As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.

by Anna Lembke

In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. It’s overwhelming. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change, there is a way out. The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally.

In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued. Watch out for our review on 5 November.

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by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend

Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”.

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by Amy Crawford

For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate. Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land.

“Whether it’s garlic mustard spreading through American forests or brushtail possums allegedly decimating the flightless birds of New Zealand,” Undesirable is a “multi-faceted story”, say its publishers. On top of that, exactly how to hold ourselves to account remains an open question. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”. Crawford, a freelance writer and long-time contributor to Smithsonian magazine, looks set to give us plenty to chew on here.

by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Illustrated by Paula Terán Ospina

Look closely at the list of creators on the cover of this book, aimed at a 5+ age group, about a cloud forest within the Intac valley in northwestern Ecuador, and along with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, you’ll spot a more unusual contributor: Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself. As the publishers (probably correctly) point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. To celebrate that fact – and the anniversary of a court decision recognising Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future – this is apparently “more than a book”, in that by making it, “we are recognising the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work”. When you open Song of the Cedars, the flora, fauna and fungi of Los Cedros Cloud Forest jump off the page in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as you wish. All the royalties from sales of the book, the publishers say, will be used to support the protection of Los Cedros. Fighting talk!

by Angèle Christin

What’s it like to make your money as a content creator? Angèle Christin, a digital studies scholar at Stanford University, California, takes us inside that world in her new book. The things these influencers post on social media range “from dance routines to political commentary, makeup tutorials to carpentry DIY”. She looks far and wide to explore what she calls their “golden dreams of passion, autonomy, and monetary returns”. No spoiler alert needed: the outcome for these creators and their followers shows how this digital work tends to fuel precarity, inequality – and much more. Christin’s bottom line: it’s more than time to rethink the economic structure of social media.

by Ashley Ward

Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than human blood, yet it has been central to our evolution – the  “amniotic fluid of life itself”, as the publishers of Saltwater: A natural history of the sea describe it. In this book, author Ashley Ward, a marine biologist, will bring readers face to face with the deep secrets of marine life. There will be jousting rival humpback whales, and claustrophobic journeys in a submersible to 600 metres deep to see an aurora of bioluminescence. We will also apparently encounter the complex seabird cities that develop along coasts, where auk fathers train their chicks to become skilful divers. And there’s mention of the ethereal song of a pod of belugas carrying across a fjord in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ward could hardly be better placed to deliver all this and more, given his background as a biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as head of its Animal Behaviour Lab.

by Baland Jalal

A sneak peek at the introduction of Baland Jalal’s The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep shows what we can expect from a researcher often billed as the leading expert in sleep paralysis. “One morning in my teenage years, I awoke gripped by terror… In horror, I realized a demon was on my bed. It grabbed my legs and began tossing them up and down in the air, while crushing my chest and squeezing my neck. While being strangled to death, I could somehow telepathically read the mind of the monster. It had one – and only one agenda: to destroy me.”

This terrifying no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became the territory of his research for the next decade or so. There are plenty more great stories in this highly accessible book, including one featuring Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears as a sleep-paralysis ghost to Jalal – and leads him off on a new train of thought about exactly how the ghostly figures people see in sleep paralysis are formed. The borderlands of sleep turn out to be a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. And watch out for our interview with Jalal, in our 14 November issue.

by Erica McAlister, illustrated by Natalie McIntyre

This is the latest in the Chicago University Press’s Day series. Earlier in the year, we enjoyed marine biologist Helen Scales’s Shell Day and behavioural ecologist Marty Crump’s Snake Day. Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives follows the same pattern, acting as an hourly guide, this time following insects as they hunt for food, mates or just plain safety from predators. Author Erica McAlister is a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. She starts at midnight in Africa with a female mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, which is out for the blood of any unwitting sleeper and may unintentionally transfer malaria. Who knew, by the way, that the males have no taste for blood?

