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At its best, fantasy fiction is transportive, taking us away from the world we know. Sometimes that journey sends us to alien and mythic realms, but sometimes—as in this trio of powerful new novels—magic can be found in a strange and wondrous reflection of a world we already recognize.

In his stunning debut, The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp crafts a spellbinding vision of one of America’s most magical cities. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, magician and grifter Jude Dubuisson is adrift, hiding from his exciting former life and keeping quiet about his gift for locating lost items. All that changes when a sudden invitation catapults him back into a world of gods, vampires, angels and tremendous power.

What begins as an enticing introduction to a mythic version of the Crescent City and its characters quickly deepens as Camp weaves through strange haunts and schemes. Indeed, magic is woven into every page with such mesmeric precision that the reader has no idea what to expect next and can’t risk turning away for a moment. Camp takes us through his world with the self-assuredness of a seasoned novelist, leaving no word wasted and no moment of exposition without a little spell twisted into it.

The novel journeys deeper still, beyond its own imagined mysteries and into the unanswered questions of the American experience. The cultural melting pot of New Orleans becomes enchanted, as ritual chalk circles lead to doors, doors lead to hidden rooms, and hidden rooms lead to other realms. As Jude rediscovers a world he left behind, we discover a magical and uncharted landscape that perhaps has always existed before our very eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Camp for The City of Lost Fortunes.

CITY ON THE WATER
In Blackfish City, the first adult novel from Sam J. Miller (The Art of Starving) imagines a rough, cobbled-together future, then brings forth a little magic from its potential darkness.

In a world ravaged by climate change, corruption and other disasters, humanity has reorganized itself into a series of new settlements. In the floating city Qaanaaq—a mesh of intertwined cultures, vastly different income levels and technology merged with raw survival instinct—a group of seemingly disparate characters are united by a single jarring event: the arrival of a mysterious woman, called an “orcamancer,” who emerges from the sea on a killer whale, with a polar bear in tow. Who is she? What does she want? Will she be the city’s doom, its salvation or some frightening hybrid of the two?

As this mystery unfolds, Miller introduces a rich kid suffering from a strange disease, a battered journeyman fighter, a city administrator, a crime lord with bigger ambitions, a gender-nonbinary messenger and other compelling personalities linked by the aura of the orcamancer. Providing one more voice to the narrative, a mysterious guidebook seems to function as the voice of the city itself. As these varying points of view take their turns telling the story, an addictive tale of redemption and hope emerges from a grimy future.

INTO THE WOODS
What Should Be Wild, the magical debut novel from Julia Fine, begins with all the makings of a dark fairy tale. There once was a girl named Maisie who grew up in an old manor house on the edge of a strange forest. Maisie was born with the power to kill living things and resurrect dead things with a single touch, and so she was locked away by her anthropologist father, who considered her too dangerous and puzzling to be allowed to explore the outside world. When her father goes missing, Maisie’s mixture of curiosity and concern sends her on a journey to the heart of the forest. There, she discovers a dark curse that has plagued the women of her family for centuries.

What follows is a captivating tale that explores the fears, desires and mysteries of growing up through the clouded lens of a dark fantasy. Fine begins with elements we all recognize—a girl with strange powers, a dark old house, a mysterious forest that could be waiting just beyond our doorstep—and delightfully warps them until a new tale emerges. Maisie is a complex heroine worthy of the story’s luxurious prose. In telling her story, Fine reveals her own gift for walking the tightrope between the universal truths of human experience and the hidden magic within those truths.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One day soon, we may develop technology that integrates with biological systems, that becomes so much a part of you that it isn’t clear where you end and the science begins. This potential paradigm shift lies near the center of two new science fiction thrillers. Both books start with integrated tech as a given, pulling readers through adventures as existentially stressful as they are fascinating.

In Emma Newman’s Before Mars, a standalone novel set in her Planetfall universe, geologist and artist Anna Kubrick finds a disturbing note in her room when she arrives at a Martian base. The note is in her handwriting, and warns her not to trust the base’s psychologist. More anomalies become apparent as she examines the world around her: she is missing canvases and sketchbooks, her messages home to her family aren’t answered in a way that makes sense and the base’s doctor feels too familiar to be a man she has just met. At risk of developing psychosis from prolonged exposure to immersive memory technology, and probably suffering from postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Anna struggles to settle in. Are her suspicions about the psychologist, the base’s AI and the motives of the corporation that sent her to Mars justified, or are they just an outgrowth of her own supposed paranoia?

Newman gives us a look at the near future that is both grim and thoughtful. AI implants within characters’ minds blur the line between what is real and what is imagined, to the point that entire psychoses are associated with not being able to tell brain-generated holograms from reality. Corporations have taken control of not just world governments, but entire planets. But even with all these changes, people, at their core, don’t change. They still suffer from depression and have bad relationships. They are paranoid and jealous. This contrast—the fantastical artificial intelligence and brain-bending technology against the mundane flaws of humanity—is what makes Before Mars brilliant. Newman’s latest novel is well worth the read for anyone who loves a twisty thriller, or who is interested in how our future as a species could unfold.

