If there was a paucity of new science fiction in August, then September more than makes up for it, with everything from a long-awaited piece of speculative fiction from China MiĂ©ville to a short story collection paying tribute to the genius of Ursula K. Le Guin, with contributions from names including Ann Leckie and Kelly Link. Then there’s a new near-future novel from Station Eleven author Emily St John Mandel, a fresh sci-fi series from the bestselling Brandon Sanderson (and co-author Janci Patterson) and a strange but intriguing tale from one of my favourite writers, Naomi Alderman.

edited by Jonathan Strahan

This is something I absolutely cannot wait to read: a collection of 15 new short stories, inspired by the work of the one and only Ursula K. Le Guin and intended to honour her amazing legacy. The names contributing are super impressive, including Karen Joy Fowler and Charlie Jane Anders: what a treat.

by China Miéville

China MiĂ©ville is one of our great contemporary writers, master of the weird and author of masterpieces including The City and the City and Embassytown (my personal favourite). New book The Rouse comes in two whopping volumes, and its publisher promises it is a “decade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy”. I can’t tell you for sure that it’s science fiction, as I’ve yet to tackle the two doorstopper tomes I’ve been sent, but I can predict it will definitely be weird, and speculative. Michael Moorcock, no less, calls it “completely without parallel”. Exciting times.

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by Garth Nix

In my younger days, I was an avid reader of Garth Nix’s young adult Old Kingdom series, so I’m interested to see what this excellent author’s first venture into sci-fi will be like. It’s a military space opera, set in a universe where interstellar war rages between Earth and Mars – and where for over two centuries, humans have travelled into space on huge sentient mountain ranges known as Massifs. Then the crew of the ship Sassafras starts asking questions about why the Massifs carry humans to the stars – and talking to the powerful avatars piloting the ships.

by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

This is the first in the new Skyward Legacy series from the mighty Sanderson, co-written with Janci Patterson. It’s a complicated set-up: humans have warred against alien oppressors for decades. Now they’re free, and Arturo Mendez, leader of Skyward Flight, is sent on a mission to make contact with a settlement of humans isolated during the long war. But Blightfall, the planet he’s sent to, is more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

by Naomi Alderman

I am such a Naomi Alderman fan. We read her previous novel, The Future, with the Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ Book Club, and I loved it. This latest sounds much stranger and more speculative, but I’m here for anything from this author (her recent non-fiction book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, is also a big recommendation from me). Anyway: the plot here is that the novelist Naomi Alderman, grieving the loss of her mother, sets up a wildlife camera in her parents’ garden, and takes the first photo of a new animal, the “mimmoth”. These creatures spread across the world, harmless apparently, but strangely intelligent – what will their eventual impact be?

by Emily St John Mandel

Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, is very good at thoughtful, near-future tales, and here comes another. Set in 2031, this is a world where America is in the middle of a civil war – but where something even stranger might be going on. Ari, newly out of prison, goes to a party in Los Angeles, where she meets someone who looks exactly like her friend, but isn’t
 Living in Paris a long time later, Ari is haunted by what happened at the party, and by what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world. I’ve started this one, and it’s living up to its promise so far.

by Ken Liu

This collection of short stories from the award-winning speculative author moves between science fiction and fantasy – from techno-witches battling a world ruled by machines, to a consciousness on a starship watching the cosmos die and be reborn.

by Jo Martin

This new Doctor Who novel sees the Fugitive Doctor and Martha investigating a strange object in the British Museum. Apparently a medieval toy, it refuses to stay in one place, time or identity.

by Hernan Diaz

This novel by the heavyweight literary author Hernan Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, takes place centuries in the future, following the adventures of a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid and sells it on the black market. This pincher, an orphan, goes on to discover an experiment that, if she can power it, could “change the fabric of reality itself”.

by Chloe Benjamin

Laurel is a biologist turned dishwasher at an Antarctic research station. She doesn’t tell anyone in her new life about the tragedy which made her leave her old one – but she becomes convinced that the mysterious Arc that appears across the ice could lead her to a new world where she could turn back the clock. I’m halfway through this one and am loving the biology and the Antarctic side of it. Can’t wait to see how the physics holds up.

