Laura Hubbard

One day soon, we may develop technology that integrates with biological systems, that becomes so much a part of you that it isn’t clear where you end and the science begins. This potential paradigm shift lies near the center of two new science fiction thrillers. Both books start with integrated tech as a given, pulling readers through adventures as existentially stressful as they are fascinating.

In Emma Newman’s Before Mars, a standalone novel set in her Planetfall universe, geologist and artist Anna Kubrick finds a disturbing note in her room when she arrives at a Martian base. The note is in her handwriting, and warns her not to trust the base’s psychologist. More anomalies become apparent as she examines the world around her: she is missing canvases and sketchbooks, her messages home to her family aren’t answered in a way that makes sense and the base’s doctor feels too familiar to be a man she has just met. At risk of developing psychosis from prolonged exposure to immersive memory technology, and probably suffering from postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Anna struggles to settle in. Are her suspicions about the psychologist, the base’s AI and the motives of the corporation that sent her to Mars justified, or are they just an outgrowth of her own supposed paranoia?

Newman gives us a look at the near future that is both grim and thoughtful. AI implants within characters’ minds blur the line between what is real and what is imagined, to the point that entire psychoses are associated with not being able to tell brain-generated holograms from reality. Corporations have taken control of not just world governments, but entire planets. But even with all these changes, people, at their core, don’t change. They still suffer from depression and have bad relationships. They are paranoid and jealous. This contrast—the fantastical artificial intelligence and brain-bending technology against the mundane flaws of humanity—is what makes Before Mars brilliant. Newman’s latest novel is well worth the read for anyone who loves a twisty thriller, or who is interested in how our future as a species could unfold.

While Newman’s novel is a psychological playground of paranoia and suspicion, Emily Devenport’s Medusa Uploaded, the first in her Medusa Cycle, is half revenge thriller, half spy novel. Oichi Angelis is a servant—called a worm—on a generation ship hurtling through space. Shortly before her parents die in the destruction of their ship, they give her an implant ostensibly meant to give her access to the great music of human history. But as Oichi learns shortly before their deaths, the implant is more than it seems. It gives her not just access to music, but also to the ship’s communications systems and to a Medusa unit, a biotech fusion suit with its own AI, that can be only be paired people who have the implant. When the ship’s Executives suspect Oichi of being an insurgent, she fakes her death and joins her Medusa in a quest for revenge and the truth about what happened to her parents’ ship.

Medusa Uploaded is pure adrenaline, hurtling from intrigue to murder to impersonation. All the while, it challenges readers to think not just about the place of technology alongside—and even within—the human race, but also about what that means for human evolution. And despite its deliciously dark undertones (the first chapter, for example, asks readers to consider what sort of killer our main character is—serial? Mass murderer?), it is a book that is unshakably hopeful, for all its mayhem and scheming. Oichi and Medusa's partnership has the potential to fix the injustices of their world, which makes them a team worth rooting for. Albeit one with a very high body count.

There are plenty of science fiction books that tell stories of people voyaging to a new beginning, filled with intrigue, dystopias and subjugation. Relic and Record of a Spaceborn Few don’t tell those stories. Perfect for fans of both science and literary fiction, both books deal with what comes after humans have found their place in the stars.

Alan Dean Foster’s Relic tells a thoughtful story of survival. Once a midlevel administrator on the planet of Sebaroth, Ruslan is now the last of his kind. Homo sapiens—a species that had once settled countless worlds—has been destroyed by a disease of its own making, the Aura Malignance. Alone and miraculously disease-free, Ruslan has been given a new home by the Myssari, tripedal aliens whose enthusiasm for “human studies” is only outweighed by their politeness. When Myssari scientists decide they wish to clone Ruslan to reestablish his species, Ruslan is given a choice. While the aliens will not stop the cloning program out of deference for Ruslan’s feelings, they do want his willing cooperation. In exchange for the willing donation of his genetic material, the Myssari agree to look for humans’ ancient home world, a place called Earth.