While Newman’s novel is a psychological playground of paranoia and suspicion, Emily Devenport’s Medusa Uploaded, the first in her Medusa Cycle, is half revenge thriller, half spy novel. Oichi Angelis is a servant—called a worm—on a generation ship hurtling through space. Shortly before her parents die in the destruction of their ship, they give her an implant ostensibly meant to give her access to the great music of human history. But as Oichi learns shortly before their deaths, the implant is more than it seems. It gives her not just access to music, but also to the ship’s communications systems and to a Medusa unit, a biotech fusion suit with its own AI, that can be only be paired people who have the implant. When the ship’s Executives suspect Oichi of being an insurgent, she fakes her death and joins her Medusa in a quest for revenge and the truth about what happened to her parents’ ship.

Medusa Uploaded is pure adrenaline, hurtling from intrigue to murder to impersonation. All the while, it challenges readers to think not just about the place of technology alongside—and even within—the human race, but also about what that means for human evolution. And despite its deliciously dark undertones (the first chapter, for example, asks readers to consider what sort of killer our main character is—serial? Mass murderer?), it is a book that is unshakably hopeful, for all its mayhem and scheming. Oichi and Medusa's partnership has the potential to fix the injustices of their world, which makes them a team worth rooting for. Albeit one with a very high body count.

Science fiction, more than perhaps any other genre, has an established tradition of social and political critique. Such iconic works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune all used future human civilizations as stages to play out contemporary struggles such as Golden Age hedonism, class-based societies, modern imperialism and plutocracy. This pattern, dating back to the genre’s inception in the 19th century, has created an expectation that new science fiction must also contend with some contemporary crisis of the human condition, preferably in some novel fashion.

Both Peter Watts and Claire North (the pen name of Catherine Webb) have established themselves as unique literary voices. Watts is known for his exhaustively researched fiction and tight narrative structure, while North is a linguistic gymnast in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Their most recent offerings, The Freeze-Frame Revolution and 84K, do not disappoint, and although each of their plots is strongly reminiscent of other novels, the delivery sets them apart from their compatriots.

In Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Sunday Ahzmundin is a biological engineer on the spaceship Eriophora, whose unusually close relationship with the AI autopilot, Chimp, is tested when she learns of a rebellion being conducted by certain members of the crew in their brief gaps between decades-long periods of stasis. Although this is, by Watts’ admission, more scientifically speculative than his other work, purists will be pleased by his handling of machine learning, evolutionary time scale and even names—Eriophora is a genus of orb-weaving spider that creates spiral webs, and the Eriophora is building a spiral web of faster-than-light travel routes. The Freeze-Frame Revolution is closer in length to a novella than a novel, which enables the cover-to-cover tautness of the plot and makes the character development, especially of the relationship between Sunday and Chimp, all the more remarkable.

84K, by contrast, is both large and dense. Theo Miller is a man of uncertain provenance, living in a near-future United Kingdom that is dominated by a single massive monopoly called the Company. Theo determines the price in pounds sterling that convicted criminals must pay for their offenses, but when a woman from his past reappears, he must face the blight at the heart of his society. North constructs a linear plot out of disjointed slices of time, resulting in a book that never shows its hand and only snaps into focus at the very end. This unusual plot structure makes 84K a challenge for the reader, but it feels necessary. After all, North is painting a portrait of a society that hides its true form behind a facade of advertising and euphemism. Her heroes miss crucial details, and it is unclear whether “heroes” is really the right thing to call them.

Although The Freeze-Frame Revolution is strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 84K contends with a similar autocracy to George Orwell’s 1984, each book distinguishes itself both by its author’s technique and by its treatment of moral ambiguity. In each case, the protagonist possesses imperfect and likely biased information and is embroiled in a revolt that, for all its humane intentions, is anything but benevolent in practice. Watts leaves the essential conflict tantalizingly unresolved and writes from the perspective of Sunday retelling the events. This casts doubt on the veracity of Sunday as narrator, transforming what could otherwise have been a relatively cliché story of man versus machine into an engaging tale that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. And North consistently justifies her writerly contortions by using them to convey her protagonist’s state of mind. Her carefully chosen run-on sentences, unusual phrasing and jarring jumps (frequently mid-sentence) from thought to thought, character to narrator, or present to past convey Theo’s progress from being a deliberately boring, utterly confused bureaucrat to a man who has finally attained a sense of purpose.

Perhaps modern science fiction is somewhat hamstrung by its need to reflect our current society in its speculative funhouse mirror. There are only so many great debates to be had, after all. But these latest contributions, from such eminently skilled writers as Watts and North, are worthy voices in their respective conversations, and thoroughly engrossing stories in their own right.