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 MiĆ©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 thereā€™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 MiƩville

China MiĆ©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 ā€œdecade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracyā€. I canā€™t tell you for sure that itā€™s science fiction, as Iā€™ve yet to tackle the two doorstopper tomes Iā€™ve been sent, but I can predict it will definitely be weird, and speculative. Michael Moorcock, no less, calls it ā€œcompletely without parallelā€. Exciting times.

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by Garth Nix

In my younger days, I was an avid reader of Garth Nixā€™s young adult Old Kingdom series, so Iā€™m interested to see what this excellent authorā€™s first venture into sci-fi will be like. Itā€™s a military space opera, set in a universe where interstellar war rages between Earth and Mars ā€“ 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 ā€“ 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. Itā€™s a complicated set-up: humans have warred against alien oppressors for decades. Now theyā€™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 heā€™s sent to, is more dangerous than heā€™d anticipated.

by Naomi Alderman

I am such a Naomi Alderman fan. We read her previous novel, The Future, with the Ā鶹“«Ć½ Book Club, and I loved it. This latest sounds much stranger and more speculative, but Iā€™m here for anything from this author (her recent non-fiction book, Donā€™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 parentsā€™ garden, and takes the first photo of a new animal, the ā€œmimmothā€. These creatures spread across the world, harmless apparently, but strangely intelligent ā€“ 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 ā€“ 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 isnā€™tā€¦ 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. Iā€™ve started this one, and itā€™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 ā€“ 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 ā€œchange the fabric of reality itselfā€.

by Chloe Benjamin

Laurel is a biologist turned dishwasher at an Antarctic research station. She doesnā€™t tell anyone in her new life about the tragedy which made her leave her old one ā€“ 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. Iā€™m halfway through this one and am loving the biology and the Antarctic side of it. Canā€™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 ā€“ but then heā€™s given a job to protect one of them. The publisher promises that this fuses ā€œthe dystopian morality of cyberpunk with the explosive action of animeā€, 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 ā€œscience-fantasyā€ in a world where the royal advisors are plotting to overthrow emperor Yun. Yunā€™s sister Xilian escapes to the drowning continent of Opera, a place filled with strange tech and dreams of immortality.

by Adam Simcox

Itā€™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 ā€“ only for the future to change in bad ways that may have something to do with Oliver, with whom sheā€™s now fallen in loveā€¦

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 ā€œconstructā€, or robot, that he built himself, and which he hopes will win big in the construct fighting circuits.

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The Ā鶹“«Ć½ Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in Julyā€™s read, Claire Northā€™s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Hellerā€™s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earthā€™s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper ā€“ and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasnā€™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, Iā€™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 ā€“ and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction ā€“ I couldnā€™t wait to read it with our book club.

I wasnā€™t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing ā€“ and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peterā€™s essay, how he wrote the novel cold ā€“ no initial research, no planning: ā€œIt 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. Iā€™d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.ā€ 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 ā€“ spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren ā€œfound the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldnā€™t have carried on if it hadnā€™t been a book club choiceā€. But ultimately she was glad she did, and ā€œcouldnā€™t put it down towards the endā€. ā€œI loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,ā€ she wrote on , describing the novel as ā€œa testament to the triumph of the human spiritā€.

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The writing in this book is very distinctive ā€“ jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Higā€™s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. ā€œI 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,ā€ wrote warsaw_sun. ā€œThereā€™s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ā€˜men of actionā€™ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?ā€ wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. ā€œIā€™m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book ā€“ but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,ā€ he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Wintonā€™s Juice ā€“ another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. ā€œWhat 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,ā€ he wrote. ā€œAs humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we donā€™t. Perhaps I wouldnā€™t survive a holocaust, but I donā€™t think empathy is weakness, I donā€™t think that kindness is naivety, and I donā€™t want to read any more dystopias.ā€

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

Itā€™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 Bradleyā€™s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinsonā€™s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isnā€™t something the book club will need to worry aboutā€¦

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The Ā鶹“«Ć½ 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.