Foster’s book reads like a slow, methodical mystery, building to something that isn’t quite clear until the last pages. While the discussions of Ruslan’s continued existence and the intricacies of his relationships with the blunt, three-gendered Myssari could have been tedious, Relic is anything but. It is nuanced, with a surprise lurking behind every shadow, making it impossible to put down. Foster’s story also strikingly echoes our own world, where we fight tooth and nail to avoid losing species, even if it means those species live out the rest of their days in dreary captivity. Ruslan’s experience asks, if it were us, would we want the same? Relic will not just keep you entertained. It will keep you thinking.

Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third installment in her Wayfarers universe, tells the story of an entire fleet, as opposed to Relic’s solitary survivor. Hundreds of years after humans left Earth to find a better home, the Exodus Fleet has settled in a new solar system, locked into orbit around a new star and been accepted into the greater galactic community. Most Exodans have left the Fleet, determined to make their homes planetside. Record of a Spaceborn Few tells the stories of a few people who chose to stay in the Fleet, torn between integrating into greater galactic life and preserving the only way of life they have ever known. When an accident destroys one of the Fleet’s homesteader ships, its remaining residents are forced to struggle with what it means to still be an Exodan now that the Exodus is over.

Chambers’ characters are beautifully drawn, and they seem like they could be people next door as much as they could be people from a galaxy away. Her writing allows the reader to inhabit those nuacned characters with feeling, but without maudlin sentimentality or forced emotion. The result is an experience that will leave lovers of both science and literary fiction wishing they had just one more chapter to go back to.

Science fiction and fantasy novels are filled with roguish misfits, from heroic starship captains who just can’t stay on the good side of the law to ghoulish assassins who dispense justice from the shadows. Because this trope is so popular, authors sometimes lack the ability to surprise and delight readers with new twists on this old tune, and it takes a clever mind to turn it into something exciting, but both Suzanne Palmer’s Finder and Sam Sykes’ Seven Blades in Black do just that.

Finder is the kind of science fiction you’d get if “Firefly” and Pierce Brown’s Red Rising had a baby—an adrenaline-packed, heist-filled ride with a heavy side of political intrigue. Set against the backdrop of deep space colony Cernee, Palmer’s debut novel follows repo man Fergus Ferguson as he attempts to complete a seemingly straightforward mission: find (and reclaim) the stolen spaceship Venetia’s Sword from one Arum Gilger, local trade boss. When the colony is suddenly pulled into a civil war, Fergus must balance his job against protecting the lives of the locals who he has—unfortunately—begun to care about.

Palmer spins a story that pays homage to the rogue archetype so common to space operas without feeling like a stale copycat. As Fergus Ferguson careens from one end of Cernee to another, we are treated to not just frenetic fight scenes, daring escapes and tense intrigues, but also to the crushing uncertainty of what it would feel like to live in a human colony at the edge of the alien unknown. This contrast enhances an already complex (and not always predictable) plot that captures readers and drags them through to the book’s unlikely and unsettling end.

Like Finder, Sykes’ first entry into the Grave of Empires trilogy is, at first blush, a simple story. Sal the Cacophony is slated for execution but refuses to go until someone hears her final words—even if that means roping an officer of the Revolution into listening to her and being late to her own death by firing squad. Part Gunslinger and part Kill Bill, Seven Blades in Black is a revenge story both classic and wholly original. Sykes brilliantly weaves a tale of adventure, loss and revenge that is set against the backdrop of a countryside torn from decades of magical warfare between the magic-wielding Imperium and the Revolution, which is led by their former slaves.

What stands out most about Seven Blades in Black isn’t the characters, although Sal and her companions are beautifully crafted and far more nuanced than first meets the eye. It also isn’t the magic system, which is both complex and thoughtful in its execution. It isn’t even the breath-stealing plot, which makes the novel’s roughly 700 pages fly by. Instead, what makes Seven Blades in Black so compelling is the depth of the world Sykes has constructed. Sykes isn’t afraid to ask more questions about his world than he answers, leaving readers knowing that there’s more adventure around the corner. That ability to immerse readers in a new world without over-explaining things is difficult in the first book in any series, but Sykes deftly rises to the occasion.

