It’s November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The federal government is broke, cities are privately owned, the military is shaking down citizens in the streets, and Wyoming is on fire. The last place anyone expects to find an answer is the nation’s capital.

Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A master political spin doctor, Oscar has been in the background for years, doing his best to put the proper spin on anything that comes up. Now he wants to do something quite unusual in politics. He wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skeleton in his closet: a grotesque and unspeakable scandal that haunts his personal life.

He has one unexpected ally: Dr. Greta Penninger. She is a gifted neurologist at the bleeding edge of the neural revolution. Together Oscar and Greta know the human mind inside and out. And they are about to use that knowledge to spread a very powerful message: that it’s a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s an idea whose time has come… again. And once again so have its enemies: every technofanatic, government goon, and reactionary laptop assassin in America.

Like all revolutionaries, Oscar and Greta might not survive to change the world, but they’re determined to put a new spin on it.

“This is a powerful and, at times, very funny novel.”
—Publishers Weekly

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies.

Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.

The city is gripped by an alien terror. The fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station.

It is too late to escape.

“Flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly, inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.”
—Kirkus Reviews

It’s Dissolution Summer, and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything’s allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O’Niall.

Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the softly spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. Together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that’s supposed to make the government look cool.

“[P]art sixties rock-and-roll idealism… and part near-future Arthurian legend: an altogether satisfying blend.”
—Booklist

This is the story of twin brothers, rowers in the 1936 Olympics (where they met Hess, Hitler’s deputy).

One joins the RAF, captains a Wellington, and is shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg and becomes Churchill’s aide-de-camp.

His twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross, rescuing bombing victims in London.

But this is not a straightforward story of the Second World War: this is an alternate history. The two brothers—both called J.L. Sawyer—live their lives in alternate versions of reality. In one, the Second World War ends as we imagine it did. In the other, thanks to efforts of an eminent team of negotiators headed by Hess, the war ends in 1941.

“[S]ubtle, unsettling alternative WWII history.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

“Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe, a London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds, risks life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox.

Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem becomes a spy, confidante and pawn of royals, in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance.

“Sprawling, irreverent, and ultimately profound.”
—Newsweek

It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.

In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .

“Continuously fascinating… Miéville creates a world of outrageous inventiveness.”
—The Denver Post

Chung Mae is the only connection her small farming village has to culture of a wider world beyond the fields and simple houses of her village. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere without power lines, computers, or machines. This technology is Air. An initial testing of Air goes disastrously wrong and people are killed from the shock. Not to be stopped, Air is arriving with or without the blessing of Mae’s village. Mae is the only one who knows how to harness Air and ready her people for its arrival, but will they listen before it’s too late?

“Besides being a treat for fans of highly literate SF, this intensely political book has important things to say about how developed nations take the Third World for granted.”
—Publishers Weekly

Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you’ll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts.

Vic Serotonin is an illegal travel agent into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself, and maybe as dangerous. She wants a tour inside Saudade just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts have started leaving living algorithms that are transforming the real world in unsettling ways.

Pursued by a detective intent on collaring him for his illegal tours, and hunted by a gangster convinced that the travel agent has infected him with a rogue artifact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos.

“[D]ense quasi-noir tale… [N]ot for everyone, Harrison’s trippy style will appeal to sophisticated readers who treasure the work of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Marsalis is one of a new breed. Literally. Genetically engineered by the U.S. government to embody the naked aggression and primal survival skills that centuries of civilization have erased from humankind, Thirteens were intended to be the ultimate military fighting force.

The project was scuttled, however, when a fearful public branded the supersoldiers dangerous mutants, dooming the Thirteens to forced exile on Earth’s distant, desolate Mars colony. But Marsalis found a way to slip back—and into a lucrative living as a bounty hunter and hit man before a police sting landed him in prison—a fate worse than Mars, and much more dangerous.

Luckily, his “enhanced” life also seems to be a charmed one. A new chance at freedom beckons, courtesy of the government. All Marsalis has to do is use his superior skills to bring in another fugitive. But this one is no common criminal. He’s another Thirteen—one who’s already shanghaied a space shuttle, butchered its crew, and left a trail of bodies in his wake on a bloody cross-country spree. And like his pursuer, he was bred to fight to the death. Still, there’s no question Marsalis will take the job.

Though it will draw him deep into violence, treachery, corruption, and painful confrontation with himself, anything is better than remaining a prisoner. The real question is: can he remain sane—and alive—long enough to succeed?

