The best new science

Although there are no big names that publish new science fiction novels in May, there are nevertheless real jewels – including a great council of my Each version of you. I want to press it in the hands of all those I know. There are also two fascinating thrillers of scientific sciences this month, by Adam Oyebanji and Barnaby Martin, while Catherine Chidgey’s Creepy The guilt book Intrigued me enough to make it my next reading – if it is not ousted by the true history of war inspired by Bora Chung, on an extraterrestrial planet, Red swordthat’s to say…

Located in Australia at the end of the 21st, this novel (published in Australia in 2022, but now more broadly) follows Tao-yi in a world where most people spend their lives in an immersive virtual reality called Gaia. Each morning, she climbs into a pod in her apartment to enter Gaia, where she works and socializes. In the real world, the implacable heat of the sun means that there are no more trees and almost no animals: it is a terrifying vision of the future. When a new technology allows people to constantly download towards Gaia, the partner of Tao-Yi, Navin, whose real body is lacking, wants to do it. Tao-yi is not so sure. This is my favorite book of the year so far – a brilliant and moving science fiction edge that I cannot stop thinking. Attention, New Scientist Book Club: I think it can be one for us later this year!

I love a speculative thriller and this one, on the scars left by the slave trade in the Atlantic, seems to crack. He opens with an impossible death – a man and his son who seem to have drowned in sea water, but who are 1600 kilometers from the nearest ocean. While the detective Ethan Krol is investigating, he learns more about the mysterious Abi Eniola, who claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria but whose high -tech gadgets and extraordinary physical capacities suggest that there can be something else.

On a disputed planet, a woman is forced to fight for her kidnappers, the struggle (we said to ourselves by the publisher) “scientific abominations and a truly foreign terrain to discover the truth about his identity and that of her companions reduced to slavery”. The South Korean writer Bora Chung relied on a real story to write this novel – that of Korean soldiers who fought in the name of the Qing dynasty against Russia. It looks like an essential reading for me.

An intriguing piece of horror of science fiction here, of the former president of the association of horror writers John Palisano. It takes place on a cemetery the size of a moon in space, Eden, where a cosmic entity brings the souls of people buried on board. Ava, whose lost love, Roland, is one of these spirits, must fight against him before reaching the earth.

I hope the shades of Kazuo Ishiguro Never let me go In this novel which takes place in an alternative version of England in 1979, where the triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last residents of a house in the New Forest. The house is part of the government’s Sycomore program (anything, it seems sinister), and every day they are watched by three mothers: the mother’s morning, the mother’s afternoon and the mother. “Their nightmares are recorded in the book of dreams. Their lessons are learned from the knowledge book. And their sins are reported in the guilt book, ”explains the publisher of Chidgey. While the government is starting to close its houses in Sycomore, children realize that their lives could be very different from the version that has been nourished. I am so desperate to discover what the mystery is that this one has the one on my bedside table ready to leave.We readers will have to wait in September.

This is presented as a speculative fiction, which, as far as I know, means that it is not entirely fantastic and it is not quite science fiction – or if this is the case, then it is at the end of the two. Anyway, it seems really intriguing. We follow Lina and her father as they arrive at the sea, a building that changes its “made of Time” shape, where “past and future collision” (which feels enough traveler for this overview). There, they meet their neighbors, of a Jewish scholar from the 17th century excommunicated for his radical thoughts to a poet of the Tang dynasty. But why Lina and her father there?

I will almost always fall into a story in which a mother must protect her child in a dangerous future world – and, yes, I will read this one too. This particular dangerous world is the one where fatal warmth obliges people to live at night and where the mysterious sound field arrived 20 years earlier, producing a constant buzz. Scientist Hannah worked on the sound field, trying to resolve her mysteries; Now she has to keep her Son Gouéac Isaac safely.

Our science fiction columnist at New scientistEmily H. Wilson, recently thoughtful The concept of “climate fiction” and what should count as a piece of “cli-fi”. This novel should certainly be in this mixture: it takes place in the future where ferocious forest fires are raging. When a young mother and daughter show up at the Iris hotel in the German city of Bad Heim (where customers are now rare), Iris wonders if they constitute a threat.

I like the pitch for this novel: “Boy Meets Girl Meets therapist of the AI”, in which Adrian decides to try Sike, a new application of AI psychotherapy which follows each movement and emotion of its users to guide them towards “mental contentment”. He falls in love with Maquie, a venture capital in search of the next Big Tech Hit, but she refuses to use Sike.

Jeff lives a worldly life until he sees the “pale woman” and her reality changes. Now he’s a mercenary Jezz, fighter of extraterrestrial insects on the front line. This is described by its publisher as The matrix Meet Joe Haldeman’s military science fiction novel War foreverWhich is certainly intriguing. In addition, I still like an extraterrestrial insect.

The art and science of science fiction

Explore the world of science fiction and learn to create your own captivating science fiction tales during this immersive weekend break.