Recent Reading Roundup 63

The process of putting these posts together is fairly unscientific. When I read a book that seems worth commenting on, I start writing, and if what I end up with is less than a thousand words or thereabouts, it gets placed in a post like this until enough commentaries accumulate that the post feels ready for public consumption. And yet somehow, this recent reading roundup has a surprising thematic unity. These are all books published in the first half of 2025, all science fiction (albeit in some cases a very slipstreamy version of it), and all weird and experimental in either their form or ideas. They're also all books I recommend, especially if you're looking for a sense of what the genre is doing in 2025 that's a little off the beaten path.

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien - Fleeing persecution in their native China, Lina and her father arrive at The Sea, a floating structure moored outside space and time, where every inhabitant looks out and sees a different geography, and a different path both behind and ahead. As they settle into life in this non-space—scavenging the means of survival from washed-up luggage, trading for food, hoping to be joined by Lina's mother and brother, and debating whether they should try to secure passage on one of the ships venturing outward—the two encounter fellow refugees, some of whom have sojourned at the Sea for a very long time. Lina's only connection to her home are three randomly-chosen volumes in a children's series titled The Great Lives of Voyagers, and as she immerses herself in these stories, finding in them echoes of her own experience of exile and refugeeism, the reader recognizes their subjects in Lina and her father's neighbors: chronicler of 20th century totalitarianism Hannah Arendt, 17th century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and 8th century Chinese poet Du Fu. As Lina grows up and her father's health fails—and as these shifts in their relative strength affect their dispute over whether to wait for their family or continue on their journey—the three neighbors entertain them by telling their own tales of escape and reinvention.

Dense with allusions to history, poetry, and philosophy, these narratives are nevertheless gripping. Arendt's nail-biting flight ahead of the expanding Nazi empire—she is interned in a French concentration camp, taken in by the Emergency Rescue Committee, and crosses from France into Portugal in the hopes of reaching a ship bound for America—is intercut with relationship drama and philosophical debate. She divorces one husband and marries another, from whom she is separated for long periods, and has alternately furious and despairing conversations with other members of the now-denounced intelligentsia that at times feel high-flying, and at other points get at the disorientation of feeling as if everything you had understood about the world has been called into question. Spinoza works his way towards ideas that to us feel obvious—what if there is no god? what if there is no soul? what if there is no reward or punishment in the afterlife?—exciting and terrifying his friends and fellow travelers in Amsterdam's insular Jewish community, from which he is eventually excommunicated. Du repeatedly fails the civil service exams despite his obvious merit, and as his family grows his disappointment turns to desperation, which wars with his awareness that the empire's leadership is rapacious and corrupt. When he's finally offered a government position, it's to oversee the forced conscription of peasants to fight in yet another pointless war, forcing him to choose between his family's needs and what he knows to be right.

Taken on their own, each of these narratives would be a brilliant and compelling piece of historical fiction. But the way Thien weaves them together, allowing past and present to interpenetrate and affect each other—as in a sequence in which Arendt, Spinoza, and Du all end up in the same train carriage as Lina's brother—creates a slipstreamy narrative in which the only constant is the power of the state to declare some people illegal, and the faint but ever-present hope of escape. That impression is reinforced in a middle segment in which Lina's father tells his own tale, describing his attempts to use cyberspace as a means for liberation, only for it to be coopted by the state (a narrative that broadly describes how China has suborned the internet over the last few decades but which nevertheless has the flavor of science fiction). One point that emerges from all these stories—as well as a framing narrative in which a middle aged Lina assists dispossessed travelers—is the power of individuals to strike back against dehumanization: the French and Spanish peasants who assist Arendt and her husband along their journey; the gentiles who help Spinoza rebuild his life after he is cut off from all support in his community; in a reverse example, Lina's father's refusal to feel solidarity towards friends who have been criminalized by the state, which ultimately seeds the rupture in his family. Already a fiercely intelligent and deeply moving work, this aspect of The Book of Records makes it an essential one for our present moment.

Aerth by Deborah Tomkins - Magnus grows up in a small farming community on Aerth, a planet that is slipping into an ice age, whose population has been ravaged by a pandemic. He dreams of joining the space program and traveling to Mars, but the elders in his community argue that this runs counter to their creed of radical empathy. All his life, Magnus has been urged to walk lightly, listen carefully, and consider whether his actions contribute to the greater good. Is following his own dream, and leaving his aging parents and dwindling community bereft, the best way to do that? The first segment of Tomkins's deft, affecting novella is a coming of age tale that is also doing some effective worldbuilding. In ultra-short chapters that shift styles and modes, it follows Magnus as he grows older and chafes against his community's restrictions and core values. In doing so, it reveals those values, and the strange yet also familiar world they've emerged from.