By 7am, we’ve moved on to the Arctic circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, is basking within the flowers of the Arctic poppy. She can also keep warm simply by vibrating. Throughout the day, we meet the yellow-legged saddle casemaker (Agapetus ochripes), the blue-winged helicopter (Megaloprepus caerulatus), the Peruvian shield mantis (Choeradodis rhombicollis), the ferocious water bug (Abedus herberti) and Grote’s bertholdia (Bertholdia trigona). In its closing pages, Insect Day delivers a final punch: we’ve just toured insects, but there may be as many as 30 million more yet to describe.

by Richard Dawkins

A new Richard Dawkins book is always a bit of a treat, and 42 Tales from Life: A modern bestiary looks set to be no exception. This is a collection of animal tales, explaining how they evolved into the extraordinary, intriguing and often beautiful forms they have, with a colourful backdrop of illustrations by 19^th-century naturalist, morphologist and artist Ernst Haeckel. According to the publisher, Dawkins reveals “the fundamental truths behind even the most unfathomable animal behaviours”, such as the galloping of fish, the shape of the rhinoceros’ horn, the surprising similarities between horses and lizards, and why hummingbirds glow so brilliantly. The book starts with “The Cephalopod’s Tale” and “The Hummingbird’s Tale”, ending with “The Bat’s Tale” and “The Frog’s Tale”. They are accompanied by Haeckel’s art, whose depictions of plants, sea creatures and other animals turn out to have fascinated Dawkins all his life.

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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?

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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.

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We went out by a path that led through a big clump of flickering starflowers and then into Batwing. A whole bunch of Batwing grownups and newhairs were in their clearing banging away at a giant redlantern tree with their blackglass axes, working in the pink light of its flowers.

We walked round the edge of their clearing to Family Fence, dragged away the branches at the opening, and went out into open forest. No more shelters and campfires ahead of us now: nothing but shining trees.

Hmmmph, hmmmph, hmmmph, went the trees. Hmmmmmm, went forest. We walked for a waking under the light of the treelanterns, slashing down whatever birds and bats and fruit we could get as we went along, and finally stopped to rest at the big lump of rock called Lava Blob. Old Roger handed us out a gritty little seedcake each, made of ground-up starflower seeds, so we could have something in our bellies, and then we settled down with our backs against the rock, so we didn’t have to worry about leopards sneaking up behind us. There were lots of yellowlantern trees round there, which we didn’t get so much back in Family, and also yellow animals called hoppers that came bouncing out of forest on their back legs and wrung their four hands together while they looked at us with their big flat eyes and went Peep peep peep. But hoppers were no good to eat and their skins were no use either, so we just chucked stones at them to make them go away and let us sleep in peace.

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When we woke up, Starry Swirl was still bright bright in sky. We ate a bit of dry cake and off we went again, under redlanterns and whitelanterns and spiketrees, with flutterbyes darting and glittering all round us and bats chasing the flutterbyes and trees going hmmph, hmmph, hmmph like always, until it all blurred together into that hmmmmmmmmm that was the background of our lives.

After a few miles we came to a small pool full of shiny wavyweed and all us newhairs took off our wraps and dived into the warm water for crabfish and oysters to eat. All the boys watched Tina Spiketree diving in, and they all thought how graceful she was with her long legs, and how smooth her skin was, and how much they wanted to slip with her. But when she came up she swam straight to me, and gave me a dying oyster with the bright pink light still shining out of it.

“You know what they say about oysters, don’t you, John?” she said.

Tom’s neck, she was pretty pretty, the prettiest in whole of Family. And she knew it well well.

In another couple of hours we reached the place where Peckham Hills began to rise up out of forest of Circle Valley, and started to climb up through them by Monkey Path, which isn’t really a path, but just a way we know through the trees. The trees carried on up the slopes – redlanterns and whitelanterns and scalding hot spiketrees – and there were flickering starflowers growing beneath them, just like in the rest of forest. Streams ran through them down from darkness and ice, heading towards Greatpool, still cold cold but already bright and glittering with life. And small creatures called monkeys jumped from tree to tree. They had little thin bodies, and six long arms with a hand on the end of each. Handsome Fox shot one with an arrow, and was pleased pleased with himself, even though they were all bones and sinews and only give a mouthful of meat, because they move fast and are hard to aim at with those big blotches on their skin that flash on and off as they swing among the lanternflowers.

As we climbed up it got colder. The starflowers disappeared, the trees became smaller, and there weren’t any monkeys any more, only the occasional smallbuck darting away through the trees. And then the trees stopped and we came out from the top edge of forest onto bare ground. Pretty soon, when we’d climbed above the height of those last few little trees, we could see whole of Circle Valley spread out below us – whole of Eden that we knew, with thousands and thousands of lanterns shining all the way from where we stood on Peckham Hills to Dark shadow of Blue Mountains away in the distance, and from Rockies over the left, with the red glow of Mount Snellins smouldering in middle, to the deep darkness over to our right that was Alps. And above all of it the huge spiral of Starry Swirl was still shining down.

Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there – you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest – and it was cold cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn’t see us.

“We’ve made our point now, haven’t we, John?” Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they’d been skinned. “Shall we go back down to rest of them now?”

