurrents I’d missed. But with Exit Party connections are pretty clear and not all that interesting.”

Alan_P felt similarly to me about the first half – it’s “almost without incident except for the actual odd appearances and disappearances”, he wrote. “The pace does pick up a little in the final quarter of the book, but most of it is a beautifully described description of two very different societies,” he added. “It’s a good book – I don’t think it’s a great book but it is technically very good, and has an interesting ending. But it makes you work to get there and I don’t think that improves it.”

Matthew found Mandel’s writing style “overly careful, which gets in the way. Which isn’t to say she isn’t a very good writer, perhaps she just needs to let her hair down a bit”, while PiriShepherd, conversely, really enjoyed the novel’s opening. “I love the idea that a party is the place where the unintended bridge between universes opens up. A party is disorientating – somewhere you might be a bit drunk – where unexpected or inexplicable things happen – where people show up that you didn’t expect to see,” they wrote. “Where there might be consequences or disastrous events that extend beyond the next morning.”

“There’s such an intriguing start but then the mystery is largely left aside for a long time – possibly too long for the reader’s satisfaction?” said Dee55. “I found the book’s B part much more gripping – and disturbingly close to things that are already happening in some countries.”

Katita2026 found Mandel’s future visions very frightening. “She doesn’t give us a ‘bad world’ and a ‘good world.’ She gives us the two greatest political nightmares of the 21st century,” Katita   wrote, pondering if “the genius (and the terror) of this book lies precisely in this political pessimism”.

“By offering a world torn between absolute chaos and absolute tyranny, isn’t the author diagnosing that modern society has already lost the ability to imagine a future where democracy survives?” Katita asked.

As you can see, book club members really put this thoughtful, thought-provoking novel through the wringer!

Emily St. John Mandel, best known for her prescient flu pandemic novel Station Eleven, joined the New Scientist Book Club to talk about her latest book, the science-fiction novel Exit Party. Emily discussed everything from why she is compelled to write about the aftermath of disaster – this latest book takes place in a near-future US, after a civil war – to how hard it was to keep ahead of the US news cycle as she wrote.

For Aindreas Scholz, there is a contradiction at the heart of environmental photography. Photos of landscapes “can sometimes aestheticise environmental damage while remaining materially distant and separate from it”, he says, while photography itself consumes water and produces waste.

“I do not want to make work about ecological responsibility while pretending that the photographic printing process is somehow outside that problem,” says Scholz.

His latest project tackles this contradiction head on through the medium of cameraless photography. The image above, The Most Beautiful Anthropocene #53, was made while Scholz was at an artist residency in France. Using 19th-century lumen and cyanotype printing techniques, he took already-exposed photographic dark-room paper, water from a nearby pond and plants from a local flower meadow to create the work.

“What you are looking at is the physical trace of plants and environmental conditions acting directly on a photographic material,” says Scholz.

The image is part of an bringing together two of his bodies of work, And So I Watch You From Afar and The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, UK, until 18 January 2027. Part of this year’s , the installation sees Scholz explore how ecologically sustainable cameraless photography can provide a record of environmental change, from plant life to coastal edges, focusing on environments affected by humans.

“Rather than photographing a landscape from a distance, I bring the photographic surface into direct contact with environmental conditions and materials, sunlight, water, seawater, rainwater, plants, salt, soil, residues and atmosphere,” says Scholz.

“That distinction is important to me,” he says. “I am less interested in making a photograph of climate change than in asking whether a photographic printing process can itself be materially affected by the same environmental conditions that the work is trying to address.”

The New Scientist Book Club has been testing its collective brain power in September with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s . Subtitled “particles, poetry and the cosmic dream boogie”, this sees the New Scientist columnist and theoretical physicist set out to explain our universe, from the quantum to the inner workings of black holes.