Although radically different in setting and tone, both Finder and Seven Blades in Black offer fantastic, fantastical stories that are sure to delight. Either would be a great pick for anyone who loves rascals, rogues and high-octane adventure.

Some people love to celebrate the lazy days of summer with relaxing books set on the misty moors of Scotland or far-off beaches in the South Pacific. But for those of us who would prefer a jolt of adrenaline, The Girl in Red and Salvation Day offer enough frantic sci-fi adventure to chase the summer blues away.

Christina Henry is well known for her often dark and always enthralling takes on classic fairy tales. Her latest endeavor, The Girl in Red, follows in this tradition. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where a dangerous plague has driven survivors to quarantine camps and lawlessness, Henry’s new novel is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood—if Red were a biracial 20-something with a prosthetic foot, anxiety issues and the woodsman’s axe. Refusing to go to a quarantine camp, Red is instead determined to hike the hundreds of miles to the safety of her grandmother’s home. But with the world gone mad, there are darker things lurking in the woods than mere wolves.

The Girl in Red is equal parts psychological horror and post-apocalyptic survivor story, and it manages to harness the best qualities of both. Remarkably slow-paced for such a stressful novel, Henry’s story allows us to see and feel what Red sees and feels, nothing more. The narrowness in scope feels like having blinders on, forcing us to question whether the bumps in the night that terrify Red are monsters or misunderstandings. That same narrowness also grounds the story. By focusing on the pain—both physical and mental—that comes from Red’s long journey, Henry avoids making her remarkable characters feel small and unimportant in the face of the end of the world.

While The Girl in Red is singularly focused on the struggles of one woman, Kali Wallace’s Salvation Day is far grander in scope. The plot centers on what should have been a flawless heist. Zahra and the members of her “family” knew every inch of the plan to commandeer the House of Wisdom, a research vessel abandoned a decade earlier after a deadly plague swept through its hulls. What they could not plan for was what they learned once they got on board—that the virus that wiped out House of Wisdom was far worse and far different from what the government reported. And that they may have woken it up.

Salvation Day isn’t terrifying because of its premise—plenty of virus and zombie films should be scary and are instead just laughable or sad. It is terrifying instead because of Wallace’s sense of timing. She builds the story of the theft of the ship more like a story about war: long periods of tension punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Zahra and her compatriots spend a lot of their time on the ship exploring and learning about its fate rather than dealing with the still-present biological threat. Those lulls of relative calm make the action more intense and startling when it does occur, forcing readers to wonder with bated breath just what lurks beyond that next corner.

While different in scale, The Girl in Red and Salvation Day are similar in one very important way: Once you pick them up, it’s unlikely that you’ll put them down any time soon.

From orcs to elves to dragons, non-human beings in fantasy books often fall into two camps. Some are presented as basically human, if often exoticized. The rest are generally presented as bestial: They may or may not be able to speak, but at their core they’re not too different from beasts of burden. Regardless of the archetype, their thoughts, feelings and cultures (when they have any at all) are described in relation to a human or human-like surrogate. Both Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner and The Deep by Rivers Solomon (with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes) buck this tradition, creating non-human characters that are defined not by their relationship to humans but in the context of their own societies.