My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me – his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born – and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he’d do just about anything I asked.

“No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“To the silence, you idiot.”

There was no hmmmmmmmm of forest, no hmmph, hmmph, hmmph of pumping trees, no starbirds going hoom, hoom, hoom in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no whoosh of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was dark dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.

We could barely make out each other’s faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don’t have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.

“When people talk about Earth,” I said to Gerry, “they always talk about that huge bright star, don’t they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn’t it, and half the time it wasn’t facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.”

“What are you talking about, John?” Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. “And why can’t we go back down again if you just want to talk?”

“I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn’t they? I’m just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it’s what they would have called Night.”

© Chris Beckett

This is an extract from by Chris Beckett (Corvus), the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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I came up with the idea of the planet Eden in 1992 for a short story called . At that time, I had no idea that there really were such things as planets without suns, but it seemed likely to me. It also seemed possible to me that life might arise on such a planet, since, even here on Earth, whole ecologies thrive without sunlight around thermal vents in the deep ocean. Life on Earth may have even have begun in such places.

Quite often, if something seems likely, it does indeed happen. (In another , I predicted that a US president would one day seek to take over Greenland and Canada.) Having written that story, I learned that free-floating planets did indeed exist. Being dark, they’re hard to spot, but a number have been detected using gravitational lensing. And I gather it’s not particularly controversial to think that some of them might support life (though not quite in the form that I chose to imagine it – but I’ll come to that).

When creating a world for a story, I don’t usually seek to make the whole thing scientifically accurate, but I try to make it hang together in a way that feels coherent. I didn’t build Eden by doing a lot of research, but I did put a lot of thought into how it might all work. This wasn’t so I could put it all in the book – no one in Eden knows this stuff and the story is told entirely by its characters! – but so that I had something to guide my imagination and make my invented world feel coherent.

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My idea was that Eden had once been covered in ice, but its hot core meant there was liquid water below the ice in which life could come into existence. One particular kind of life form appeared, somewhat resembling tree roots, that was able to obtain additional energy by pushing deep down into hot rocks, pumping its sap through them to heat it, and then pumping it back up again, like a geothermal power station. One of the ways these organisms used this heat was to push upwards into the planet’s shell of ice, melting parts of it, feeding on the nutrients it contained, and creating more living space – and they carried on doing so until much of the surface of Eden was ice-free, and had an atmosphere that would turn out to be breathable by humans.

Millions of years later, this thawed-out surface, now populated by a multitude of different life forms, became the stage on which my drama could unfold: first that early story, then another story and then the novel Dark Eden and its two sequels. In Dark Eden, a tiny community of humans, descended from stranded visitors from Earth, eke out a living using tools made of stone and wood, and try to make sense of their life as exiles from a sunlit world that lives on in folk memory, but which they can only very shakily imagine. (In the biblical story of Eden, humans are exiled from Eden – my Eden is the place of exile.) Their stories tell them that Earth people could fly through the air, that there was a thing there called leckytrickity, that Earth animals had eyes that you could look into and see their minds looking back out at you, not like the flat, blank eyes of Eden creatures.

On the surface of Eden, those root-like life forms put up structures that Eden’s humans call “trees”. A whole ecosystem has evolved around them, including “starflowers” that parasitise their roots. (These, as it happens, turn out to be a rich source of Vitamin D. Phew! What a stroke of luck!) And there are many animals – or quote-unquote “animals”, strictly speaking, since they’re not related to the animal kingdom of Earth. There’s no sunlight in Eden (and therefore no alternation of day and night) but, like organisms that live in the ocean depths of Earth, Eden’s life has developed bioluminescence. The “trees” have luminous “lanternflowers”; the starflowers glitter. Imagine a leafless forest on a moonless night, lit by thousands of Chinese lanterns. Then add in twinkling fairy lights at ground level. With your eyes half-closed, the forests of Eden would look something like that.

Just as life on Earth depends on plants that turn sunlight into chemical energy, so the life of Eden depends on geothermal trees. They bring heat to the surface to power their metabolisms, they keep the air warm and, if you live on Eden, the steady “Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph” of their constant pumping is the background of your waking and sleeping life, merging in the distance to a steady hum. All the trees are hot, and some of them are so hot that you’d burn yourself if you touched their trunks. If you cut down a tree, you have to watch out for the spurt of scalding liquid that bursts out.