That’s a lot to get through, but as Chanda writes in her book, it is worth the effort: “We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds.” She went further in an exclusive essay for book club members, challenging us to get to grips with the quantum nature of space-time. “Spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions,” she wrote. “Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever.”

Starting with a careful deconstruction of why we need to think hard about the metaphors we use in science writing to make sure they are helping rather than hindering readers in understanding non-intuitive concepts in science, Chanda goes on to take us through some of the most abstract areas of theoretical physics. It is, as member Dee55 put it, a “wild ride”, in terms of both the physics and the in-depth conversation that members have been having about the book over on our channel.

I really enjoyed this book. I am someone who didn’t manage to finish Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, but who, thanks to Chanda’s friendly, encouraging and (most importantly) clear writing, emerged at the end of this book a little more knowledgeable about physics. I liked how Chanda slipped in multiple references to literature and popular culture to help make her points, as well as how she told us firmly: “This is supposed to be fun, and there is no test at the end.” She reiterated this in our interview: “[Part] of welcoming people into the material is saying, this isn’t something that only… a lone genius can think about. You’re entitled to this as well. This is your universe, too.”

Many book club members were similarly enamoured. “One of the earliest statements in this book which blew me away (there have been many) was ‘Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light[from the beginnings of the universe]for sixty-two years’,” wrote Melissa on Discord. “Just the incomprehensible fact of cosmic light from the unimaginable ancientness of the beginning of the universe—which is just there but people have only found out about it in the space of less than one human lifetime ago.”

Jodie has been “enjoying it a lot, even if it does make my head ache at times!” – I think that’s fair, Jodie! – while Dee55 has also found Chanda’s explanations mind-expanding: “For years I have been making periodic attempts to understand Quantum Stuff and always come away fairly befuddled but also intrigued – and this time feels just a little different, as if I am not exactly grasping something but perhaps catching fleeting glimpses of it (we don’t get far without metaphors, I find).”

“The wonderful gift this book gives us is the opportunity to spend time in practicing feeling unsettled, sometimes even bewildered, as we experience the strangeness of quantum physics,” added Laura Akers. “It’s several hours, in my case over many days, of practicing the acceptance that science and reality are strange, bizarre… rather than simple and reassuring – and it’s really okay.”

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

“I’ve really enjoyed The Edge of Space-time,” wrote DavidCl on Discord. “About half way through I realised what my perspective of reading it was like. It’s like sitting down and spending time with a good friend who is way cleverer and more intelligent than I am while she tries to explain what it is she does, why she does it and what drives her onwards.”

This book is packed with literary allusions, and with Chanda’s strongly expressed political perspectives – not everyone appreciated this. “I am not really enjoying this book, to be honest. I prefer straightforward scientific information and explanations,” wrote Lowenna, while Katita2026 found that Chanda’s politics and her subjective takes intruded on the physics a little too much. “Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is an incredible storyteller. I absolutely love how she brings the cold, intimidating world of astrophysics right down to earth. Explaining cosmic inflation through a TR-808 drum machine, or bringing Missy Elliott and Wu-Tang Clan into a physics book, is just brilliant science communication,” wrote Katita. But “as much as I’m enjoying the read, I find myself struggling when she tries to make the physics fit her politics”.

This was a question picked over with great sensitivity by book club members. “I do agree that some of the connections are bit forced, but I think the author is trying to show not only how physics says that the universe is, but also how she from a particular background visualises that,” wrote Alan_P. “We all bring our own experiences and backgrounds to any field of knowledge and view things through that prism – she’s just giving us her prism. She many times explains the sheer wonder and joy that she experiences as a physicist, and that this is finding out about an objective reality.” DavidCl felt similarly: “The explanations are peppered with her personal viewpoints and politics but that’s ok because her passion and occasionally sweary outbursts are all part of painting a compelling picture.”