by James Islington

This sci-fi thriller is set in a world where the poor die young, and the rich live forever. Assassin Azure is usually hired to kill the richest of people – but then he’s given a job to protect one of them. The publisher promises that this fuses “the dystopian morality of cyberpunk with the explosive action of anime”, which sounds pretty cool.

by Jordan Prosser

Abby, suffering the burden of being in her 30s without having achieved any of her dreams, decides she has a new purpose: becoming the first person on Mars. Luckily for her, a Danish entrepreneur is planning a one-way mission.

by Ai Jiang

Jiang, who also has a story in the Ursula K. Le Guin anthology out this month, sets this piece of “science-fantasy” in a world where the royal advisors are plotting to overthrow emperor Yun. Yun’s sister Xilian escapes to the drowning continent of Opera, a place filled with strange tech and dreams of immortality.

by Adam Simcox

It’s 2026, and time travel is a luxury commodity. So, Rachel, who killed Oliver in a car crash in 1997 when she was 18, goes back to save him – only for the future to change in bad ways that may have something to do with Oliver, with whom she’s now fallen in love


by Django Wexler

Taj is a scrapper, living in a junkyard and keeping his family alive with the scrap he finds there. His one salvation? A “construct”, or robot, that he built himself, and which he hopes will win big in the construct fighting circuits.

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If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what’s exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, , was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space? What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions – even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe.

I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Eventually, I read Hawking’s book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day.

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Today, I’m a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group – but that’s not every day. And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets.

The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it. I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.

I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren’t good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter. And while I think these questions are important and interesting, they live at a kind of margin that physicists are pushed to by economic and social forces that determine which questions we can be paid to pursue and which we won’t be.

When I began working on the book in 2023, I was in the midst of a five-year stint working in US science policy, alongside colleagues from around the world (mostly the UK, Europe and Canada). As I learned more about the politics of science at the government level, it became clear to me that particle physics and cosmology were in trouble. Politicians were no longer sold on the fundamental importance of our research and didn’t see how it was beneficial to the capitalist economy or the military, which historically is how that support has been rationalised. The cultural arguments – that a well-cultured civilisation does things like try to understand the universe – didn’t seem impactful at all. And the general public, struggling with climate change and economies that don’t serve the 99 per cent, couldn’t see how we had anything to add.

I could see that we were about to be on the margins in a new way. And so The Edge of Space-Time became not just a return to my roots and the big-picture questions that once drove me, it also became a plea: don’t let me be the last of my kind. The cuts that are being made to science in the UK and the US right now seem like a political problem that is easily remedied, but it is more complicated than that. Even one year where there is a gap in funding means we haemorrhage workers who may never return. As those researchers leave, they take with them knowledge. Because the sciences work through apprenticeship, if there is no senior instructor to pass on knowledge, it doesn’t matter if there is money and an apprentice waiting in the wings.

With The Edge of Space-Time, I take readers on a journey through huge questions, like why does my favourite physics experiment foist the structures of quantum physics on us? And will we ever know what space-time really is, or is it always just going to be a useful mathematical construct that allows us to calculate motion in environments where gravity plays a significant role, like near black holes?

While thinking through the physics, I also try to make the case for why any healthy democracy needs people who live at the edge of what is known and what is unknown – the keepers of these cosmic stories that have fascinated humans for millennia. I make the case that, like poetry, physics gives us a viewpoint on the universe that we need because it is our ancestral inheritance. I also argue that spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions.

Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever. Thinking a bit about the various edges of space-time, like black holes and cosmic event horizons, can help us build the better world we need.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books) is the September read for the Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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sΔ wo werΔ fi na wosan kɔfa a, yΔnkyi

it is not incorrect to go back and get what you forgot

—Akan proverb

We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?