When I read stories set on alien planets, I’m sometimes disappointed in the “animals” (I’ll drop the inverted commas now). Writers often seem to dream up a motley collection of bizarre creatures without much regard for how they might actually survive or how they are related to one another. I tried to design my animals on evolutionary principles, giving thought to how they were adapted to their environment, the role they played in the ecosystem and how they might plausibly have evolved. Animals on Earth fall into a large but finite number of basic body plans. For example, monkeys, cows, crocodiles and seagulls all have four limbs and, though some descendants of quadrupeds have lost their limbs (snakes, whales), there are no examples of quadrupeds developing extra ones. In the same way, large animals on Eden all have a six-limbed body plan. There are other animals that don’t conform to this, just as there are arthropods, et cetera on Earth, but the large animals are all based on this six-limbed pattern.

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I’ve already mentioned how different Eden eyes are from the eyes of terrestrial animals. They have evolved alongside the evolution of bioluminescence, rather in the way that colourful flowers and nectar-eating insects have evolved alongside one another on Earth. Eden trees use luminous lanternflowers to attract the creatures that help them reproduce, just as flowering plants on Earth use colour and scent.

I gave a lot of thought to the biology of Eden, but I have to admit that, in strictly scientific terms, my imaginary world isn’t entirely viable. Free-floating planets with warm cores? Yes! Not just possible, but a certainty! But free-floating planets with warm surfaces? Sadly no. More than one astronomer has told me they just couldn’t happen. No matter how many radiator-like trees there might be, I’ve been told, it still wouldn’t be enough to maintain liquid water or a warm atmosphere.

Let’s call it “fiction science”, science made up for a story, which works in some places and in others allows itself poetic licence. Almost all science fiction uses fiction science and Dark Eden contains several other examples. I took some liberties with human genetics, for instance. And then there’s the question of how people got to Eden in the first place. (It’s many light years away from Earth.) Like the writers of pretty much all stories set in interstellar space, I pretended that faster-than-light travel was possible and went with that, although it most probably isn’t.

(I think that’s OK. It allows us to visit, in our imaginations at least, parts of the universe we could never otherwise hope to reach.)

What I wanted from Eden was for it to be a world that hung together well enough to be a satisfying setting for my story, one in which I and my readers could immerse ourselves. The story is about exile and loss. The perpetually dark sky, and the animals with their blank unreadable eyes, serve as reminders that Eden folk are exiles. At the beginning of Dark Eden, every human being in Eden lives around a circle of stones that marks the place where their ancestors first touched down. And this circle represents to Eden folk the hope for return and redemption, which is central to their whole world view.

The fact that I took some liberties when constructing Eden doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting also to write about a real free-floating planet. And, as it happens, I’ve had the opportunity recently to do just that. In a project initiated by Comma Press, I was one of a number of writers who paired up with astronomers from Jodrell Bank to write stories for an anthology called . My astronomer collaborator, Ida Janiak, helped me build a scenario in which a free-floating planet called Lupus arrives in the solar system. Apart from being roughly Earth-sized, Lupus isn’t much like Eden, but somewhat like the Jovian moon Europa. Its surface is covered by a kilometres-thick shell of ice in no danger of melting, with a liquid ocean beneath and… well, read the story! The anthology will appear in November but there will also be a condensed version of mine and Ida’s story in the Christmas edition of New Scientist, out online on 16 December and in print on the 19th.

I hope, meanwhile, you will immerse yourself in the luminous forests of Eden with their pulsing trees. Possible or not, they are very beautiful, if I say so myself.

by Chris Beckett (Corvus) is the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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Steven D. Allison
Harvard University Press Out 3 November (US) and 27 November (UK)

It’s 2030. Heatwaves are scorching parts of the globe, while elsewhere, hailstorms or tsunamis ravage homes, cities and farmlands. Wildfires rage across continents, Arctic ice sheets dwindle, volcanoes spew left and right, and Earth cracks open along multiple fault lines. Death tolls – human, animal and plant – soar.

Amid this doom and gloom, a superhero arises from scientific labs, ready to fight our – human-made – enemy, climate change. The tiny figure can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere, or bury it underground or at the bottom of the sea, for near-eternity. It can fuel jet engines with clean energy, replace chemical fertilisers, save coral reefs from bleaching and disease, and re-engineer trees, food crops and other plants to survive, even thrive, in droughts.

This scenario is at the heart of Steven Allison’s book, . Allison, professor of ecology at the University of California, Irvine, maintains a balance between realism and optimism as he introduces his as yet unsung hero, the microbe.

These resilient, highly adaptable and primarily single-celled organisms could, he insists, play a far larger role in controlling or maybe even reversing climate change than we imagine. Many of these bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses are currently dismissed as insignificant or even targeted as pathogens to be wiped out. But the microbes he and others envision using against climate change are non-toxic and non-pathogenic.