In her debut novel Unnatural Magic, C.M. Waggoner spins a coming-of-age tale of love, friendship and murder that is both universal and completely new. Unnatural Magic’s first strand of story is that of Tsira, a half-troll whose heritage has made it difficult to fit in among her home clan. When confronted with first a half-dead solider and then with an attempt on her own life, Tsira is forced from her solitary existence. The book’s second strand is that of Onna, a girl with a prodigious gift for magic and the guts to blaze her own academic path when she’s denied a higher magical education due to her sex. But as she embarks on her new scholarly adventure, Onna quickly becomes pulled into a hunt for a troll murderer—and unknowingly sets out on a crash course towards Tsira. Equal parts romance, bildungsroman and murder mystery, Unnatural Magic can’t decide on a genre archetype, and that’s a good thing. The resulting amalgamation is delightfully unpredictable.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, in contrast, is a story of pain and new beginnings. Holding the collective memories of an entire race of people isn’t easy. It is even less easy if your underwater-dwelling people are descended from the children of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by their captors and left to drown. Yetu’s duty is to remember the pain of her ancestors so that the rest of her people can live in the moment, free from the trauma of the past. She is freed from the memories only during an annual ceremony in which Yetu shares the history with her people. Overwhelmed at the prospect of taking back the memories of her ancestors, Yetu flees to the surface in the middle of one of these Tellings. On the surface, she will learn not just of the world her people left behind, but also of her people’s future. Philosophical and atmospheric, The Deep is not just a story of trauma. It is a story that looks carefully at the individual’s place in society and explores what it means to collectively heal and to move forward by accepting, but not forgetting, the past.

Unnatural Magic and The Deep are as different in tone, writing style and subject matter as two fantasy books can be. But what the two share is a deep sense of empathy. As readers, we are not meant to identify with either Yetu or Tsira as though they were human. Instead, both Solomon and Waggoner ask us to imagine beings different from ourselves and then to meet them without trying to force them into human-shaped boxes in our minds. The results are as challenging as they are enjoyable, and any reader willing to try something different will be rewarded handsomely for the effort.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Go Behind the Book with C.M. Waggoner.

This spring, YA superstars Sarah J. Maas and Veronica Roth make their adult debuts.

Veronica Roth is best known for her intense, mega-bestselling Divergent trilogy, and Sarah J. Maas’ sweeping Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses series have garnered her a massive following. With their new novels, the two YA authors fully cross over for the first time into fiction for adults. Both books sit squarely within the realm of science fiction and fantasy, but each represents a very different approach to the genre.

Maas’ House of Earth and Blood, the first book in her new Crescent City series, introduces half-Fae party girl Bryce Quinlan. After Bryce comes home to find her closest friends literally ripped limb-from-limb by a demon, she is left alone and devastated, her only solace that the perpetrator is behind bars. But two years later, a string of similar murders begins, and Bryce realizes that her friends’ killer was never caught. With the help of Hunt Athalar, a fallen angel and assassin enslaved to the city’s governor, Bryce must navigate the darker side of Crescent City to try to bring the killer to justice. 

Maas’ world is rich and sensuous, a dark urban fantasy with mythic overtones. Perfect for readers looking for both dramatic and romantic tension, it will make you hold your breath and leave your heart pounding.

Where House of Earth and Blood straddles the line between romance and mystery, Roth’s fantasy novel Chosen Ones takes a more traditional approach to the genre. The novel opens 10 years after the defeat of the Dark One, a mysterious and magical entity responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. The Chosen—the five teens responsible for the Dark One’s downfall—have grown up and moved on, creating lives that are as close to normal as they can get. 

But not everyone can move on. Sloane is plagued by PTSD and the feeling that she’ll never be anything more than one of the Chosen. But then the death of one of the Chosen forces the remaining four to reckon with a new terror: the idea that the Dark One might not be as vanquished as they once thought. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: See what Veronica Roth has been reading.

Chosen Ones gives us a glimpse into a world after the heroes have won, and the result is stunning. Simultaneously heart-wrenching and heart-pounding, Roth’s latest will leave you gutted and wishing for just 10 more pages.

For readers who already love Roth or Maas, Chosen Ones and House of Earth and Blood will be automatic additions to their collections. For adult readers who have been hesitant to delve into the world of YA, both books serve as perfect introductions to their authors’ work. Take your chance now, and pick either (or both) as your next thrilling ride.