All in all, I think this was a (challenging) hit with book club members – on to the next one.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

This is a really good month for everyone who is both a science-fiction fan and a New Scientist reader. Not only do we have a new sci-fi novel due from the magazine’s columnist Annalee Newitz (with a slime mould as its protagonist), but new books from New Scientist Book Club alumni Adam Roberts and Claire North to look forward to. And there’s more: Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife) is returning to her world of causal loops in a sequel to her bestselling 2003 novel, while Becky Chambers is here to bring us some more sci-fi fun. Time to book a few days of holiday to binge through all this…

Fans of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, rejoice: this month, there’s a new novel out from the mighty Becky Chambers, and it sounds great. Set on the planet Fortune, where a poisonous atmosphere alters the nature of life, we follow the adventures of Cora, a pilot who has a dangerous condition thanks to her bond with an alien animal, Colibri. Then Cora, in need of treatment but unwilling to seek it if it means losing her connection to Colibri, meets a botanist, Signy, who might be able to help her.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

I have chortled over Jasper Fforde’s literary detective novels ever since the first, The Eyre Affair, starring Thursday Next. The publication of Dark Reading Matter marks Next’s eighth and final outing, in which she’s up against some Martians who have broken out of their H.G. Wells novel, as well as problematic Reality Field Distortion experiments. The title, by the way, refers not so much to the hypothesised physical phenomenon but to the “realm where deleted books and unrealised literary ideas end up”.

The author of the excellent Ascension turns to an organisation beneath the streets of London for his latest novel – an organisation conducting “strange experiments” that “blur the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death”. Arlo is a private investigator out to find Sophie Banik, who is apparently dead – but who had been digging into those strange experiments, and who might not be as dead as he thought.

We are big fans of Adam Roberts at New Scientist: his novel, Lake of Darkness, was a relatively recent pick for the New Scientist Book Club. This latest sounds very different. It’s a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the monster, “a splendid creature, in almost every respect superior to humanity”, goes on to conquer Europe, and rule the world. It is, says the publisher, “a meditation on the nature of power”, and I can’t wait.

Another new novel from a New Scientist Book Club alum (Claire North’s space opera, Slow Gods, has been a top read this year for members). This time, North is tackling time travel, moving from Cal, who falls in love with a soldier in the French revolution who is fated to die – unless he tweaks history to save him, to Fadimatu, who finds her mummified corpse in a museum in 2018. Honestly, fictional time travel is tricky to get right, but I trust North to handle it wisely and well so this another book I’m really looking forward to.

If there’s another author I trust to handle time travel wisely, it’s this one. Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, has written a sequel to that bestseller, following the life of Alba, the daughter of Claire and Henry. Like her father, Alba is a time traveller, but instead of having one great love like Henry does, she has two: Zach, handsome, beloved, living his life in the normal order; and Oliver, a time traveller from the future with whom her life crosses and circles repeatedly, at different ages. I’ve read the book already, because I will be chatting to Niffenegger about it for New Scientist, and I urge you not to miss it. It’s wildly different from the gentle and romantic air of its predecessor – this is a book tackling big questions: climate change, democracy, protest. I finished it last week and want to discuss it with people, so get reading!

A new novel from New Scientist’s tech columnist? And a wild-sounding one at that? We are spoiled for sure. The book follows the adventures of Gardenpath, who is a slime mould from an ancient civilization as well as a graduate student in biology. Gardenpath wants to discover something “truly novel in the universe” to obtain the highest possible honour in their exams, so travels to a remote and dangerous planet and discovers … a strange multicellular animal living in a city they call Pompeii. Newitz has written about the research they did for this book in a recent column – you can check it out here to see if it tempts you.

This comes to us from the small literary publisher Fitzcarraldo, a press that punches way above its weight in terms of choosing incredible writers – think of literature Nobel winners Annie Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Elfriede Jelinek). The Floating World tells of a billionaire called Morel, who is building a refuge for the super-rich on an island in the Aegean. A struggling journalist is asked to come and work there, but – and I imagine you’ll be as unsurprised as I was by this next plot line – discovers dark currents below the surface of this apparent utopia. I very much enjoyed the last “billionaire builds a refuge that turns out to have major issues” novel I read, Naomi Alderman’s The Future, so I’ll definitely be trying this one.

