During the 21st Century, we’ve seen the genre of science fiction expand and evolve in exciting new ways. Authors are pushing boundaries, blending genres, revisiting classic themes with fresh eyes and perspectives. There’s so much to be excited about when it comes to modern sci-fi novels.
Essential Modern Sci-fi Novels
Whether you’re an aficionado of classic science fiction and want to know what modern authors are all about, or you are new to the genre and want to start with the contemporary and work backwards, here’s what you need to be reading.
These authors from around the world are redefining the genre and writing some of the best modern sci-fi novels you can read right now.
Disclaimer: For a book to make this list of modern sci-fi novels, it has to have been published this century.
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How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
It’s not a stretch to call How High We Go in the Dark the next step in science fiction. This is one of the best modern sci-fi novels you’ll ever read; a bold new approach to the genre of science fiction.
Reminiscent of the narratives and themes found in the works of Emily St. John Mandel, with a sprinkling of Black Mirror, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel is essential reading.
We begin with a scientist whose daughter, also a scientist, has recently and tragically died while on an expedition to the Batagaika Crater in Siberia. Cliff heads to Siberia to continue his daughter’s work, with the support of her colleagues.
The work involves investigating the melting permafrost to see if any potentially long-frozen diseases might be uncovered and spread across the world. This is a very real issue that scientists fear, and that is part of what makes How High We Go in the Dark so compelling and chilling.
And of course, a virus is uncovered and it does spread. From here, we follow a host of different first-person narratives in a world where infected children have their organs slowly mutated until they fail completely. Multiple sci-fi themes and tropes are explored in new ways here, including the question of human intelligence when a pig that was being used to grow human organs develops advanced intelligence and even telepathic speech.
These disparate themes and narratives all work together so beautifully, like an orchestra of science fiction concepts. It’s beautiful and makes for a very addictive read.
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is prolific, having written multiple sci-fi epics, each of which has further cemented him as a modern giant of the genre. Alien Clay might be his finest work; a novel that doesn’t just blend politics with scientific discovery—it stitches them together as inseparable themes and plot elements, all while being set on a strange, deadly, and exciting alien world.
Set some time in humanity’s future, Alien Clay presents an Earth ruled by a tyrannical government known as the Mandate, something which uses the veneer of science to structure society into neatly-organised and easily-controlled binaries. Our scientist protagonist, Daghdev, has been captured as an academic dissident and shipped off to a planet nicknamed Kiln. The prison labour force there are charged with uncovering the secrets of this world.
Kiln is littered with abandoned alien structures which must surely have been built by intelligent hands; they are marked with some kind of language as well. But the people who built them are gone, and they left no trace. Discovering the truth of this world is only half the battle for Daghdev; the other is breaking free of his shackles.
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu
As things stand right now, Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds feels like the defining sci-fi novel of the decade. This is a grand, ambitious, considered, philosophical masterpiece of political science fiction, and one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.
Taking place in 2201, Vagabonds is set on Mars and focuses on the tensions between Mars and Earth. Similar to the timeline of the early USA, Mars was colonised (though unlike the US, it wasn’t already lived on and therefore nothing was stolen).
After its colonisation, Mars was dependent on Earth for supplies, but eventually wanted to strike out on its own and a war for independence ensued. After the war, Earth resembles the greatest extremes of capitalism and Mars is something of a communist utopia.
Forty years after the war, our protagonist, Luoying, is a young Martian woman who has returned to Mars after years of living and studying on Earth as part of the Mercury Group (a batch of young people sent over to learn and improve interplanetary relations).
The big question posed by Vagabonds concerns the meaning of freedom. Each planet views the inhabitants of the other with pity, seeing the other as less free. Terrans are free to pursue different jobs, move cities and countries, and spend their money how they please. Martians are free from the stresses of money, poverty, corporate pressure, unemployment, and unfulfillment.
For their unique freedoms, both planets have their own drawbacks and restrictions. Feeling like she belongs to both cultures, Luoying is seeking answers to the question of what freedom really looks like.
Beyond all of this is the world-building. Hao Jingfang provides us with such a detailed and exciting version of Mars, mechanically, politically, and economically. It’s dense but endlessly fascinating. While it is a long and slow book, Vagabonds is one to get lost in. A genius work of Chinese sci-fi and one of the best modern sci-fi novels.