August is traditionally a quiet month in publishing, and this one is no different. But there are still science-fiction gems to look forward to, including a fascist empire, courtesy of Richard Swan, and some scary Korean sea monsters from Kim Bo-young. I can also recommend M. John Harrisonā€™s The End of Everything, published earlier this year but just longlisted for the Booker prize. Itā€™s rare for sci-fi to make this prestigious literary longlist so that is a tribute to Harrisonā€™s writing ā€“ as our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson highlighted last month. And do join us at the Ā鶹“«Ć½ Book Club, where weā€™re reading Peter Hellerā€™s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, set after a superflu has wiped out most of humanity (and written well before covid-19). A Ridley Scott-directed film adaptation of it is about to be released, so weā€™re ahead of the crowd.

by Richard Swan

I hear good things about this one from Emily H. Wilson, who has a review forthcoming. Itā€™s set in a fascist and galaxy-spanning empire, where Katherine Fullerā€™s husband has died, leaving her an immensely wealthy woman. Katherine is given the chance to buy a world, and create a better society ā€“ but will the empire let her make a democracy? Itā€™s pitched by its publisher as Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Man in the High Castle, which is enough to hook me.

by Kim Bo-young, translated by Sophie Bowman

Iā€™m also really excited about this one, in which bodyguard Mu-young is heading to an isolated Korean seaside village with her niece when she learns that a huge earthquake has hit the region. She travels there regardless, but the earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, which turns those who catch it into ā€œfishy monstersā€. The village is locked down ā€“ and Mu-young is trapped. Perfect beach reading, perhaps?

by Tim Pratt

This space opera with a ā€œtouch of romanceā€ follows graduate student Glenn and his girlfriend Vivy, a spy who has been tasked with stopping a rogue comet but finds herself also trying to find a stolen jewel that can destroy universes.

by C.A. Fletcher

I always love a post-apocalyptic story in which a few hardy souls are struggling to survive. As previously noted, weā€™re reading Peter Hellerā€™s The Dog Stars in the Ā鶹“«Ć½ Book Club this month, and itā€™s a prime example of the genre. In Fletcherā€™s intriguing-sounding take, humans have stopped being able to have children (shades of P. D. Jamesā€™s The Children of Men, perhaps?), and Mouse and Cat are our indomitable duo living in an almost-empty world, 200 years on.

by Andrea Hairston

I rather like this title ā€“ and the story sounds fun, too. Itā€™s a murder mystery set in the multiverse, in which Oona (a St Berdoodle, which Iā€™m assuming is a type of dog) and her owner Zsuzsu are investigating the death of a local celebrity. Oona, it turns out, can travel between dimensions, and she knows the identity of the killer. We are also promised ā€œconundrumsā€ and ā€œalien trickstersā€ from the publisher.

by Nicole Brooks

A ā€œonce-in-a-lifetime floodā€ hits Ravenā€™s family home, and she finds herself trapped on the roof with her children, her dog and her stepmother, struggling to survive. The novel is set over 6 hours and sounds very nail-biting ā€“ more thriller-y than sci-fi perhaps, but itā€™s an exploration of the power of a changing nature, so Iā€™m keen to read it.

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by W.H. Chizmar

Described as a post-apocalyptic horror survival novel by its publisher, and therefore ticking all my favourite boxes, this follows the fallout when a government project to transport matter across the universe brings back something alive ā€“ and dangerous. When this ā€œsomethingā€ is being transported (in a lorry ā€“ come on, people!), its lorry overturns and ā€œunleashes an otherworldly horror upon an unsuspecting New England countrysideā€. Three years on, a man is trying to stay alive on the USā€™s now-deadly East Coast.

by Jodi Taylor

This is the latest Smallhope and Pennyroyal time-travelling adventure, and sees Lady Amelia Smallhope attempting to relax after she nearly died in the last book. However, she and Pennyroyal are targeted by someone with knowledge of the latterā€™s ā€œmurky pastā€, and further adventures ensue.

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I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and Iā€™m not saying I did, itā€™s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didnā€™t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but Iā€™m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didnā€™t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. Thatā€™s where weā€™re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. Sheā€™s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. Sheā€™s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. Iā€™m figuring Iā€™m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldnā€™t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesnā€™t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I donā€™t call him that, though, whatā€™s the point, thereā€™s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! Thatā€™s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. Itā€™s dangerous, itā€™s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so itā€™s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess thatā€™s enough.

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Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees arenā€™t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. Thatā€™s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. Itā€™s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. Iā€™ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldnā€™t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

Thatā€™s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe sheā€™d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he canā€™t fly, I donā€™t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. Thatā€™s how Bangley talks. Because itā€™s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a dayā€™s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they donā€™t bother us. Thatā€™s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die ā€“ no If ā€“ it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said itā€™ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. Weā€™re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because itā€™s warm, but if itā€™s summer I mostly donā€™t. When I wear it, I feel like Iā€™m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasnā€™t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the Ā鶹“«Ć½ Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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