Just a little alert that this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Ernest Cline’s bestseller is out this month. A recap for those who haven’t read it (or seen the adaptation) yet: set in 2045, it follows Wade Watts, who along with most of humanity spends most of his time jacked into the virtual reality of the OASIS. When OASIS’s creator dies, he leaves behind a series of puzzles, and whoever solves them is set to inherit control of the virtual reality. Wade makes a start – and finds himself up against some deadly rivals.

If you like your fiction tinged with history and horror, then Alma Katsu is for you. I still shudder happily when I remember reading The Hunger, her twist on the story of the Donner party, which brings added terror to an already terrifying real-life tale. This time, she’s applying scary twists to The Picture of Dorian Gray with the tale of Dorothy, who codes an impossibly beautiful deepfake for social media, Isabella. But as Isabella’s fame grows, Dorothy stops being able to tell where she ends and her creation begins.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

If there was a paucity of new science fiction in August, then September more than makes up for it, with everything from a long-awaited piece of speculative fiction from China Miéville to a short story collection paying tribute to the genius of Ursula K. Le Guin, with contributions from names including Ann Leckie and Kelly Link. Then there’s a new near-future novel from Station Eleven author Emily St John Mandel, a fresh sci-fi series from the bestselling Brandon Sanderson (and co-author Janci Patterson) and a strange but intriguing tale from one of my favourite writers, Naomi Alderman.

edited by Jonathan Strahan

This is something I absolutely cannot wait to read: a collection of 15 new short stories, inspired by the work of the one and only Ursula K. Le Guin and intended to honour her amazing legacy. The names contributing are super impressive, including Karen Joy Fowler and Charlie Jane Anders: what a treat.

by China Miéville

China Miéville is one of our great contemporary writers, master of the weird and author of masterpieces including The City and the City and Embassytown (my personal favourite). New book The Rouse comes in two whopping volumes, and its publisher promises it is a “decade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy”. I can’t tell you for sure that it’s science fiction, as I’ve yet to tackle the two doorstopper tomes I’ve been sent, but I can predict it will definitely be weird, and speculative. Michael Moorcock, no less, calls it “completely without parallel”. Exciting times.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

by Garth Nix

In my younger days, I was an avid reader of Garth Nix’s young adult Old Kingdom series, so I’m interested to see what this excellent author’s first venture into sci-fi will be like. It’s a military space opera, set in a universe where interstellar war rages between Earth and Mars – and where for over two centuries, humans have travelled into space on huge sentient mountain ranges known as Massifs. Then the crew of the ship Sassafras starts asking questions about why the Massifs carry humans to the stars – and talking to the powerful avatars piloting the ships.

by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

This is the first in the new Skyward Legacy series from the mighty Sanderson, co-written with Janci Patterson. It’s a complicated set-up: humans have warred against alien oppressors for decades. Now they’re free, and Arturo Mendez, leader of Skyward Flight, is sent on a mission to make contact with a settlement of humans isolated during the long war. But Blightfall, the planet he’s sent to, is more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

by Naomi Alderman

I am such a Naomi Alderman fan. We read her previous novel, The Future, with the New Scientist Book Club, and I loved it. This latest sounds much stranger and more speculative, but I’m here for anything from this author (her recent non-fiction book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, is also a big recommendation from me). Anyway: the plot here is that the novelist Naomi Alderman, grieving the loss of her mother, sets up a wildlife camera in her parents’ garden, and takes the first photo of a new animal, the “mimmoth”. These creatures spread across the world, harmless apparently, but strangely intelligent – what will their eventual impact be?

