New Books in Science Fiction

By New Books Network

What's New Books in Science Fiction about?

Bestselling and award-winning science fiction authors talk about their new books and much more in candid conversations with host Rob Wolf.

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New Books in Science Fiction episodes:

04.07.2024
Wole Talabi, "Convergence Problems" (Astra Publishing House, 2024)
In his new story collection Convergence Problems (DAW Books, 2024), Wole Talabi investigates the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves. In “An Arc of Electric...
04.02.2024
Adapting Liu Cixin’s "Three-Body Problem" for Television
It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new...
03.14.2024
Scott Alexander Howard, "The Other Valley" (Atria Books, 2024)
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she'll decide who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it's the same valley, the same...
03.13.2024
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)
Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first...
02.27.2024
Marie-Helene Bertino, "Beautyland" (FSG, 2024)
At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and...
02.26.2024
Harry Turtledove, "Wages of Sin" (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024)
What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wages of Sin (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024), by Dr. Harry Turtledove, a patriarchal society reacts...
01.26.2024
Samantha Harvey, "Orbital" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023)
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last...
01.24.2024
Stefano Gualeni, "The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction" (Routledge, 2023)
On a slow autumn afternoon, an atmospheric physicist working at the Malta Weather Station receives a surprising email from a colleague working in the United Kingdom: something troubling has apparently been detected during one of their research flights. The ensuing...
01.16.2024
Waubgeshig Rice, "Moon of the Turning Leaves" (William Morrow, 2023)
It’s been over a decade since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy. Evan Whitesky led his community in remote northern Ontario off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve...
12.17.2023
Jarret Keene, "Hammer of the Dogs" (U Nevada Press, 2023)
Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Jarret Keene's, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press, 2023), is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of...
11.18.2023
Proto-Science Fiction Classics: Joshua Glenn on MIT Press's "Radium Age Series"
Under the direction of founding editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age series is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes...
11.09.2023
Reese Hogan, "My Heart Is Human" (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023)
My Heart Is Human (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023) by Reese Hogan is about a human and robot who come to occupy the same body. The body belongs to Joel Lodowick, a single parent and trans man whose only wish, at the story’s...
10.29.2023
Mingwei Song, "Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2023)
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived...
10.19.2023
What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn...
09.21.2023
Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and...
09.12.2023
A Better Way to Buy Books
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the...
09.07.2023
Em X. Liu, "The Death I Gave Him" (Solaris, 2023)
Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him (Solaris, 2023) brings a science fiction twist to Shakespeare’s beloved Hamlet. Working at Elsinore Labs, Hayden Lichfield and his father are in relentless pursuit of the cure for mortality. The night of Hayden’s breakthrough should...
09.07.2023
Earthsea, and Other Realms: Ursula Le Guin as Social Inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])
To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats. Learn more about your...
08.17.2023
Samuel R. Delany, Neveryon and Beyond
John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form...
08.03.2023
Nick Harkaway, "Titanium Noir" (Knopf, 2023)
According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing...
07.31.2023
Arin Greenwood, "Your Robot Dog Will Die" (Soho, 2019)
Today I talked to Arin Greenwood about her new book Your Robot Dog Will Die (Soho, 2019). When a global genetic experiment goes awry and canines stop wagging their tails, mass hysteria ensues and the species is systematically euthanized. But soon, Mechanical Tail...
07.06.2023
Karen Lord, "The Blue, Beautiful World" (Del Rey, 2023)
In science fiction, aliens who come to Earth are usually scary and menacing, aspiring to destroy, conquer, or even eat mankind. But the aliens in Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World (Del Rey, 2023) aren’t interested in conquering or destroying; they’re interested in...
07.02.2023
CK Westbrook, "The Shooting" (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022)
In The Shooting (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022), the first book in a trilogy, CK Westbrook superbly places real-life characters in a fantasy world filled with unthinkable environmental disasters while addressing major issues that face our world today. After almost every gun owner worldwide turns...
06.20.2023
Scott Russell Duncan, "El Porvenir, ¡Ya!: Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl" (2022)
Mexican American writers make their mark in Science Fiction literature! In this first of a kind anthology, written solely by Mexican Americans, we are taken into space and near future barrios, to the other side of the universe, and onto...
06.12.2023
Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology
This episode is a first for the Peoples & Things podcast: it features a guest host. It is something you will be seeing more of in the future. Guest host Aaron Benanav, assistant professor of sociology at and a senior...
06.12.2023
Roy Christopher, "Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism" (MIT Press, 2022)
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet...
06.11.2023
Ida Yoshinaga et al., "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction" (MIT Press, 2022)
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late...
06.01.2023
Emma Mieko Candon, "The Archive Undying" (Tordotcom, 2023)
The Archive Undying (Tordotcom, 2023) is Emma Mieko Candon’s ambitious epic science fiction novel about intertwined human survivors following the violent fall of cities run by AI entities so massive, they had the power and influence of gods. When the robotic god...
05.27.2023
Ray Nayler, "The Mountain in the Sea" (MCD, 2022)
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species...
05.04.2023
Gareth L. Powell, "Descendant Machine" (Titan Books, 2023)
Gareth L. Powell’s Descendant Machine (Titan Books, 2023) is set about 200 years in the future, and yet the recent explosion in A.I. technology suggests Powell’s imagined future—in which the minds of humans and A.I.s are symbiotically enmeshed—is just around the corner. The...
04.19.2023
Brad Kelly, "House of Sleep" (2021)
Today I talked to Brad Kelly about his novel House of Sleep (2021). A cerebral PsyFi thriller that will break your heart and then set it free. Think Chuck Palahniuk with soul, supernatural Don DeLillo, occult Murakami, edgy Atwood. At an exquisite mansion perched...
03.30.2023
Leslye Penelope, "The Monsters We Defy" (Redhook, 2022)
Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is...
03.24.2023
Jinwoo Chong, "Flux" (Melville House, 2023)
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct...
03.02.2023
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, "The Ten Percent Thief" (Solaris, 2023)
In Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s science fiction novel, The Ten Percent Thief (Solaris, 2023), is set in a world centered on meritocracy, where everyone is judged on the Bell Curve. Apex City, formerly Bangalore, divides its population into the Virtual and Analog societies where...
02.02.2023
Denise Crittendon, "Where it Rains in Color" (Angry Robot, 2022)
Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel,Where it Rains in Color (Angry Robot, 2022), is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi. Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of...
01.05.2023
Annalee Newitz, "The Terraformers" (Tor Books, 2023)
In their new novel, The Terraformers (Tor Books, 2023), Annalee Newitz leaps 60,000 years into the future, redefining ideas of peoplehood, democracy and love A diverse array of characters—hominids, animals, and objects that in 2023 are still considered inanimate, such as doors and trains—are “people”...
12.15.2022
Books in Dark Times: A Discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest...
12.01.2022
Hiron Ennes, "Leech" (Tordotcom, 2022)
“Soft sci-fi, gothic body horror” is how Hiron Ennes describes their debut novel, Leech (Tordotcom, 2022). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Set in an isolated winter chateau, the novel weaves a surreal and atmospheric tale of a doctor who is...
11.15.2022
On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine"
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science...
11.08.2022
Neta Yodovich, "Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the 'Good' Fan" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience...
11.03.2022
Alastair Reynolds, "Eversion" (Orbit, 2022)
In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion (Orbit, 2022), the setting keep changing—the epoch, location, and technology—but the characters remain more or less the same as they carry out an expedition to a mysterious object at the behest of a private investor. The novel starts on a...
10.26.2022
Halloween Special: Schrodinger’s Cat Redux
Kim talks with Gina Dominick about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” and the philosophical stakes of Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Le Guin’s story was published in her collection, The Compass Rose (Harper Collins, 1982). There are many PDFs of it scattered across...
10.06.2022
Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)
Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the...
10.06.2022
Victor Manibo, "The Sleepless" (Erewhon, 2022)
Part mystery, part thriller, with a splash of cyberpunk, Victor Manibo’s debut novel The Sleepless (Erewhon, 2022) imagines a near-future New York City where a quarter of the population has lost the need for sleep. Ahead of a corporate takeover, investigative journalist Jamie Vega...
09.15.2022
89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling...
09.08.2022
Joma West, "Face" (Tordotcom, 2022)
People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,”...
08.11.2022
Megan Giddings, "The Women Could Fly" (Amistad, 2022)
The Women Could Fly (Amistad, 2022) is set in our contemporary world with one big difference. A belief in witches gives rise to laws and a culture that encourages women to be married by the age of 30, locking them in...
07.26.2022
F. Brett Cox, "Roger Zelazny" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. In Roger Zelazny (University of...
07.21.2022
85* Pu Wang and John Plotz look back on their Cixin Liu interview
Our first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political...
07.20.2022
Darts and Lasers: The Future of Science Fiction, Afro-Futurism, and Feminist Speculative Fiction
It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of...