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In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Written by Scottish author Martin MacInnes, In Ascension is a literary sci-fi epic that has the potential to change the way you think and feel about the world around you, about what we are, where we came from, and where we might go.
Set in the present day, In Ascension follows a Dutch biologist named Leigh, who grew up in Rotterdam and is captivated by sea life. In the novel’s first part, Leigh joins an expedition to the north Atlantic ocean, to explore a deep sea vent that might tunnel deeper than the Mariana Trench, and therefore house life never seen before.
The life in this vent, untouched for billions of years, would be like a time capsule, taking us back to the earliest forms of life on this planet. What Leigh discovers in the vent takes her to the Mojave Desert, to a job working with a NASA-like space agency that is using a newly-discovered form of fuel to send people to the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.
The questions that In Ascension poses, and the incredibly discoveries made, ask the reader to deeply consider that old cliche: we are all made of star stuff.
In Ascension is a modern sci-fi novel that takes us from the most inaccessible parts of the deepest darkest ocean to the furthest point in our solar system. And, as we explore these places old and new, big and small, we ask ourselves what we are, where we came from, where we will go, and how it is ultimately all the same. We are all star stuff.
Buy a copy of In Ascension here!
The Hierarchies by Ros Anderson
It might be impossible to count the number of sci-fi stories that explore the themes of consciousness, AI, and machine learning. These themes have been made famous by writers like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Becky Chambers, and so many more.
But here, with The Hierarchies, Ros Anderson has managed to do something fresh and new on this well-trodden ground, while also taking a bold, modern approach to feminist writing. Sylv.ie is a sex robot. She exists to please the man who owns her. Sylv.ie’s owner is a married man whose wife is pregnant, and she gives birth soon after the novel begins.
Sylv.ie must stay upstairs, sit idle, browse the internet (Ether), and wait for her husband to come to her with his needs — be they sexual or social.
Sylv.ie’s moral code is governed by a short list of “hierarchies”, much like Asimov’s laws of robotics, and she is able to learn and develop by plugging herself into the internet.
Soon enough, however, Silv.ie wakes up in hospital for a “routine” check. She gets a nice new vagina, a software update, and upon returning home, she realises that a large section of her memory is missing. When she finds a coded diary from her past self, a self she no longer remembers, she learns that she has already attempted to escape once, and she must do again.
The Hierarchies is a very nuanced and captivating exploration of consciousness, learning, personal growth, freedom, and purpose. It tackles themes that sci-fi has been tackling since its inception but in bold new ways.
One fresh and fascinating aspect of the novel is the inclusion of an angry group of “bio women” who protest the existence of female sex robots. These women are allegorical of conservative bigots who look down their noses at transgender women and sex workers, and their inclusion makes this one of the most bold and dynamic modern sci-fi books you’ll ever read.
Appleseed by Matt Bell
The phenomenal Appleseed is a slow-burn eco-novel spanning multiple timelines and genres, and one of the most revolutionary modern sci-fi novels ever written. Matt Bell expertly blends folklore with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic themes with an ending that ties three disparate narratives together in ways that you simply can’t predict.
We spend the majority of our time as readers in eighteenth-century Ohio, as two brothers follow the path of the legendary Johnny Appleseed, planting apple orchards across the US. As the brothers pass through settlements and forests teeming with myth, their bond is tested over and over.
The second narrative is set fifty years from our present time, in the second half of the 21st Century, when climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power.
You follow one of the company’s original founders as he returns to the headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build. The final narrative is set thousand years in the future, when North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier.
You follow him as he sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilisation. There are few novels as imaginative and beautifully plotted as Appleseed, a novel of important ideas that need to be paid attention to.
This is one of the best sci-fi novels on the shelves, especially for fans of the eco-novel subgenre.
To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
To Be Taught If Fortunate is an original sci-fi novella by Becky Chambers. While her celebrated Wayfarer series is a space opera, this is a harder, quieter, more serious story.
This is one of the best modern sci-fi novels; set in a future where a new public space program has been kickstarted by the funding of ordinary people, with a specific view to exploring and discovering and expanding human understanding of the cosmos.