When Magnus finally arrives on Mars, he learns that it is only a way-station. A stopping point to Urth, a planet that orbits the sun at the exact opposite position to Aerth. Chosen to lead the expedition to this planet, Magnus finds himself in a place that readers will find familiar—crowded, overheated, its society governed by dirty politics and rapacious capitalism. It's only upon arriving in this place that Magnus, the supposed iconoclast, realizes how much of a product of his home he actually is. He is baffled by money, shocked by the abundance of food, alcohol, and drugs, and only barely grasps the political and social forces eager to take advantage of him. (It's also in these chapters that we realize that there were things about his world that Magnus never told us, because he took them so much for granted; for example, he makes assumptions about social standing that reveal that unlike Urth, Aerth is a matriarchy.) Eager to forge meaningful bonds between the two planets, Magnus instead finds himself reduced to a celebrity, fodder for the entertainment circuit and conspiracy theorists, his planet's philosophy digested into sound bytes and then dismissed.

With science fiction classics like The Dispossessed and Stranger in a Strange Land embedded deep in its DNA, Aerth nevertheless manages to strike its own tone, perhaps simply because it is a product of our present moment rather than fifty or sixty years ago. Urth turns out to be a different place from our home, with amusingly different geopolitics and history. Nevertheless, its problems, chiefly a looming climate crisis, are ones that Le Guin and Heinlein's novels did not engage with. Magnus—abandoned on the wrong planet, desperate for purpose and connection, his efforts to live a quiet, normal life having gone catastrophically wrong—eventually falls into being a climate activist. Even then, however, his disconnect from the people he's come to live among looms larger. No matter how hard he tries, they can only filter the philosophy he tries to teach them through their own terms—which is also perhaps why they understand what the reader will have begun to suspect, that Aerth's history has darker chapters than Magnus could have ever imagined.

Aerth concludes with a final journey that leaves us wondering what the lesson of Magnus's life actually is. Was his wanderlust, his desire for more than the life of a farmer, a mistake? Is his society's guiding credo a lie? Can anything come out of the meeting of these two worlds, or will they keep moving in their own orbits, unable to truly connect with one another? For Magnus himself, there are no answers, simply a final chance to find a place where he can belong.

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori - In the opening scenes of Murata's dystopian novel, schoolgirl Amane is teased by one of her classmates, who has discovered that Amane's parents conceived her by having sex. As Amane goes on to explain, in the alternate history of the novel's setting, post-WWII technological advances have made artificial insemination common and reliable, and as a result, sex has become first uncommon, and then taboo-ized. Schoolchildren are expected to "fall in love" with fictional characters, mostly from animated shows, whom they refer to as boyfriends and girlfriends. Married couples are matched by personality quiz—with questions like whether they expect to co-sleep, or prefer to cook or clean—purely for the purpose of (artificial) procreation. While married people are expected to have lovers—Amane reports that both her and her husband's lovers attend their wedding—sex is increasingly absent even within those relationships.

All of this is related in blank, sterile prose, with interactions between Amane and her friends and lovers having an almost childlike quality. As one makes one's way through yet another bland, banal expression of satisfaction with how convenient life is in this new, sex-free world, it's hard not to suspect Murata of writing an "if this goes on" screed—perhaps inspired by the growing trend, in Japanese society, of young people who choose to remain unpartnered and childless. But the novel's interest seems less in the shape that its society has taken—a shape that changes several times over the course of Amane's childhood and early adulthood—as in how a society shapes individuals, even without exerting direct force on them. Amane's natural conception is unusual, but not illegal—when she tells people about it as an adult, they are usually nonplussed, not disgusted or condemnatory. Nevertheless, Amane takes on the belief that sex between married partners is wrong, even divorcing her first husband when he tries to initiate it. Amane herself is a bit of a rebel—she has sexual fantasies about her fictional boyfriends, and initiates sex with her real ones. But far from being a story about personal awakening and self-discovery, Vanishing World shows us how even these urges are processed through the framework that Amane has been raised with.

That framework reaches all the way down into language, with Amane explaining to her frustrated mother that of course sex between married partners counts as incest—aren't husbands and wives members of the same family? Later she will insist to her friends that her fantasies about fictional characters are sex rather than masturbation, because they are an act of connection. It's this connection that Amane seems to be seeking in her sexual encounters, rather than physical pleasure. Murata's descriptions of these encounters are vague yet upsetting, as Amane ignores her own and her partners' pain and discomfort to pursue an ideal she doesn't understand. And yet even as Amane seeks to make accommodations with her society's ideas about sex and intimacy, those ideas keep shifting. Having achieved the perfect, sexless marriage, she then observes younger women dismissing the idea of marriage entirely—isn't it weird, they ask, to have a stranger living in your home? Advanced childbearing technologies, including artificial wombs for men, also raise the question of whether the family unit is still necessary. An experimental community arises where citizens—men and women—are impregnated via lottery, with children raised communally. Frustrated by their inability to find physical and emotional satisfaction within the constraints offered to them, but also incapable of considering that those constraints themselves are misguided, Amane and her second husband choose to move there.