What's New Books in Science Fiction about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in Science Fiction episodes:

Wole Talabi, "Convergence Problems" (Astra Publishing House, 2024)

Adapting Liu Cixin’s "Three-Body Problem" for Television

Scott Alexander Howard, "The Other Valley" (Atria Books, 2024)

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, "The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2024)

Marie-Helene Bertino, "Beautyland" (FSG, 2024)

Harry Turtledove, "Wages of Sin" (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024)

Samantha Harvey, "Orbital" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023)

Stefano Gualeni, "The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction" (Routledge, 2023)

Waubgeshig Rice, "Moon of the Turning Leaves" (William Morrow, 2023)

Jarret Keene, "Hammer of the Dogs" (U Nevada Press, 2023)

Proto-Science Fiction Classics: Joshua Glenn on MIT Press's "Radium Age Series"

Reese Hogan, "My Heart Is Human" (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023)

Mingwei Song, "Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2023)

What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington

Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

A Better Way to Buy Books

Em X. Liu, "The Death I Gave Him" (Solaris, 2023)

Earthsea, and Other Realms: Ursula Le Guin as Social Inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])

Samuel R. Delany, Neveryon and Beyond

Nick Harkaway, "Titanium Noir" (Knopf, 2023)

Arin Greenwood, "Your Robot Dog Will Die" (Soho, 2019)

Karen Lord, "The Blue, Beautiful World" (Del Rey, 2023)

CK Westbrook, "The Shooting" (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022)

Scott Russell Duncan, "El Porvenir, ¡Ya!: Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl" (2022)

Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology

Roy Christopher, "Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism" (MIT Press, 2022)

Ida Yoshinaga et al., "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction" (MIT Press, 2022)

Emma Mieko Candon, "The Archive Undying" (Tordotcom, 2023)

Ray Nayler, "The Mountain in the Sea" (MCD, 2022)

Gareth L. Powell, "Descendant Machine" (Titan Books, 2023)

Brad Kelly, "House of Sleep" (2021)

Leslye Penelope, "The Monsters We Defy" (Redhook, 2022)

Jinwoo Chong, "Flux" (Melville House, 2023)

Lavanya Lakshminarayan, "The Ten Percent Thief" (Solaris, 2023)

Denise Crittendon, "Where it Rains in Color" (Angry Robot, 2022)

Annalee Newitz, "The Terraformers" (Tor Books, 2023)

Books in Dark Times: A Discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson

Hiron Ennes, "Leech" (Tordotcom, 2022)

On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine"

Neta Yodovich, "Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the 'Good' Fan" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Alastair Reynolds, "Eversion" (Orbit, 2022)

Halloween Special: Schrodinger’s Cat Redux

Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)

Victor Manibo, "The Sleepless" (Erewhon, 2022)

89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)

Joma West, "Face" (Tordotcom, 2022)

Megan Giddings, "The Women Could Fly" (Amistad, 2022)

F. Brett Cox, "Roger Zelazny" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

85* Pu Wang and John Plotz look back on their Cixin Liu interview

Darts and Lasers: The Future of Science Fiction, Afro-Futurism, and Feminist Speculative Fiction