A crew of four people has been sent to a faraway solar system, in order to examine the planets and moons that are believed to harbour life.
To Be Taught If Fortunate is another novel that flexes the muscles of Becky Chambers’ imagination. She repeatedly considers what might, reasonably, be found on certain worlds with certain climates.
This is not about imagined civilisations but about biodiversity and small discoveries, about the beauty of life and the magic of exploration. This is a book that celebrates science and what it can achieve. Easily one of the most impactful and comforting little sci-fi books by women that you’re likely to read in your life.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation is the first in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and this modern sci-fi novel was also adapted into a film by Alex Garland, director of Ex Machina.
While it is the first of a trilogy, Annihilation also works perfectly as a stand-alone novel, and it is also smartly short. A novel as strange and surreal as this one not outstaying its welcome is a very savvy decision.
Annihilation is set entirely within the limits of “Area X”, an abandoned and marshy part of US coastline which was officially designated a place of ecological disaster.
Our protagonist is a nameless biologist who is part of the twelfth expedition into Area X; the purpose of these expeditions is the explore the strange area and learn as much as possible about what it is and what caused it. Most expeditions end with disaster: insanity, disease, tragedy. And as our protagonist ventures deeper in, stranger things emerge.
The strangest being a tower/tunnel which burrows into the Earth. There is a staircase inside and the walls are lined with biblical-sounding gibberish made out of moss, flowers, and other living stuff. The thing that wrote this gibberish is a possibly extraterrestrial humanoid creature dubbed the Crawler.
Annihilation is a sci-fi eco novel of sorts that explores the concept of ecological change and adaptation in the face of difficulty and things beyond our understanding.
Lovecraftian, feverishly strange, but also beautiful in a way that only the best sci-fi can be, Annihilation is one of the most addictive modern sci-fi novels ever written.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel took the world by storm with the publication of her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, a novel which focusses on the preservation of human art and culture rather than the survival of people themselves. With Sea of Tranquility, she has written a phenomenal piece of time travel science fiction which surpasses even Station Eleven, in this writer’s opinion.
Cleverly tied to her literary thriller The Glass Hotel with recurring events and characters from that novel, this is a book that unfurls gradually and strangely, creating a kind of symmetry with itself by the final page.
We begin in 1912, with an English nobleman exiled to the rural wilds of western Canada by his family. Then we move to the modern day, with characters from The Glass Hotel revealing what almost seems like a glitch in the world.
Next is the life of an author who grew up on a moon colony and is now doing a global book tour in 2203, just as a pandemic is about to sweep the planet. Finally, at the book’s halfway point, we meet our true protagonist: a man named Gaspery, whose sister works for a time travel agency.
All of these lives become stitched together as the novel progresses, in ways that will blow your mind over and over again. The plotting of this novel is beaten only by its incredibly revelations. Sea of Tranquility is a true masterpiece, and one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.
Buy a copy of Sea of Tranquility here!
The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey
Before he turned to novels, M.R. Carey was a legend of the comic book world, writing under the name Mike Carey. His comic book masterpieces Lucifer and The Unwritten were celebrated across the medium.
The Girl With All The Gifts was Carey’s first foray into prose, and what a breakout hit it was. Blending science fiction and horror in a post-apocalyptic world, this novel is a dazzling exploration of human connection.
Our protagonist, Melanie, lives in a cell. Every day, she is strapped into a wheelchair and wheeled into a classroom full of other young children where they learn subjects like maths and English, like in any other school. Melanie loves one teacher in particular, and hates the military sergeant who treats her with fear and disdain.
Soon enough, we learn that the world outside this military base is infested with zombie-like things that have been infected with the fungal cordyceps (just like in The Last of Us).
Melanie and the other children are infected with the fungus, and yet they remain calm and lucid and intelligent. That is, unless they are given the chance to taste human flesh, in which case they become feral and dangerous. Sergeant Parks and the scientists at the base believe that Melanie is dead, and that what they are talking to each day is the fungus talking through her body. She is simply a test subject.
Beginning in a cramped prison cell and eventually opening up into a dangerous trek across the southeast of England, The Girl With All The Gifts is a frantic page-turner and one of the finest modern sci-fi books around.
Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey
Infinity Gate, the first in a duology by M.R. Carey (author of The Girl With All The Gifts, above), is a sweeping science fiction epic that takes readers across an infinite multiverse. Decades from now, professor Hadiz Tambuwal stumbles across a way to Step between dimensions, granting her access to alternate Earths.
The Earth that she leaves behind, our Earth, has been ravaged by climate change and capitalism to the point of collapse. What she finds — or, more accurately, what finds her — is a political alliance of a millions Earths known as the Pandominion.
Our Earth is rare, it turns out; one which never learned to Step. The million Earths that did learn this science formed a union of worlds, but war is coming. Matching the Pandominion in terms of strength and size is a similar network of parallel Earths on which all life is mechanical, rather than biological, and these two factions do not understand one another.
Infinity Gate is a modern sci-fi epic that takes readers on a journey across many different Earths: some where no life exists at all, others where life was wiped out hundreds of years ago.
Many Pandominion worlds are almost entirely similar to ours; others saw herbivores and carnivores, rather than omnivorous apes, grow and evolve to become the dominant species. The scale of this multiversal novel is unparalleled, making Infinity Gate one of the most exciting modern sci-fi novels on the shelves.
Buy a copy of Infinity Gate here!
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This is How You Lose the Time War is a stellar short sci-fi novel, co-written by two celebrated and award-winning science fiction authors. Primarily, this is a love story. Our protagonists, Red and Blue, are accomplished agents of rival factions which are fighting for control of time itself.
While roaming the aftermath of a battlefield, Red finds a letter left by Blue; the letter taunts and flirts and teases Red, and also reveals that Blue is becoming disenchanted by this endless war. From here we move between Red and Blue’s perspectives, and those perspectives are divided by letters sent back and forth between the two.
As they move through strands of time that move back and forth through possible pasts and futures, each finds a letter left by the other, and these letters steadily take on a different tone.
From flirtatious taunts to passionate declarations of love, the letters steadily spell out the intense addiction that these two opposing women have developed for one another.
The world-building is also thrilling. Larger-than-life concepts involving time manipulation and riding the threads of time, taking us from Shakespeare’s London to mecha wars on distant planets. This is a wildly exciting science fiction novel that shows us how, no matter the scale of the world, no matter the advancements in technology, love still conquers all.
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
The first in an epic sci-fi series by genre titan John Scalzi, Old Man’s War is set in a future in which humanity has colonised much of the galaxy, but that has put us in the crosshairs of many other races vying for ownership of the stars. On Earth, people know little about what the spacefaring Colonial Defence Force gets up to, but when they hit 75 years old, American citizens are allowed to apply for the military and start a whole new life.
They don’t know how, but those who enlist assume that their age will somehow be reversed. With few years left to live, many prefer to spend a second life fighting an intergalactic war than continuing to deteriorate. John Perry has just turned seventy-five. He and his wife agreed to enlist together, but she died of a sudden stroke several years ago. And before he knows it, Perry is whisked off to the stars, and to an unknowable future.
Old Man’s War is a fast and vibrant slice of modern sci-fi, full of wit and humour, as well as plenty of heart and soul. Its version of the future is a smart and strange one, and its story is urged forward by forged friendships and plenty of twists and turns. Scalzi is a mastermind of great science fiction, and Old Man’s War is the best proof of that.
Buy a copy of Old Man’s War here!
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
With Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, Temi Oh makes the wonderfully creative choice to take the established concept of a coming-of-age story and set it on a lonely ship bound for a far-flung planet. The titular Terra-Two is an Earth-like planet that was recently discovered, and will take twenty-three years for a manned ship to reach. But this is necessary, given the way our climate is changing.
The crew of the Damocles is comprised of four experienced astronauts, doctors, and engineers, and six British teenagers who have been training for, and dreaming of, this one-way trip for most of their lives. The novel’s first quarter introduces us to our protagonists, establishes the stakes, and throws a painful and shocking emotional curveball at us before we’ve even left Earth.
Once their journey begins, we watch with beady eyes as these young people adapt to life in space, grow, learn to work together, fight, and fall frequently into disfunction. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? blends the isolation and wide-eyed hope of a good sci-fi novel with the angst and drama of a good coming-of-age story, and this strange genre cocktail tastes excellent.
