This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja. By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

��

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate – comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo’s freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn’t even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer’s outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

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In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman – 15 per cent

Entrepreneur – 10 per cent

Director – 9 per cent

Abundant – 5 per cent

Diligent – 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called “Aspiring”.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana “Respected” na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North’s first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what “unhallowed” means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me – 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal checkups, vitamin shots, etc. . . .

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother’s breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row – the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child “Respected”, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint – though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

��

We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my “cute” years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a “tip” for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father’s thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother’s sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn’t smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn’t quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

“Smile with your eyes,” my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn’t seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived – so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However, education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

This is an extract from by Claire North (Orbit), the 91av Book Club’s pick for July. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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Writing this as the UK swelters under an unprecedented May heatwave, perhaps it’s small wonder that so many science-fiction authors are currently imagining miserable versions of an overheated future in which their characters are struggling to survive. I’m intrigued by the sound of sci-fi legend M. John Harrison’s upcoming take on a dystopian future, but if post-apocalyptic hellscapes aren’t your thing, I’m also happy to report that there are other options for sci-fi fans this month. I’m already enjoying time-travel adventure The Traveler by Joseph Eckert. Next, I’m going to explore Isabel J. Kim’s sci-fi spin on immigration, Sublimation, as soon as I can get my hands on it. And then for a little light relief, I’m planning on lining up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Green City Wars.

by M. John Harrison

I am excited about this book: M. John Harrison is a really classy writer, winner of all sorts of awards, and his latest novel sounds right up my street. It’s set in a future years after an obscure “crisis” changed everything, in a world where the seas are full of new creatures. Phillip, who makes a living collecting objects that wash up on the tideline from the Channel, discovers a creature that keeps changing…

The best new science fiction books of May 2026

New science fiction from big names including Ann Leckie, Alan Moore and Martha Wells are just some of the exciting crop of titles out this month

by Joseph Eckert

I started reading this over a weekend and it turned out to be exactly what I was in the mood for – a rip-roaring time-travel adventure with the love between a father and a son at its heart. It follows the story of Scott Treder, husband and father, who first “slips” on the way to work: one minute he’s in his car, the next he’s rolling down the road, his car gone – and it’s a day later. The slippages start at 7:52 am every morning and keep doubling in length until he’s hurtling through time, losing weeks, years, decades, as his son Lyle grows up before his eyes, and no one knows how to stop it. Lyle, though, is determined to catch the father who is leaving him behind.

by Isabel J. Kim

This sounds really intriguing from the Nebula award-winning Isabel J. Kim. The conceit is this: when you emigrate, you leave a literal version of yourself behind. You can keep in touch with your original “instance”, in the hope of one day reintegrating; Soyoung Rose Kang, however, left home at 10 and hasn’t spoken to her other “instances” again. Now she’s living in New York, but when her grandfather dies, her Korean instance says she needs to come home for the funeral.

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by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve only just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s previous novel, March’s Children of Strife, and now sci-fi’s most prolific author has another book out. It does look fun, though – set in a solar-powered future, it sees humans living in luxury. It’s a luxury kept in place, however, by unseen “Little Helpers”: artificially enhanced animals who keep the green cities running and have one key rule: “do not bother the humans”. We follow freelance raccoon investigator Skotch, whose latest case is finding a fugitive mouse scientist – while also keeping that cardinal rule.

by Emily Paxman

More post-apocalyptic survival here, but in the form of cosy romance. In this version of the future, Kayla lives in the wasteland of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. When her sister April falls ill, they trek to Salt Spring Island, which still has a hospital, but are unable to access its medical care. A panicking Kayla makes a deal with an aspiring politician, Sid, to save her sister – she’ll marry him to get her treatment. But real feelings start to emerge in this arranged marriage.

by Meg Elison

This novel sounds wild – but in a good way. Philip K. Dick award-winner Meg Elison imagines a world where some right-wing billionaires have decided to take control of the US by cloning the original Founding Fathers and raising them in secrecy, so they can restore the US to its “original glory” once they are adults. But then “Ben” (Franklin, I assume) discovers a smartphone in the “privy” of their isolated island plantation, and the young men decide to take their lives into their own hands.

by Amil, translated by Joheun Lee

The world of the future is (again) ravaged, and in Korea people escape their miserable real lives by using virtual reality headsets. High schooler Soop is bullied by her classmates because she is unable to access VR. She pins her hopes on meeting K-pop star Yichae, who is coming to film a music video at her school.

by Cheong Ye, translated by Slin Jung

Schoolteacher Youngah lives her life according to everyone else’s rules but secretly hates it. So, she undertakes a four-week emotion-regulation programme. Once completed, she unleashes her unfiltered self on the world, throwing off the expectations that have always been imposed on her – and she loves it.

