Science Fiction

When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Silliness abounds in the sci-fi novels of John Scalzi lately, and honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve had kaiju, we’ve had supervillains with all-cat staffs and now we have a whole book dedicated to what would happen if the moon suddenly turned into an enormous orb of cheese. We haven’t a clue how seriously Scalzi will take this premise, but we can’t wait to find out.

Queen Demon

By Martha Wells

Murderbot creator Martha Wells made her grand return to fantasy with 2023’s Witch King, and Queen Demon continues the story of Kai, a demon prince who was incapacitated and imprisoned for centuries before finally freeing himself, and must now face a world radically changed in his absence.

The Martian Contingency

By Mary Robinette Kowal

The Lady Astronaut series takes place in an alternate midcentury Earth, where a meteor strike in 1952 radically accelerated the planet’s various space programs, opening the doors for women to play a large part in the exploration of the stars. In the fourth book of the series, humanity has colonized the moon and is about to begin the process on Mars. Trailblazing astronaut Elma York lands on the red planet eager to begin, but soon uncovers troubling hints that there was some sort of disaster during the first expedition to Mars, a disaster that the current authorities seem anxious to cover up.

Cold Eternity

By S.A. Barnes

We loved both of S.A. Barnes’ previous sci-fi horror novels and cannot wait for her next terrifying excursion into the black. Cold Eternity’s setting is terrifying even by Barnes’ high standards: a space barge full of cryogenically frozen people, populated only by one woman on the run and the barge’s creepy AI hologram “hosts.”

When We Were Real

By Daryl Gregory

It’s become something of a universal bit to declare “we live in a computer simulation” when faced with the latest nonsense of our age, but trust Daryl Gregory (Revelator, Spoonbenders) to take that idea and spin it into something more profound than pithy. Best friends JP and Dulin are heading out on a road trip—to see all the weird anomalies that popped up in our world after a mysterious announcement that our reality is merely a digital construction.