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke
Several People Are Typing is a mind-bending, genre-bending novel presented entirely as a series of Slack messages. This fantastic piece of comedy horror science fiction for the digital age that would make Franz Kafka proud.
Several People Are Typing begins with Gerald, a man who works in New York City, logging into his company Slack to inform his colleagues that he has been trapped in the app. Upon learning that his consciousness (or possibly his entire self?) has been uploaded to Slack, his colleagues naturally don’t believe him and it becomes a tired prank to them very quickly.
But, with nothing to do but figure out how to get out, Gerald keeps working and his productivity gradually improves in a hilarious moment of kafkaesque black comedy. Meanwhile, more creepy events occur with increasing frequency and drama, including the sound of howling outside one colleague’s window and signs that the Slack help bot may be gaining sentience.
What begins as a kafkaesque commentary on modern work culture slowly descends into a creeping sci-fi horror novel, all written like a Slack transcript. Brilliant.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Written by one of the modern world’s finest and most beloved authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun is easily one of the finest modern sci-fi books of recent years.
This is a science fiction masterpiece that tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend (or AF). The purpose of an AF is to be a companion to the teenager who selects them.
Klara begins her story in a store in an unspecified American city. She is put on display and, through her eyes, we learn about the world — or, at least, the world as she sees it. Klara is soon chosen by a teenage girl called Josie who takes Klara home to live with her in the countryside.
This is a novel about love and hope. Klara’s relationship with Josie, and Josie’s relationship to her own mother Chrissie and her best friend Rick, is the glue of this book.
What makes this almost an elevation of Ishiguro’s unreliable narrator trope is Klara’s own unique perspective on the world (literally, how her robot eyes see things, and metaphorically, how she learns and comes to understand people and their relationships).
This is a very sweet and tender novel full of love in all its forms. It considers class and social groups, but it also deals heavily with love, religion, superstition, and, most importantly, how we hope; how we use hope as a method of survival.
Alongside Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun proves that Ishiguro’s greatest strength is observing human relationships through a variety of lenses; and he is at his best when using science fiction as a tool for exploring that to its fullest.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses
Blurring the lines between sci-fi and dystopian fiction, Tender is the Flesh brings us something entirely new. Living in a world that is either a little to the future of, or a possible parallel to, our own, our protagonist Tejo works at a slaughterhouse which deals exclusively in human meat.
A disease is said to have tainted, and mostly wiped out, most non-human animals, and so came a period known as the Transition, wherein human meat production became an accepted norm across the world. The humans that are bred for slaughter are not considered people, are referred to as ‘heads’, and are kept in much the same condition as cattle are today.
Therein lies the book’s first clear-cut message: to consider how modern-day battery farming, and meat and dairy production, treats non-human animals: the conditions they’re kept in; the ways they are raised, tortured, abused, and ultimately killed.
If this were the only message the book carried, it wouldn’t be adding anything new to the popular discourse. Fortunately, Tender is the Flesh offers a broader scope than that. While Tender is the Flesh treads dangerously close to being gratuitous and unnecessarily violent at times, and its exposition never ceases to feel disconnected from the plot.
The questions and warnings it raises are ones genuinely worth sitting with and pondering on as our planet continues to diminish in a frightening multitude of ways.
Tejo’s personal story is also aggressively compelling, and it carries the book’s messages and morals expertly. It is, ultimately, those messages that make this book worth reading, and what makes it one of the best modern sci-fi novels.
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
What do you get when you cross the political wisdom and boundless imagination of Terry Pratchett with the knowledge and experience of Stephen Baxter?
One of the most essential modern sci-fi novels on the shelves, that’s what.
One of the simplest pleasures that good sci-fi novels can provide is eliciting that “wow” feeling when confronted with a big idea or event.
The Long Earth is full of these moments:
- When you follow protagonist Joshua to his first parallel world
- When you learnt that there are no people on any other world
- When you learn that they are potentially infinite
- When you learn of a strange human-like race of natural “steppers” that move between parallel worlds
- When you learnt that a catastrophe is wiping out these worlds
There’s a healthy helping of surrealism here, as well as a big dollop of political intrigue. But there is also that blissful sense of wide-eyed discovery and adventure.
