OUT of ideas for a gift? However your friends or family see life, you can be sure that this year’s crop of science fiction contains a gift (or even a gift set) that will confirm their world view.
The pessimist in your life will love (HarperCollins), Sandra Newman’s sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book that helped to define the idea of dystopia. The novel is told from the perspective of the inscrutable femme fatale whose manipulations send Winston Smith to his doom. Now, 74 years on from George Orwell’s novel, Newman gives us her inside story.
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This year also saw a lot of cross-pollination with noir, that most pessimistic of genres. Enthusiasts will appreciate Nick Harkaway’s (Hachette), which combines the life-extending excesses of end-stage capitalism with an old-fashioned gumshoe detective story, building on top of primordial Greek mythology.
The noir vibe also suffuses (Pantheon), a novel from the sci-fi author who writes pseudonymously as Djuna. It has all the ingredients of noir-splashed cyberpunk: sprawling multinational corporation up to no good? Check. Gold-hearted protagonist on the run from his own past? Check. And there is also a space elevator.
For those who cling desperately to silver linings, Naomi Alderman’s (HarperCollins) offers a bracing and beautiful vision of how we might course correct our future away from its seeming dive into dystopia. One of its most intriguing plot points concerns our unhinged response to uncertainty: we would rather see the world burn than not know what is going to happen next.
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This theme carries into Christopher Priest’s ambitious twist on climate fiction in (Gollancz). Out in paperback, his twisty ribbon of sci-fi and historical novel questions how much we really know about the future.
Similarly, Moses Ose Utomi’s gorgeous novella (Macmillan) starts with a people too afraid to escape the dystopia they know. It only takes one brave soul to question the narrative and change everything.
For the girl who just wants to have fun, this year had a bumper crop. John Scalzi’s (Pan Macmillan) wins the prize for most fun conceit of 2023. Your rich uncle has died and left you his entire supervillain apparatus – complete with lair, technologically sophisticated cat henchmen (henchcats?) and foul-mouthed dolphins.
Less laugh-out-loud fun but just as snackable are the short stories in Julianna Baggott’s (Blackstone Publishing). They reward more than one reading.
If you want to give someone a really good time, though, give them (Macmillan), the latest in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series. In fact, why binge one when you can binge all eight? Make up a box set for that lucky soul who hasn’t read them. They are such fun that readers may not notice the big ideas sneaking past.
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But we all have a friend who just wants to trip out on the biggest, weirdest ideas they can cram into their brains. This year has been good to them, too. Justin Cronin’s (Orion) is a wild ride through so many genres it defies description. It starts out as a cosy mystery set on an idyllic island, much as a rollercoaster ride starts with a nice slow trip up an incline.
And getting a bit more experimental, Lavie Tidhar’s (Tachyon) takes every big idea you ever had and arranges them like an onion. It starts with the noirish story of a missing mathematician and peels down through a hallucinatory episode involving the canonical sci-fi writers of the mid-20th century and on to encompass God and the reason for the existence of the universe.
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But out of this wild and weird crew, the trippiest and most unsettling is by Han Song. Pacey and psychedelic, this story of a business traveller contending with the opaque hospital system of an unfamiliar country quickly becomes something far more Kafkaesque.
And finally, if you have a sci-fi snob on your present list, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
has published an omnibus collection of the works of Joanna Russ. She wrote some of the earliest and most trenchant feminist sci-fi of the 20th century, while the male writers were busy becoming household names. The new collection includes her novels We Who Are About To… and The Female Man, along with some short stories.
The only remaining problem with the gift dilemma is how to resist the temptation of making a present to yourself of all these great books to enjoy again.
