[book_info title=”The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” author=”Becky Chambers” publisher=”HarperVoyager” title_link=”https://www.harpervoyagerbooks.com/book/9780062444134/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet-2/”]
WE JOIN Rosemary Harper, a human born on Mars, as she enlists on the Wayfarer, a spacecraft tasked with tunnelling wormholes to different parts of the galaxy. This is space opera in the style of Firefly, the TV space-western show; the crew is made up of multiple species and a sentient AI called Lovelace. Despite the mission’s adventures and dangers, the story is more concerned with the interactions and histories of the characters on board the ship. A refreshing change from the standard space opera, and an easy novel to love. First in a series. Rowan Hooper
[book_info title=”Ancillary Justice” author=”Ann Leckie” publisher=”Little, Brown” title_link=”https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780356502403″]
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THIS isn’t brand new but it is an instant classic. I reread it this year and loved it just as much as I did the first time. The first and best book of a trilogy, Ancillary Justice is set in a far future ruled over by an expansionist spacefaring race called the Radch.
Our hero, Breq, looks human, but is something far more: the last living fragment of a powerful starship, The Justice of Toren. The physical ship itself, its central AI and its thousands of mind-slaved human soldiers – its “ancillaries” – are all gone, destroyed by treachery… all except Breq. Which leaves only her to carry out the ship’s great vengeance.
A delicious and very timely twist is that in Radch culture it is rude to pry into gender, and all the characters are described as “she”, regardless of their sex. This becomes an increasingly interesting thought experiment as the book develops.
Leckie won every major sci-fi award for this, and rightly so – her book is intimate yet sprawling, thought-provoking yet action-packed, entirely original and beautifully written. Emily Wilson
[book_info title=”Autonomous” author=”Annalee Newitz” publisher=”Orbit” title_link=”https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/autonomous/”]
THIS is the story of Jack, a renegade pharmaceutical patent pirate who steals drug recipes from big pharma and synthesises them for the masses. It is set in Canada in the 22nd century, where human life has been radically transformed by smart drugs and sentient robots struggle to earn their freedom.
The assessment of human behaviour by robots – we see through their eyes – is wonderfully illuminating and original. This thoughtful novel forever changed how I think about robots and our relationship with them. RH
[book_info title=”Remembrance of Earth’s Past ” author=”Cixin Liu” publisher=”Macmillan” title_link=”https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765397485″]
A TRILOGY starting in 1967 as the Cultural Revolution sweeps China, taking in a hostile alien species living around our closest star, Proxima Centauri, and ending – well, it reaches far into the deep future. This is epic, hard sci-fi of the most extraordinary kind. The ideas Liu develops are deeply science-based and mind-blowing. Barack Obama is a big fan. Read it before next year’s movie. RH
[book_info title=”The Speed of Sound” author=”Eric Bernt” publisher=”Thomas & Mercer” title_link=”https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/publisher/81286?text=The+speed+of+sound”]
IMAGINE if everything you had ever said was recorded in the walls, just waiting to be played back. That is the sci-fi conceit at the heart of this fast-paced thriller. The hero, Eddie Parks, lives in Harmony House, a secret government facility designed to harness the unique minds of autistic savants. He develops an “echo box” capable of performing “acoustic archaeology” to listen to any conversation, ever. Parks just wants to hear his dead mother’s voice, but shadowy figures have more sinister plans, forcing him to go on the run. Jacob Aron
[book_info title=”Dogs of War” author=”Adrian Tchaikovsky” publisher=”Head of Zeus” title_link=”http://headofzeus.com/book/dogs-war-1″]
REX, a 2-metre-tall bio-engineered dog, is possibly one of the most achingly human characters I have ever encountered in a sci-fi novel. He and his companions – Dragon, a lizard with a sniper rifle, Honey, a super-intelligent hacker bear, and Bees, a literal swarm of bees – are designed and programmed to be an elite strike force. But when Rex starts questioning his masters, his world unravels as he fears becoming a Bad Dog. A gripping dive into bioethics and AI that I couldn’t put down. JA
[book_info title=”Saga” author=”Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples” publisher=”Image Comics” title_link=”https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/saga”]
TAKE the cosmic scope of Star Wars, the star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, the familial heart ofBuffy, and a dash of gratuitous sex from Game of Thrones – and then stick it all in a beautifully illustrated blender. Out pops this gorgeous comic series featuring Marko and Alana, soldiers on opposite sides of a war between a planet and its moon, who are on the run with their daughter. Every page has something bonkers on it, some will make you cry. And that’s without mentioning the ghost babysitter, robot royalty, tree spaceship, bad-ass grandmother, or psychic cat. JA
This article appeared in print under the headline “Savouring the best of sci-fi”