The Long Earth is a novel in which scary and dangerous ideas coalesce with the human urge for adventure, discovery, and doing something risky for the sake of it.
While it lacks the wit of Pratchett’s Discworld series, it makes up for that with a mind-opening feeling of discovery and intrigue.
The Employees by Olga Ravn
Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, The Employees is a short sci-fi novel by Danish author Olga Ravn. Set on a massive spaceship in the 22nd Century, this is a satire of hypercapitalist workplace culture. It is one of the very best modern sci-fi novels.
The Employees is structured as a series of interview statements with various workers about a ship which has just picked up a collection of unknown objects from a newly discovered planet. The objects are slowly and subtly changing the minds and feelings of the workers, both human and humanoid (robot AI).
And the company is observing these changes through a series of interviews with both groups. This Danish sci-fi novel explores the theme of AI and the meaning of life in truly fresh and original ways. It also satirises the cold and uncaring relationship between a company and its workforce.
The company sits silent and invisible as its human employees grow increasingly nostalgic about life on Earth, while its robot employees feel lost, wistful, and even angry as they too become nostalgic, but for what?
The concept of AI and the ethics behind it are considered from new angles, such as when one humanoid observes that it has been programmed to behave faithfully, but all it sees are hypocritical and unfaithful humans all around it.
The Employees is one of the most original and unique science fiction novels to come along in years, and an absolute must-read amongst sci-fi books by women authors.
Tower by Bae Myung-hoon
Translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu
Tower is a truly unique and boundary-pushing piece of modern science fiction. As its name implies, this piece of Korean sci-fi is set entirely in an enormous tower. This titular tower is a nation unto itself, home to 500,000 people.
Bae implies that it was built on Korean soil but this is never explicitly stated. The book is divided into a series of interconnected speculative tales, all set within this solitary tower nation known as Beanstalk.
The world-building is fantastic, as the tower needs to be a believable place in order for the author’s disparate tales to work. Infrastructure, economy, politics, and daily life all need to be accounted for and designed in a way that the reader can understand and appreciate.
The six stories in Tower are tied together by the place itself and by recurring characters and events. And each story serves to further build the world while also telling an entirely self-contained tale. In that sense, this is a unique piece of Korean fiction that blends the concepts of the novel and the short story collection.
And each tale also, as all good science fiction does, poses an ethical, political, or philosophical quandary for us to muse over. What an amazing book amongst the best modern sci-fi novels.
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
The Echo Wife is a grounded piece of speculative science fiction. A deeply personal and human tale of love and loss and betrayal and desperation and death. Our protagonist, Evelyn, is a research biologist who has seen breakthroughs in the field of human cloning. Her ex-husband, a fellow biologist named Nathan, has recently remarried.
After receiving an award for her work, Evelyn is asked out to tea by Nathan’s new partner, Martine, who turns out to be a clone of Evelyn, grown by Nathan. Martine also happens to be pregnant, which is something that Evelyn, the leading expert in cloning, believes to be impossible.
To say more would be to spoil a novel full of twists and turns. This is an intimate science fiction thriller, a true page-turner. What makes this novel so crisp and tight, however, is Evelyn herself. Written as a true scientist, she is clinical and logical in her view of people. She is kind and helpful, but not warm and passionate.
The world of The Echo Wife is also wonderfully well-realised. While perhaps not hard sci-fi, it is grounded enough to feel believable — or, at least, conceivably.
Tightly plotted, elegantly written, and populated with sharp, unique characters, The Echo Wife is a modern masterpiece of speculative science fiction that explores big moral and ethical questions, as all good speculative sci-fi should.
I’m Waiting for You by Kim Bo-young
Translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu and Sophie Bowman
Kim Bo-Young is a legend of Korean literature, and even worked as a script editor on Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer. With I’m Waiting for You, readers can see first-hand why she’s such a special sci-fi author. This collection of four stories is essential reading amongst modern sci-fi novels.
The four stories in this collection actually work as two pairs. The first and fourth stories — I’m Waiting For You and On My Way to You — are the same tale told from two perspectives: a bride and groom each making their way home to Earth for their wedding ceremony.