by Keely Jobe

In a small feminist community on an isolated mountaintop, Mila is struggling to keep things from falling apart, while nearby��an orchid endling is about to die. When the women of the community mysteriously become pregnant, and Mila gives birth to the only boy, their ideals are put to the test.

by J.P. Lacrampe

Helper robot Cy isn’t delighted when he’s tasked with helping his owner’s 35-year-old son Grayson “get out of his funk”. But then Grayson discovers that his CEO sister, Charlotte, is planning to sell the family company to a tech conglomerate, and he decides to plot a corporate takeover. Cue a “mad-cap adventure”, which the publisher says is a “whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster”.

by Nathan Tavares

It’s 1977 in an alternate US, one where the US launched its space program shortly after the second world war. Mitch joined the US Spaceguard because his lost love, Flynn, did; he’s been stuck in a backwater moon base ever since – until he’s dishonourably discharged and returned to the US. Then Flynn comes back, claiming to be the host for an emissary from a utopian alien civilization…

by Peter F. Hamilton

This is the sequel to Hamilton’s EXODUS: The Archimedes Engine, set in a far future where the human population has been reduced to little better than serfs by the Celestials. Can Finn and his allies finally throw off their shackles?

by Cristina LePort

This high-concept medical thriller sees cryogenically preserved scientist Peter and his wife Monica wake up two centuries into the future. The world they discover is dystopian, with the devastating “mitocancer” a global threat.

This month’s most exciting popular science books are surprisingly eclectic, and big on invention, ambition –and hubris. We’re tackling topics including the wonder (and envy) of flight, how to eat so the planet doesn’t collapse, the human capacity to build colossal structures and a drugs industry worth trillions, that er, doesn’t work as planned. Get stuck in – there’s plenty to amuse, delight and terrify.

by Simon Rogers

How do I get rid of hiccups? Why is grief so lonely? Should I have a third child?�� How can I help a bee? In What We Ask Google: A surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind, Google data editor Simon Rogers shares some of the intimate, touching, momentous and downright human questions that we’ve been asking Google for over two decades now. There is plenty of opportunity for embarrassed winces reading Rogers’s exploration of the billions of anonymous data searches: we share more than we know, it seems. Rogers is also a lecturer in data journalism at Medill-Northwestern University, San Francisco, and wrote the well-regarded Facts are Sacred in 2013. Oh, and economist Tim Harford (presenter of BBC Radio’s More or Less and an FT columnist) says, “This view from the other side of the search box is both charming and insightful.”

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by Courtney Conley and Milica McDowell

Hands up if you haven’t been pushing through the daily tyranny of notching up however many thousands of steps are in vogue that month. Well, you may change your mind after reading Walk: Your life depends on it by gait specialist Courtney Conley and physiotherapist Milica McDowell, which focuses on the multiple health benefits of walking and argues, say the publishers, that “it is one of our most powerful and under-prescribed medicines”. The applications of that medicine span everything from preventing/treating obesity and falls to mitigating lower back pain – so that would be most of us caught up in those preventable conditions at some time in our lives. And, as ancient societies (not to mention Romantic poets like Wordworth and Coleridge) knew all too well, thinking, creating and walking do indeed go well together. Sounds like a win.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

We’re looking forward to the wildest of political rides crashing into epic physics from 91av columnist Chanda Prescod Weinstein in The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, poetry and the cosmic dream boogie. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, brought her many accolades, and this one is already off to a great start with praise from the likes of Ruha Benjamin, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, who described it as a “lyrical exploration of the universe that dances at the intersection of physics, pop culture, and Black intellectual thought”. Then there’s theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who reckons it is a “great read for any human being who lives in the universe”. I can’t wait to get a finished copy and dig deep, not least to discover exactly what the section delivers with its tantalising title, “How to Live Safely in a Science Factual Universe”, where Virginia Hamilton’s short story collection The People Could Fly fits in and why Chanda stayed up late thinking about metaphors in science.

by Vincent Doumeizel (translated by Charlotte Coombe)

Just how much better placed do you need to be to write about plankton? Vincent Doumeizel, author of The Power of Plankton: How plankton made life on Earth possible and why it’s key to our future, is senior adviser on oceans to the U.N. Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiative. Publisher The Book Social says his new book uncovers hidden connections between “these microscopic organisms and the survival of our planet”, shares “unforgettable” stories about a scientist who survived 65 days crossing the Atlantic eating only plankton and reveals the truth behind ancient myths of “blood rain”, which apparently traces back to plankton blooms. 91av readers will also remember his previous book, The Seaweed Revolution, which reviewer Chris Simms thought was excellent, as it made the case for the potential of seaweed to transform our world. So where does that leave plankton’s power, then? The clue is in the subtitle – as usual!