Even so, I do. Science in this society is often done for the wrong rea­sons, I find myself telling them. And they remind me that because it’s my job to study the origin and evolution of the universe and every­thing inside it, I know there is a location in space-time where the uni­verse became transparent to light: the first place where light could fly free. The ancestors insist: This is a story that I have learned so I could tell it to others. To do cosmology—to study the beginning and evolu­tion of space, time, and matter—is to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history. To do cosmology is to go back and get the beginning, to map out the future.

So: Quite nearly at the beginning, the universe said let there be light. And particles of light—photons—all of them traveling at the speed of light, the fastest in the universe, couldn’t get very far. They were stuck in a plasma stew where they constantly bumped into par­ticles, especially electrons, which swallowed their energy and spat it out in the form of new photons and other particles.

Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light for eighty-two years. It has been there almost since the beginning of everything and has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. It was there when the universe was cool enough for atoms to form. It was with the sun when it was just a cloud of gas, and it was there when the sun’s hydrogen ignited with fusion, turning the sun into a star. It was there when the leftovers from the gas cloud condensed into planet Earth. And it was there when carbon-based life forms evolved into apes.

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This light is a cosmic edge: We cannot look past it because at any time earlier than that, the photons were trapped, unable to get out. And this edge is a reminder that physics is a way of gaining deep insight into the universe, one we can add to the variety of overlapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this bound­ary, and how we have come to know about it, is to deepen our rela­tionship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it, for ourselves, and for future generations, because it is our history—and who are we to argue with the ancestors?




The book you are reading is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian AimĂ© Dafon SĂšgla calls cosmovi­sions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The Edge of Space-Time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz percussionist, artist, and technologist Milford Graves, who used percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed “cosmic energy.” Graves, a maker working in a long tradition of Black artists, was not formally trained as a scien­tist, and “cosmic energy” sounds a little like mystic talk. But when I listened to him describe his ideas in the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space-time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book.

As a set of knowledges and techniques, physics provides a path­way toward answering the same questions Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy, and space-time. It allows us to specify in great detail the relationship between photons and the plants in Graves’s garden which transformed the photons into living particles. It is another entry point to what plant biologist and Black feminist theorist of intersectionality in science Beronda L. Montgomery calls lessons from plants.

When it’s at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors—and a producer of metaphors in its own right. We often analyze the world through metaphor, and I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a perspective on the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us under­stand why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics. And if we can­not learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastro­phe for the rest of us. That’s always been true, and it always will be.

In a world where genocides (plural) can be live-streamed and still continue unabated, it is hard to imagine that society could be oth­erwise when what is broken about it feels so total and, in the case of the families shattered and lives lost, so final. I don’t think cosmology by itself can save the world. Even so, I believe in the ways that people experience a connection to the cosmos as nourishing. And I believe in preparing for the better world that is coming.

This is an extract from by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books), the September read for the Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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The Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July’s read, Claire North’s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller’s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth’s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper – and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn’t: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.

I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I’d never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott – and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction – I couldn’t wait to read it with our book club.

I wasn’t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing – and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter’s essay, how he wrote the novel cold – no initial research, no planning: “It was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.” In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott – spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren “found the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn’t have carried on if it hadn’t been a book club choice”. But ultimately she was glad she did, and “couldn’t put it down towards the end”. “I loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,” she wrote on , describing the novel as “a testament to the triumph of the human spirit”.

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The writing in this book is very distinctive – jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig’s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. “I read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,” wrote warsaw_sun. “There’s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ‘men of action’ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?” wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. “I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book – but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,” he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton’s Juice – another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. “What bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,” he wrote. “As humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t survive a holocaust, but I don’t think empathy is weakness, I don’t think that kindness is naivety, and I don’t want to read any more dystopias.”

For Kelly, The Dog Stars was “not so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story”; for Barbara Howe, it was “as much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so”. “As in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.” Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. “I’ve been meaning to ask other readers here – does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that’s not a known type?”

It’s a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn’t something the book club will need to worry about


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The Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ Book Club has been reading Peter Heller’s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars in August. He joined head of books Alison Flood to discuss the trend for dystopian fiction, how he didn’t plan anything before writing the book – and what it felt like to watch Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, released later this month.