Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

This book needs no introduction, obviously. Innumerable people recommended it to me, to the point where I feared I would find it overhyped. And in truth, I avoided it for a time because I was worried. Dungeon Crawler Carl is exactly what I expected it to be: it is a beach read, a fun (albeit traumatized) science fantasy that I inhaled on my deck one afternoon. Matt Dinniman is an excellent storyteller and connoisseur of…

It has been a long time since I read a Peter F. Hamilton novel, but I feel confident in saying Salvation is very Peter F. Hamilton, if you know what I mean. Fifteen years ago, a younger Kara was captivated by Pandora’s Star. Salvation feels like a reskinned version: wormholes and portals, a mysterious alien enemy, murder mysteries. This time around, I’m older and more cynical and want more characterization than Hamilton can give…

Science fiction is as much setting as it is genre. The City in the Middle of the Night is a firm example of this. Charlie Jane Anders could have set this story somewhere on Earth, or written it up as a weird literary fiction fever dream. Instead, she set it in the far future, on a tidally locked world where humans eke out an existence in two cities of radically different politics. One of the…

This is the successor anthology to the original Common Bonds, and it is a worthy one! This collection comprises nineteen stories and poems, all of which have an arospec protagonist or arospec themes of some kind.

As always, I struggle to review anthologies, especially when it’s a collection of works by multiple authors. It’s hard to single any one out, either for praise or criticism! In the case of Common Bonds 2, however,…

Last year I read Ancestral Night, and it totally transformed my appreciation for Elizabeth Bear’s writing. I was eager to get my hands on the next book in the series, and of course my library came in clutch. Machine is a standalone sequel, so you can read it without reading the first book. There’s only a couple characters in common, and you don’t need to know anything that happened in Ancestral Night to make…

I became a fan of Isabel J. Kim instantly when I read “Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole”, a brief and witty send-up of Le Guin’s famous short story that I suspect Le Guin would have approved of. So when I heard her first novel, Sublimation, was coming out, I jumped at the chance to get an eARC from Tor and NetGalley. This is every bit what I…

I am sure I have said this before: every Sarah Gailey book is a slightly different experience. I never know quite what I’ll get. All of their books blend science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction in such unique amounts. I actually would have a hard time pointing you to a favourite—Spread Me appears to be the winner, simply by dint of the five stars it received from me at the start of this year,…

This was fine. Radiant Star is fine. I want to start this way because I want to ground myself in the actual experience of this book and not succumb to temptation to laud it because of Ann Leckie’s name being attached to it. If you go into this expecting something with the same epic scope as the Imperial Radch trilogy or the deep exploration of alien identity of Translation State, I think you’ll…

If companies like Anthropic and OpenAI get their way, generative AI will run rampant while being controlled by megacorps who care little for human creativity. This is the future on display in Ignore All Previous Instructions, and I don’t like it—the future, that is. I liked the book! Ada Hoffmann uses their background in computer science and computer poetry to explore a contemporary issue through a futuristic lens. I enjoyed the many layers of…

Short story collections are, as I always say at the start of every review of one, a hard sell for me. I love novels. Indeed, I identified a lot with what Samantha Mills says in her afterword about writing long novels in her youth and only recently getting around to learning how to short story. That’s true for me as a writer and a reader. Nevertheless, I liked The Wings Upon Her Back enough that…

The promise of an epistolary novel about AI intrigued me. It has been a long time since I read a good, contemporary epistolary novel! Your Behavior Will Be Monitored attempts to tell a unique and moving story about the boundaries between artificial intelligence and personhood. However, I’m not sure Justin Feinstein has said anything new here, and the impersonal nature of much of the “letters” belie the usual warmth found in epistolary novels. I received…

What if we were the pets to alien conquerors? Not an original yet definitely an intriguing premise. After the Fall is a surprisingly pathos-filled romp through an Earth ravaged by the Greys, where one man and his master struggle to eke out a living on the margins. I can’t say I loved it, but like many science-fiction humour novels, that could be more me than the book. I received an eARC from NetGalley and St.…

Last book of 2025, and one of the most blatantly smutty reads (I refuse to use the term “spicy” like I’m a 16-year-old girl) you’ll ever see me review on main. Spread Me is erotic horror. Let’s get that right. I don’t know why so many other reviewers are reacting with Shocked Pikachu Face; it seemed obvious to this aroace gal that’s what I was getting from the moment I saw the title, cover design,…

Humans have screwed Earth and the only option is to rush outwards into the stars, ad astra per aspera style. Oh wait, you’ve heard this one? Synthetic Eden really hopes you haven’t. Alexander Titus and Sean Platt have crafted a space colonization narrative that isn’t so much planetary romance as it is planetary horror, with a side order of social breakdown thriller. It has its moments, and I kept reading until the end because I…

So you land on an alien world teeming with life, determined to build a colony. It’s a struggle—which you expected. What you didn’t expect was to find yourself in an uneasy alliance with a bamboo-like plant covering a good chunk of your area. And as your descendants grow up and expand, this alliance deepens into a mutualism that is reassuring for some and concerning for others. That’s the fascinating proposition at the heart of Semiosis…

Nearly four years since my last Murderbot review, I have finally read the first complete novel in the series. Fortunately, this is the kind of series where you can go years in between books and pick up where you left off. Martha Wells delights with a full-length action mystery that has the same intensity as the novellas yet benefits from more room to breathe.

I’m reviewing this novel with spoilers because otherwise it’s tough…

This was a perfect book to round out my summer vacation, an equal combination of easy to read yet demanding careful consideration. Ancestral Night is one of those books you don’t read in a single sitting, yet it also isn’t made for sipping here and there over weeks or months. I read it in big gulps. Elizabeth Bear is an author whose name is more familiar to me than her work (of which I’ve really…

The comps given for this one are Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror, and I have to agree: Glass Houses is a science-fiction thriller very much of its time. Madeline Ashby

Kristen’s childhood was spent as a subject of livestreaming by her parents—until they died in a house fire that left her badly burned. Now grown, Kristen is working for a tech startup pioneering “emotional currency” based on the blockchain. When…

Eventually when you read enough “Earth is destroyed by a gigantic implacable space foe” stories you start to get bored of them. I was worried this would be the case with Shards of Earth despite the runway Tchaikovsky has built with the other novels of his that I’ve read. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book feels like a very refreshing take on this subgenre of space opera.

Idris is an Intermediary,…

Alastair Reynolds never fails to dream up interesting science-fictional premises, and Slow Bullets is no exception. This novella is creative, tragic, and philosophical—exactly everything I want from my science fiction.

Scur is a grunt soldier fighting in a religious war that just ended. Left for dead by an enemy who tortured her, Scur awakes from hibernation on a prison transport ship that has malfunctioned. She and the other inhabitants of the ship—fellow prisoners from both…