by Turi King

You may not know the name Turi King, but you will almost certainly have heard of her work: identifying the bones of Richard III in a car park in the UK city of Leicester and leading the project to sequence Adolf Hitler’s genome. So, we can definitely expect amazing stories in her new book, The Secrets of Our DNA: How genetics has changed the world. But underpinning those stories (think everything from O.J. Simpson to mistaken dinosaur DNA to Angelina Jolie’s BRCA1 gene) will be a deep account of how genetics has ended up entangled in the lives of us all. King “shows how we are all interconnected and why we must all benefit from this exciting and rapidly evolving science” and reminds us that DNA need not be destiny – nor is it the silver bullet some imagine.

by Helen Pilcher

Many of us – and that may well include some doctors – still have to get seriously acquainted with the nocebo effect, which can make us feel unwell or even experience pain. Science writer and former cell biologist Helen Pilcher is here to help, with her latest, This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why our minds are making us sick. Like placebo, the word nocebo has Latin roots, but while placebo is linked to someone’s positive expectations, nocebo is linked to negative expectations. In medicine, the placebo effect can mean that a patient expecting a particular treatment to have a good outcome gets that outcome – even when they receive an inert medicine or sugar pill. A nocebo is, sort of, the reverse. But it’s also a lot more complex than that, as we’ve reported in 91av, so it will be fascinating to see what Pilcher makes of it – especially because of the possible implications of social media feeds for mass psychogenic illnesses, or even the controversial phenomenon known as ��Havana syndrome.

The best new popular science books of April 2026

April has a lot to offer when it comes to popular science reading, promising to help us do everything from future-proof our brains courtesy of Hannah Critchlow, to get to grips with really big numbers, thanks to Richard Elwes

by Dr Nick Barber

You might well wonder whether Nick Barber decided he had to have the “Dr” in front of his name on this book to keep everyone on the right page here, given its title. How to Take Drugs: A new approach to medication for better results and fewer side effects looks likely to be the kind of book we should all have chained to our wrists, given the sheer amount of prescription medicines we are likely to consume in a lifetime. That, and the fact that adverse drug reactions are a huge burden on health care systems – with the percentage of hospital admissions due to adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescription medicines in the UK alone estimated to be as high as 6 to 7 per cent by some studies, to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Barber is emeritus professor of pharmacy at University College London and recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, so he should know a thing or two about the state of his sector, what the real ADR figures may be – and how to address all the factors involved.

by Dave Goulson

How to eat well without harming the planet is one of the world’s knottiest problems, so it is tempting to welcome any book promising to guide us through the multidimensional issues. But Eat the Planet Well: How to fix our toxic food system – one meal at a time is by Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, who wrote well-received books like The Garden Jungle and A Sting in the Tale, not to mention more than 300 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects. His publishers say Goulson shows that changing our damaging ways is possible through supporting less-intensive farming, wasting less and rethinking what we eat – that our everyday choices really do matter. I’ll definitely be reading this one.

by Simon Barnes

What child hasn’t wanted to fly like a bird? And many an adult still yearns to soar like an eagle. So, Simon Barnes’s How to Fly: Taking wing with birds, bats, insects and humans sounds like it’s going to be fun. Its publishers say it’s “a unique and all-encompassing exploration of the wonders of flight and the way different species have evolved different solutions to the problem of defying gravity – including humans”, and it’s certainly stuffed full of facts. We meet bees that beat their wings 230 times per second, the extinct pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, with its 10-metre wingspan, and Arctic terns that travel 75,000 kilometres every year.

by Fred Mills

At 185 metres high and 2300 metres long, the Three Gorges Dam, spanning the Yangtze river in Hubei province, China, is the biggest dam in the world. Among other claims, the dam, says NASA, shifted Earth’s axis by about 2 centimetres and slightly shortened the planet’s day by approximately 0.06 microseconds. But that would come as no surprise to Fred Mills, the author of Mega Builds: Ten colossal construction projects that will change our world. Mills looks set to take us on a tour designed to convince us that modern engineering is a truly revolutionary force. As founder of The B1M YouTube channel, specialising in construction and with over 4 million subscribers, this should be a breeze for him, as he goes on a quest round the world to explore everything from a “170km-long smart city in Saudi Arabia, to Japan’s levitating railway”.

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by David Shukman

A “blistering and whistleblowing account of how Britain has joined the frontline of the world’s climate emergency, an exposé of how dangerously unprepared we are, and a vital roadmap towards a better future”, say the hopeful publishers about The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes by David Shukman. He’s a leading climate journalist and was a BBC climate correspondent for 20 years. This book sounds amazingly terrifying and has fans ranging from Tim Peake (“While I saw the fragile beauty of our planet from space, David Shukman reveals how incredibly vulnerable we are on the ground”) to the redoubtable climate negotiator and UN veteran Christiana Figueres (“A vital wake-up call for a world already on the frontlines. This is climate change stripped of rhetoric and abstraction, delivered at the painful ground level”).