The tiny superhero can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere or bury it underground for near-eternity

They are also, unlike other proposals – installing solar mirrors in space or sucking carbon dioxide out of the air – cheap, abundant, easy to produce and totally organic. For Allison, they “offer a rare glimmer of hope”.

His book explores how microbes live and interact with each other, and with “newcomers” such as humans. He focuses especially on how scientists are uncovering the mysteries of microbes and glimpsing the extraordinary properties they could offer if we only understood enough to stop fighting them.

Allison is a captivating storyteller, taking us on colourful journeys to different regions and times. Along the way, we meet fascinating characters, like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who ran his own draper’s shop in the Dutch city of Delft during the 17th century, and discovered bacteria by looking at his dental plaque using microscopes and lenses he had custom-built.

Microbes also appear as characters in their own right. We encounter bacteria-eating viruses engaged in an “insidious lifestyle” known as lysogeny inside their hosts, and zooplankton, which, like cattle, graze – and “poop a lot”.

He ensures we stay focused as we navigate complex concepts and vocabulary, like “phycoerythrins”, light-harvesting and naturally fluorescent proteins in certain cyanobacteria. We also get better acquainted with biofilms – layers of slime made of carbohydrates, proteins and other sticky biomolecules. Unlike the ones we know and hate – dental plaque and toilet bowl rings – these biofilms stop important microbes from being swept away in moving water by holding on to water like a sponge. Those microbes are also protected from desiccation, while predators, such as animals or viruses in soil, find it hard to get at prey inside a biofilm. Inside, microbes can gain the carbon and nutrients they need to grow.

In passing, Allison provides us with what can seem like cool facts to use at dinner parties. But they are offered in service of the big picture. Did you know that Sequoia trees can live a thousand years or that their bark is fire-resistant? That the annual per capita energy usage in the US is 76,300 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the energy in 2300 gallons of petrol? Or that there are nearly 3 billion billion billion oxygen-producing Prochlorococcus cyanobacteria floating around the ocean, thousands more than the stars in the known universe?

One way or another, the core message of The Age of Microbes is delivered: we can get microbes right or we can get them wrong. They are incredibly good at taking carbon in – and at letting it out again. The trick is to get them to swallow carbon and harbour it for thousands of years. That is exactly what they already do when their remains are preserved in the ground or at the bottom of the ocean as “microbial mummies”, forming clumps called necromass.

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Enter the other superheroes in Allison’s book: the researchers and bioengineers studying microbes. There is a refreshing amount of overdue credit given to women scientists. What we now call the greenhouse effect was discovered by Eunice Newton Foote, who published a paper on it in 1856. A century or so later, biologist Mary Mandels pioneered cellulosic ethanol using fungal enzymes. If we ever fly on jets powered by carbon-neutral fuel, Allison says, “you’ll have microbes and Mary Mandels to thank”. He also pays due debt to the Earth wisdom of Indigenous peoples, including the Pacific Northwest Karuk, who understand the importance of mushroom networks.

Today’s labs are investigating the genes behind necromass, hoping to selectively breed for them or to produce “designer microbes”. Others study how to help plants resist climate change. Still others are slogging through complex risk-benefit analyses of commercial products touting microbial benefits. And there is key work on improving soil, depleted or destroyed by millennia of agriculture, using microbial “inoculants”.

We also have some “long-shot” solutions for climate adaptation, especially when it comes to protecting coral reefs, Allison tells me later in an email. There are scary forecasts about losing most of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this century, so “probiotic” microbes that boost heat tolerance and reduce bleaching could save reefs that millions depend on.

Overall, The Age of Microbes is a must-read as climate change bites deeper. Let’s hope that microbes do indeed prove to be an excellent addition to our armoury.

Three more great reads about biology’s frontiers

by Rob Dunn

Rob Dunn explores the biology of homes, from moths in cupboards to thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi and plants under our noses. Kill them in the name of “cleanliness” at our peril.

by Michael Grunwald

We might be making things worse by following bad science (and politics) in the fight to feed (maybe) 10 billion people by 2050. Michael Grunwald offers an intriguing narrative.

by Karen G. Lloyd

For more great storytelling, check out microbial biogeochemist Karen Lloyd’s journey to Earth’s deep biosphere. Its “alien” life forms could make us rethink how life is supposed to work.

Christa Lesté-Lasserre is a science journalist specialising in animal health and behaviour

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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”.

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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.