The novel's final section, set in this community, shifts fully into a heightened dystopian mode. A particularly disturbing touch are the community's children, known as Kodomo-chan, who are dressed and styled entirely alike, and trained in identical expressions of happiness, affection, and cuteness. All adults in the community are encouraged to think of themselves as these children's mothers, and all the children are treated as identical and interchangeable. Amane and her husband initially plot to maintain some separation from this lifestyle. To stay in contact with each other, carry each other's babies, and raise them together. But the more time they spend around people who devalue those choices, the less important things like family and intimacy seem to them, until they finally drift apart. This leaves Amane with her sublimated, but still present, desire for connection, and in the book's final chapters she commits several horrific acts in pursuit of that desire, all of which she rationalizes within the scheme her society has taught her. The result takes the conformist dystopia in unexpected and disquieting directions, suggesting that in a sufficiently totalizing system, even rebellious individualism can take a monstrous form.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor - After a storied and successful career as a science fiction author, Okorafor delivers something completely different, a combination of naturalistic family drama, near future speculation, and post-apocalypse that is hard to pin down. Zelu is a struggling author and adjunct writing instructor, a lone artist in a high-achieving Nigerian-American family, whose other children are doctors, lawyers, and engineers. She is also a paraplegic following a childhood accident, which has left her with both PTSD and a sizable chip on her shoulder. When her academic career sputters and dies, Zelu is suddenly inspired to begin writing a novel, Rusted Robots, in which warring robot and AI tribes struggle for dominance in a post-human Nigeria. The rest of Death of the Author alternates between chapters of this novel, Zelu's experiences as it becomes a runaway global bestseller, and interviews with her friends and family members.

Death of the Author's setting (or rather, the setting of the Zelu-focused chapters) is clearly science fictional. There are self-driving cars, AI assistants, manned Mars missions, and halfway through the novel Zelu is fitted with a personal exoskeleton that permits her to walk, and even run at super-speed. Nevertheless, the heart of the novel lies not in these SFnal aspects, but in Zelu's more mundane experiences. Though not a memoir (Okorafor even warns against conflating her with her character in her acknowledgements), the Zelu chapters clearly draw on her background as a Nigerian-American, a disabled person, and a successful writer, and the result is deeply-felt. Zelu has complicated, prickly relationships with her heritage, with her parents' home country, and with her family. She is constantly brought up short by the misogyny and ableism that run through Nigerian society, but also by the awareness that what truly prevents her from connecting and immersing herself in that society is less her gender or disability as the simple fact of her Americanness. But she still feels a profound bond with the country, a sense of belonging that, however imperfect, remains an essential component of her identity. By the same token, Zelu's family is alternately stifling and supportive, unable to understand her—there are some extremely painful scenes in which she tries to share the news about her novel's success, or about being invited to try the exoskeleton, only to be met with dismissal and infantilization—and the only people who truly know her. 

All of this is inflected by the fact that Zelu is an incredibly difficult person, whose very real challenges—as a nonconformist daughter in a family that never seems able to fully see her, as a black woman in academia, as a disabled woman everywhere—can't quite justify her repeated choice to just do what she wants and ignore the thoughts and feelings of everyone around her. There are times when the novel clearly expects us to cheer for this sort of behavior. Certain interludes read almost like a persecution fantasy, as when a reporter interviewing Zelu ahead of her novel's publication takes the time to track down her former employers and get unflattering quotes, or when she's ambushed during a live TV appearance with questions about whether using the exoskeleton is tantamount to disowning her disabled identity. Zelu's powerful sense of self in these moments is clearly bound up in the challenges she's overcome and the unique perspective she brings to her art. It's clear she wouldn't be the writer she is if she weren't able to brush off others' criticism and even their perspectives. Other times, Okorafor seems to be daring us to dislike her heroine. She seems to delight in making Zelu do cancellable things, whether that's sleeping with a student, cavalierly ignoring her publisher and fans' expectation that she start work on a sequel to Rusted Robots, or befriending a Jeff Bezos-like billionaire because he's the only one who understands the challenges of rocketing to immense fame and wealth. This is a device that can sometimes strain credulity—that so many people seem to view the exoskeleton as something that makes Zelu not-quite-human, for example, seems out of step with how such technologies are viewed here and now. At its best, however, it is a fearless, uncompromising character portrait, of a woman who is rarely likable, but always entirely herself.