by Emily St John Mandel

Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, is very good at thoughtful, near-future tales, and here comes another. Set in 2031, this is a world where America is in the middle of a civil war – but where something even stranger might be going on. Ari, newly out of prison, goes to a party in Los Angeles, where she meets someone who looks exactly like her friend, but isn’t… Living in Paris a long time later, Ari is haunted by what happened at the party, and by what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world. I’ve started this one, and it’s living up to its promise so far.

by Ken Liu

This collection of short stories from the award-winning speculative author moves between science fiction and fantasy – from techno-witches battling a world ruled by machines, to a consciousness on a starship watching the cosmos die and be reborn.

by Jo Martin

This new Doctor Who novel sees the Fugitive Doctor and Martha investigating a strange object in the British Museum. Apparently a medieval toy, it refuses to stay in one place, time or identity.

by Hernan Diaz

This novel by the heavyweight literary author Hernan Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, takes place centuries in the future, following the adventures of a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid and sells it on the black market. This pincher, an orphan, goes on to discover an experiment that, if she can power it, could “change the fabric of reality itself”.

by Chloe Benjamin

Laurel is a biologist turned dishwasher at an Antarctic research station. She doesn’t tell anyone in her new life about the tragedy which made her leave her old one – but she becomes convinced that the mysterious Arc that appears across the ice could lead her to a new world where she could turn back the clock. I’m halfway through this one and am loving the biology and the Antarctic side of it. Can’t wait to see how the physics holds up.

by James Islington

This sci-fi thriller is set in a world where the poor die young, and the rich live forever. Assassin Azure is usually hired to kill the richest of people – but then he’s given a job to protect one of them. The publisher promises that this fuses “the dystopian morality of cyberpunk with the explosive action of anime”, which sounds pretty cool.

by Jordan Prosser

Abby, suffering the burden of being in her 30s without having achieved any of her dreams, decides she has a new purpose: becoming the first person on Mars. Luckily for her, a Danish entrepreneur is planning a one-way mission.

by Ai Jiang

Jiang, who also has a story in the Ursula K. Le Guin anthology out this month, sets this piece of “science-fantasy” in a world where the royal advisors are plotting to overthrow emperor Yun. Yun’s sister Xilian escapes to the drowning continent of Opera, a place filled with strange tech and dreams of immortality.

by Adam Simcox

It’s 2026, and time travel is a luxury commodity. So, Rachel, who killed Oliver in a car crash in 1997 when she was 18, goes back to save him – only for the future to change in bad ways that may have something to do with Oliver, with whom she’s now fallen in love…

by Django Wexler

Taj is a scrapper, living in a junkyard and keeping his family alive with the scrap he finds there. His one salvation? A “construct”, or robot, that he built himself, and which he hopes will win big in the construct fighting circuits.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The New Scientist Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July’s read, Claire North’s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller’s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth’s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper – and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn’t: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.

I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I’d never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott – and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction – I couldn’t wait to read it with our book club.

I wasn’t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing – and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter’s essay, how he wrote the novel cold – no initial research, no planning: “It was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.” In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott – spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren “found the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn’t have carried on if it hadn’t been a book club choice”. But ultimately she was glad she did, and “couldn’t put it down towards the end”. “I loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,” she wrote on , describing the novel as “a testament to the triumph of the human spirit”.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

The writing in this book is very distinctive – jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig’s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. “I read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,” wrote warsaw_sun. “There’s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ‘men of action’ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?” wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. “I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book – but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,” he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton’s Juice – another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. “What bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,” he wrote. “As humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t survive a holocaust, but I don’t think empathy is weakness, I don’t think that kindness is naivety, and I don’t want to read any more dystopias.”

For Kelly, The Dog Stars was “not so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story”; for Barbara Howe, it was “as much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so”. “As in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.” Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. “I’ve been meaning to ask other readers here – does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that’s not a known type?”

It’s a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn’t something the book club will need to worry about…

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.