The second and third stories — The Prophet of Corruption and That One Life — which are also the longest and shortest tales respectively, are a blend of religion, mysticism, and science fiction. In these two middle tales, the characters are a set of gods, and it is quickly revealed that they created Earth as a school in which they themselves can learn and grow.
The main protagonist of The Prophet of Corruption, Naban, is a single god whose prophets, disciples, and children all separated from them like cells. Individually, they spend entire lifetimes on Earth, learning and experiencing and dying.
Naban believes in asceticism as a school of learning; their children are reborn in low roles; they suffer and toil and eventually return home. But some are rebelling against this approach to living and learning. What makes these stories so tantalisingly addictive is both Kim’s world-building and also her attempt at writing gods as characters, with motivations and behaviours different from our own.
The stories that bookend this collection are each written in an epistolary fashion, as letters to the other. In I’m Waiting For You, our nameless groom is trying to make it to Earth, and is updating his bride each time something goes awry (and a lot goes awry).
The same is true in On My Way to You, only here the bride has her own hurdles to get over. These two stories are heartbreaking. You’ll root for them, cry for them, hope against hope that things will work out for them.
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
A breakout hit when it was first published in 2017, this epistolary modern sci-fi novel takes the simple concept of “mystery” and stretches it as far as possible. Author Sylvain Neuvel clearly had a lot of fun teasing something, big, something tantalising, something jaw-dropping in the execution of Sleeping Giants.
The initial premise is simple: a young girl in a quiet USA town sneaks out at night, falls into a pit, and finds herself sitting in the palm of an enormous metal hand. Growing up to become a scientist, Rose Franklyn has dedicated her life to understanding what this hand is, and where the rest of the body is.
As the novel progresses, we find more and more parts dotted around the planet, and we also learn that they are likely extraterrestrial in origin, given the near-impossible rarity of the metals used to forge them and the age of the limbs. The body parts are slowly assembled, and more and more truths come to light.
The epistolary style of this narrative makes the plot that much more engaging, as everything is presented as a series of classified interviews with government agents of private journals of those involved.
Buy a copy of Sleeping Giants here!
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu
Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem brings science fiction back to the era of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke—an era of wild and surreal concepts, loosely made to look plausible through their links to physics and mathematics. Set between China’s Cultural Revolution and a version of its present, the novel leads readers on a disorientating path—with all the pace and excitement of a thriller—to dizzying revelations about the universe.
During the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie saw her father named as a bourgeois academic and killed by a group of students. From here, she is banished to a labour force and eventually recruited onto a mysterious science base which is sending signals out into space. They claim to be disrupting enemy satellites but something else is clearly going on.
In the present day, scientist Wang Miao is working on a new kind of nanomaterial but is soon saddled with the responsibility of infiltrating and spying on a strange collection of scientists (a cult in all but name). Their existence is linked to the suicides of multiple scientists, and once he is involved, Wang starts experiencing strange phenomenon. Adding to the strangeness, he starts playing a new VR game set on a planet with three suns.
The Three-Body Problem is one of the wildest rides you will ever take in the world of science fiction. A strange and exciting story full of cynicism and enormous ideas.
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The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
The Space Between Worlds is the debut novel by author Micaiah Johnson; a multiverse-spanning journey of mystery and discovery, and one of the most original and affecting modern sci-fi novels on the shelves.
Our protagonist is Cara, a young traverser who moves through 380 different versions of Earth in order to observe and gather data. Her job is simply to report on what makes each version of Earth unique.
What makes this premise fun is that a traverser can only set foot on an Earth if that Earth’s version of them is dead, and Cara is dead in all but eight Earths, due to the difficult circumstances of her birth and youth. Despite its impressive and ambitious world-building, The Space Between Worlds is actually a rather intimate character-focussed sci-fi novel.
Through this sci-fi novel, Johnson offers us both questions and answers on the themes of identity, nature vs nurture, and the lasting impact of trauma. She gives us satisfying character writing, powerful plot twists, and some nice genre-bending.
Cara herself is the driving force of this novel. A damaged, angry young woman with too much on her shoulders. She is relatable in a tragic kind of way, and someone to watch with unblinking eyes as her journey of discovery becomes more personal than professional.