That portrait, however, is not all there is to Death of the Author. Okorafor's choice of title is clearly ironic—instead of divorcing a work from its author, she has brought the author into it. But the results of that fusion are inconclusive. The Rusted Robots chapters read very much like Okorafor's other science fiction, with an emphasis on individualistic characters caught in situations where they are forced to adopt creeds and group identities they do not entirely fit into. The parallels to Zelu are obvious (Rusted Robots's protagonist even experiences an accident that forces them to replace parts of their body). But ultimately, the connections between the novel's naturalistic and SFnal components (and between its two different kinds of science fiction) feel minimal. As the novel approaches its end, the interview chapters begin to hint that Zelu has made a controversial choice, leading one to suspect that the title is to be taken literally. If so, however, this is something that happens off-page, and is acknowledged only obliquely. A neat metafictional flourish at the novel's very end ties the Zelu and Rusted Robots strands together in an unexpected way, but still doesn't reveal what Okorafor's project with the novel is. What remains, therefore, is an utterly original storytelling choice, one that stands apart from much of what the rest of the genre is doing, even if it doesn't entirely cohere.

Audition by Pip Adam - Aboard the spaceship Audition, three crewmembers, Alba, Drew, and Stanley, have grown to an immense size that threatens to smash the ship apart. As they shout to each other from where they've become lodged in the ship's increasingly confining habitats, the trio reveal that there is much, in addition to the reasons for their sudden growth spurt, that they don't understand. They know that the ship is powered by the sound of their voices, and that sending them away from Earth was the only solution authorities could come up with to the problem of their gigantism. But didn't there use to be more crewmembers? Why were they chosen for this journey? Did they meet in a classroom, or before? What is the purpose of their mission?

Adam's novel—originally published in New Zealand in 2023, then last year in the UK, and now in the US—starts by throwing readers in the deep end. Beyond its bizarre premise, this is a story that refuses most of the connective tissue that helps to ground readers in a setting, such as description and exposition. Characters talk about their immediate physical sensations, or cycle through complex emotional reactions, stream-of-consciousness style, with only vague and oblique references to the history that grounds those emotions. The book's long opening chapter is made up almost entirely of Alba, Drew, and Stanley's dialogue, as they compulsively, repeatedly explain their situation to each other. They trade canned phrases—"they did a good job building this ship", "there was nothing before the classroom"—again and again in a way that makes it clear that they are trying to work their way towards a more meaningful exchange of information, but keep being thrown off by powerful psychological conditioning. They speak in the plural, ascribing feelings, motivations, and impressions to all three of them together, as if to suggest that these have been dictated from above. Even when they start to remember their past, their memories seem contradictory—they recall, at one and the same time, being a wealthy industrialist, a streetwalker, and a subway ticket seller. After a few pages of this, the reader realizes that these "memories" are actually jumbled-up scenes from classic romantic comedies like Pretty Woman or While You Were Sleeping.

Despite the confusion and lack of handholds in these chapters, Audition is a brisk, flowing read, perhaps because we can already sense what lies at the core of Alba, Drew, and Stanley’s incomprehension of their situation. That impression is confirmed when the novel's perspective shifts and moves back in time, first to Torren, a caretaker-slash-prison-guard who observes, with mingled pity and disgust, her giant charges being trained in docility and unthinking obedience, and then to a different, earlier version of Alba, imprisoned for a violent crime and abused by guards and fellow prisoners until she starts unexpectedly growing. There's a fairly straightforward SFnal dystopia, complete with trenchant social commentary, at Audition's core. The chapters about Alba in prison, in which she struggles with loneliness, self-loathing, and unprocessed guilt over her past violent acts—all of which are exacerbated by the almost routine presence of violence in her life, the cheapness with which her life and wellbeing are held by everyone around her—might easily have come from a social realist novel (in her acknowledgements, Adam writes about her commitment to prison abolition). But the novel's refusal to tell that story in an easily digestible, linear way, its determination to continue instead to leap from past to present, from one point of view to another, and from the mundane to the surreal, makes of it something stranger and much harder to sum up.

Audition's final turn comes when the ship crashes and its crew are greeted by aliens. They journey through a world where land and sea, animal and vegetable, constructed and natural objects all flow together, where the very definitions they've relied on to make sense of their world no longer hold true. Once again, there are questions the characters can't answer—was this always the plan? were they sent into space to die? are they the vanguard of an invading force? And once again, how the story is told feels more significant than what is happening in it. Just as in their training, the world Alba, Drew, and Stanley encounter is a manipulation of their perceptions, a means of teaching them a set of attitudes and expectations. But unlike on Earth, this experience is meant to free their minds, to help them shed their anticipation of violence and mistreatment. This is both a powerful social statement, and an impressive feat of SFnal worldbuilding, creating aliens who are indescribably unlike us, but also capable of grasping the humanity of people that our society discards. The result is exhilarating, an utterly original work of science fiction, with a core of deeply felt conviction that shines clearly through all of Adam's masterful stylistic acrobatics.