Best sci-fi this month with an Alan Moore epic and a Blake Crouch reprint

We sci-fi fans will be pulling out all the stops to get our hands on all the riches on offer this month. There are at least four books published in October that are must reads for me, including the new Stephen Baxter, an epic story of a future destroyed by climate change by Tim Winton, time travel by Alan Moore and the story of J. Lincoln Fenn about a mysterious creeping plant on a remote island. I’ve also included some new exciting sounding sci-fi reads because it is October after all – which reminds me it’s time to hit up my Shirley Jacksons for their annual re-read…

Our sci-fi columnist Emily Wilson, whose judgment is impeccable, tells me it’s amazing (her review is out later this month) – and it rings true. It follows a man and a child in a climate-ravaged future, traveling through a stony desert until they find an abandoned mining site and decide to take shelter. Comparisons are being made by its publisher for Station Eleven AND The road.

This is the story of Rabi, whose mother cut off his hand when he was 2 years old to prevent him from working in the Mercury mines. An adult now, he lives in the Mask, a large structure that hides the Solar System from aliens to keep it safe – but then a spaceship arrives, having traveled for 100 years from a forgotten colony planet… I have a lot old Stephen Baxter novels crowding my shelves and this latest outing from one of the UK’s best sci-fi writers sounds like it will have to stay there too.

Remember when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out, and we literary types thought “what else?” Well, now we have the adventures of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy – in space. Elizabeth, in this version of Jane Austen’s classic tale, lives on a small moon in the “London lunar system” with her sisters and parents, only for their lives to be rocked by the arrival of Mr. Bingley on the Netherfield StarCruiser.

Journalist Julia is offered a lot of money to travel to a remote Pacific island to collect samples of a special flower – an island where her botanist sister Irene died in 1939. Julia will also delve into the island’s secrets and rumors that ghosts rise from their burial places on moonless nights. Fenn’s publisher has compared this to The last of uswhich makes me think the flower will have some disturbing properties…

Described by our podcast editor Rowan Hooper as “fascinating”, this is the new cycle of novels by literary master Knausgaard, set in a town in southern Norway on which a bright new star has risen. People, it turns out, have stopped dying since the appearance of the star. “Books are about meaning, life in the modern world, and reality,” Rowan says in his writing.

In 1949, 18-year-old second-hand bookseller Dennis stumbles upon a novel that is fictional – a spawn from another book – but it’s there, in his hands. It turns out that Dennis has found a book from a version of London beyond time and space known as The Great When, but this magical London must remain a secret and Dennis must return the book to where it belongs. A time-traveling epic from the mighty Moore? Yes please.

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I’ve thought about Jeff VanderMeer often Destructionand the eerie strangeness of Area X, an area on the US coastline where anyone who enters disappears, since its release 10 years ago. Now we’re being treated to a surprise fourth volume in the Southern Reach series – a prequel, which opens decades before the formation of Area X and then jumps to follow the first expedition after the frontier descends around the danger zone. I can’t wait to learn more about a world I thought VanderMeer was done with.

This sounds like my perfect Halloween read – an AI twist Frankensteinin which engineer Henry creates an artificially intelligent consciousness he calls William. Henry is fixated on his project, staying away from everyone but William, including his pregnant wife Lily, but when Lily’s colleagues show up, Henry’s smartest of houses starts to go (horribly) wrong .

Blake Crouch is the author of the delightfully insane (and now adapted for TV) sci-fi thriller. Dark Matter. This month his publishers are reissuing an early self-published novel, Runin which all who witness the strange aurora (echoes of John Wyndham minus the deadly plants) are filled with a murderous rage for all who did not see the mysterious lights. Our perspective is tight and quite exciting, following Jack, his wife Dee and their children as they run for their lives. I’ve read this already and can attest that it’s as crazy as it is enjoyable Dark Matter.

As we head into spooky season (my favorite season), I’ve indulged myself a bit and included this anthology of horror writing: after all, there are often many crossovers between science fiction and horror, and there are some excellent ones. names here, including Michel Faber and James Smythe, both of whom have written some excellent pieces of speculative fiction (if you haven’t read Faber’s Under the skin or of Smythe Explorerthen please do so). The stories sound extremely creepy – the corpse of a long-dead parent perfectly preserved decades later; disfigured girls “willing to pay any price to fit in.” Happy Halloween to us all.

Dark space by Rob Hart and Alex Segura

This co-written sci-fi thriller follows pilot Jose Carriles as he embarks on his first mission outside our solar system – only for a series of strange malfunctions to occur and people to start returning dead. As events escalate, Carriles finds himself “face to face with a reckoning that could destroy humanity as we know it.”

This isn’t science fiction, but I’m mentioning it because I’m an Ursula K. Le Guin completionist and thought others might be interested in this revised and updated edition of this master of her craft’s guide to “navigating in the sea of ​​history”. Telling us “how – and why – to write”, the author sees The Left Hand of Darkness AND The dispossessed gives us her guide to storytelling, with a new introduction by Kelly Link (check out her wonderful collection of short stories Magic for Beginners), Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss and Le Guin’s son Theo Downes-Le Guin. I will definitely read it.

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