Asking the Wrong Questions

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 geogr...

As June wraps up, the third of my reviews from the May issue of Locus appears on the magazine's website. This review discusses Megan Giddings's third novel, Meet Me At the Crossroads . I reviewed Giddings's previous novel, The Women Could Fly , in the Guardian a few years ago, and was very impressed by what I found. Meet Me At the Crossroads , in which mysterious doors appear at various points on the planet, and reveal a strange, simultaneously dangerous and wondrous landscape when they open, is very similar in both its vibe and its quality. Like its predecessor, it is a gentle, slyly humorous fantasy that is primarily interested in how people live in a world where the numinous is possible. [Giddings's] focus in Meet Me at the Crossroads is faith, and how people grapple with the numinous and unexplainable. And sometimes, how they do not grapple with it. Many of the people Ayanna encounters seek to explain and systematize the doors. A faith healer who claims to have ...

If the first of my reviews in the May 2025 issue of Locus was a bit of a downer, the second now comes along to offer a bit of consolation. A Letter From the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall completes the duology begun in last year's A Letter to the Luminous Deep . Set among a society of scientists and academics who live on islands and atolls on a water planet, the two novels are both an investigation of this setting's genesis, and a charming epistolary romance. One of the chief pleasures of these books is their use of language. Among the recent trend for tales about cod-Victorian scientists in fantasyland (a group that includes Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde series and Malka Older's Mossa and Pleiti novellas), Cathrall stands apart for her ability to capture both the mannered formality of her characters' diction, and the charming earnestness that shines through it. "I brought only my scientific journal with me, and I hate to sully it with anxious ramblings o...

I had several reviews in the May issue of Locus , and the first of them is now online . Alex Foster's debut novel Circular Motion joins the increasingly crowded ranks of climate fiction, but with a twist that is both original and bracing. It posits a technology that permits near-instantaneous travel from any point on the planet to any other, and then introduces a cost: the more these transport pods are used, the faster the planet rotates. As a metaphor for climate change, this on the nose but also effective. If our society possessed a technology as revolutionary, as instantly habit-forming, as the transport pods, I think it’s hard to argue that we would not give into denial and short-term amelioration rather than give it up, even in the face of eighteen-, nine-, and seven-hour days. As the novel eventually reveals, there are entire industries designed to encourage such behavior, and even make it seem virtuous. There's been a lot of pushback in recent years at the talking point...

In the opening sentences of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay , a spaceship breaks up in orbit over an alien planet, spilling stasis pods whose inhabitants are resuscitated mid-crash, waking to panic and pandemonium as they tumble uncontrollably towards the planet. Some of the resuscitations fail; some of the pods are smashed by debris; some of their chutes fail to deploy. It's a familiar scene, for all its drama; a classic opening of any number of science fiction stories that drop their protagonists into a crisis and then let them work out their survival and the rest of their story from there. But as our narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, explains—from his vantage point in one of the descending pods, albeit one that makes it to the planet's surface more or less intact—this is not an accident, but the system operating as designed. The ship is carrying convicts to a labor camp. It has been built to survive the journey and no more. Dumping the prisoners out in space, terrifying...

Readers of Allan's novels, as well as her excellent blog , will have for some time been aware of her growing interest in crime fiction and non-fiction. It's not a surprise, then, that her latest book veers away from the fantastic genres and towards crime writing, and it is equally unsurprising that the result is both excellent and entirely idiosyncratic, a book that stretches our definitions of "novel" and "non-fiction" in equal measure. A Granite Silence begins in an autofictional mode, with a narrator presumed to be Allan taking a trip to Aberdeen to research a new novel in one of the early lulls in the pandemic. There she learns about the 1934 murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly, who disappeared and was later found dead in her working class tenement building. It's a case that still simmers in the city's consciousness, and has been written about extensively in legal academic circles.  This opening segment quickly becomes a compelling, gripping...