“[S]tellar… Without slowing down the headlong rush of the action, the complex, looping plot suggests that all people may be less—or more—than they seem.”
—Publishers Weekly

Song of Time begins with an old woman discovering a half-drowned man on a Cornish beach in the furthest days of this strange century. She, once a famous concert violinist, is close to death herself—or a new kind of life she can barely contemplate. Does death still exist at all, or has finally been extinguished? And who is this strange man she’s found? Is he a figure returned from her own past, a new messiah, or an empty vessel?

“[A] slow, sensitive first-person account of what it means to be human and vulnerable, and confirms MacLeod as one of the country’s very best literary SF writers.”
—The Guardian

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one.

As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

“An outstanding take on police procedurals… Through this exaggerated metaphor of segregation, Miéville skillfully examines the illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty online 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things.

But when her latest client, a little old lady, turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favorite kind of job: missing persons.

“[D]elivers a thrill ride that gleefully merges narrative styles and tropes, almost single-handedly pulling the ‘urban fantasy’ subgenre back towards its groundbreaking roots.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Millions of pregnant women in the not-too-distant future are dying from a rogue virus released in an act of biological terrorism. Nothing less than the survival of the human race is at stake.

Jessie Lamb is just an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl living in extraordinary times, who begins to question her parents’ attitudes and behavior in her struggle to become independent. As the world collapses and the certainties of childhood are ripped away, her idealism and courage drive her toward the ultimate act of heroism. But is she being heroic, or innocent and impressionable as her father fears, incapable of understanding where her actions will lead?

“The novel does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face. Like Jessie’s, it is a small, calm voice of reason in a nonsensical world.”
―The Independent

On the alien, sunless planet they call Eden, the 532 members of the Family shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest’s lantern trees. Beyond the Forest lie the mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it.

The Oldest among the Family recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross the stars. These ships brought us here, the Oldest say, and the Family must only wait for the travelers to return.

But young John Redlantern will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. He will abandon the old ways, venture into the Dark… and discover the truth about their world.

“A stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world.”
—Sunday Times (UK)

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Once, she was the Justice of Toren, a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

“By turns thrilling, moving and awe-inspiring.”
―The Guardian

A virus sweeps through the world and quickly kills off 95% of humanity, ending all comforts of civilization. The book’s protagonist is Kirsten, a young woman traveling with a band of musicians and actors who move from town to town, playing music and putting on Shakespeare plays. They hunt for food and tread carefully in a dangerous world, but even they can’t avoid a deadly and insane prophet.

Author Emily St. John Mandel flings the reader back and forth in time, examining characters both before and after the pandemic by jumping from thirty years before the virus to twenty years after and back again. But she does so with such a deft touch that these transitions feel natural and illuminating.

“Darkly lyrical… A truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down.”
—The Seattle Times

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

“The novel’s clever interrogation of the usual narrative of planetary conquest, and its thoughtful depiction of two alien civilisations attempting to understand each other, is an exemplar of classic widescreen science fiction.”
―New Scientist

This Pulitzer Prize winner is something of an alternate history, as opposed to being strict science fiction.

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.

“Potent… Devastating… Essential.”
—The New York Times

In a near-future London, Millie Dack places her hand on her belly to feel her baby kick, resolute in her decision to be a single parent. Across town, her closest friend―a hungover Toni Munroe―steps into the shower and places her hand on a medic console. The diagnosis is devastating.

In this stunning, bittersweet family saga, Millie and Toni experience the aftershocks of human progress as their children and grandchildren embrace new ways of making babies. When infertility is a thing of the past, a man can create a child without a woman, a woman can create a child without a man, and artificial wombs eliminate the struggles of pregnancy. But what does it mean to be a parent? A child? A family?

“Charnock pulls hard on the parent’s universal worry―that no matter what we do and how much we want the best for our children, somehow we aren’t doing it right―in a skillfully executed multigenerational saga that explores a potential future driven by rapid development of reproductive technologies… A story that feels personal and intimate.”
―Publishers Weekly, starred review

Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry, and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.

Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.

“Nothing short of brilliant…. A captivating, cerebral work of science fiction that may very well signal a new definitive voice in the genre.”
―Kirkus

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

“An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic… This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade.”
—The New York Times

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realizes this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals-first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species.

“[F]illed with humor, optimism, and grace: a wild ride worth taking. An eye-opening glimpse into a world that’s turned upside down and eventually becomes its own version of whole.”
―Booklist

Be sure you check out a sample of this online before buying. It’s not for everyone.

Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original.

The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.

Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.

Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?

“A novel that is both funny and profound, full of extraordinary ideas and brilliant set pieces, but also generous and poignant.”
—The Financial Times