Thriller Mars One by Charlotte Robinson is out this month
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I am currently reading the science-fiction classic Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson with the New Scientist Book Club (it’s our April read). It’s fantastic, so any other trips to the Red Planet are very welcome from my perspective, and I’m looking forward to Charlotte Robinson’s thriller Mars One. Elsewhere in this month’s science fiction, there’s horror in space from S. A. Barnes, some resurrected Neanderthals from Douglas Preston and his daughter Aletheia Preston, and ghosts in AI-generated videos from Max Lury. Something for all tastes, I’d say.
Mars One by Charlotte Robinson
This near-future space-thriller follows a one-way mission to Mars, as well as the disappearance of a programmer in Hong Kong, who leaves nothing behind but a cryptic warning. As the Argo spaceship heads towards Mars, the crew realise they are being sabotaged. How are the two storylines linked? Mars One’s publisher is comparing this to two of my favourite books: Andy Weir’s The Martian and Terry Hayes’s spy thriller I Am Pilgrim. I’m hoping it lives up to the hype, as a combination of those two novels would be a truly excellent read.
Claire and her beacon-repair crew pick up a strange distress signal and decide to investigate. They discover a luxury space-liner that vanished on its first tour of the solar system, 20 years ago – and they also discover that something isn’t right on board the Aurora, with whispers in the dark and words scrawled in blood on the walls. Horror in space? That’s my cup of tea.
This speculative short-story collection moves from sci-fi to fantasy to literary fiction, including tales of first contact, a time-travelling fisherwoman, and a new consciousness out to see the wonders of the universe. It also features Mills’s story Rabbit Test, which won the Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards.
A new title in George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards series is out in April
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This is a collection of stories set in the Game of Thrones author’s Wild Cards universe, in which the world has been ravaged by an alien virus with random effects: you die, you receive superpowers or you become strangely mutated. With writers including Cherie Priest and Walter Jon Williams, these particular tales follow Croyd Crenson as he finds himself split into six different incarnations.
Paradox by Douglas Preston and Aletheia Preston
It was very silly, but I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed Preston’s previous novel Extinction, a Jurassic Park-ish thriller in which various long-extinct creatures were brought back to life to frolic in a wildlife park. In this sequel, written with his daughter, there’s even more going on: an alien artefact that “UFO researchers believe will change the world”, a fanatical secret society, and some resurrected Neanderthals from the last book who aren’t too keen on Homo sapiens… I expect I’ll read it.
An artist’s imagining of Neanderthals – resurrected versions of which feature in the sci-fi novel Paradox, out this month
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This is the second in the Captive’s War series from the author of The Expanse. It’s a space opera, in which humanity is fighting for its survival against the monstrous Carryx empire. We follow the story of human captive Dafyd Alkhor, and of the Swarm, an agent of the Carryx’s enemy that is out to bring down the empire.
I’m intrigued by the sound of this novel, in which a sci-fi conceit is used to tell a tale of loneliness. The solitary Ada lives in London. When she meets Atticus, she feels a connection between them – but her estrangement from the rest of the world begins to widen, and eventually her attachment to both the world and to her body totally fails, and Ada finds herself in a new artificial environment, The Facility. Has it really been created and designed just for her?
Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh
I really loved Mackintosh’s previous novel The Water Cure, a sinister fable set on an island surrounded by water that might or might not have been poisonous. It verged on sci-fi, even if it didn’t quite arrive there, and it sounds to me like Permanence might do a similar thing. This new story follows Clara and Francis, who have been having a secret affair, carried out in hotel rooms – until they awake in a bedroom they don’t recognise. They discover they are in a city populated only by their fellow adulterers, where they can live openly as a couple – but contact with the real world is impossible.
Milde must choose between public execution or journeying into a black hole, in the novel Event Horizon
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Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel
Published by literary independent press Fitzcarraldo, which has a few Nobel prizewinners up its sleeve, this is the story of 17-year-old Milde, who revolts against the injustices of a government that banishes mothers and daughters from society. After she is imprisoned and tortured, she is given the choice of a public execution, or joining an experimental mission that will send her into space, and into a black hole known as the Mass.
This is a standalone story set in the universe of Stroud’s The Fractal series, opening in 2121 AD, three years after the first Mars conflict. As the colony struggles to recover, vigilante turned revolutionary Magnus Sirocco is given a cause, Peter Iskander is leading a religious mission and Commodore Ellisa Shann is drawn into a deadly duel when a ship is stolen.
I’m intrigued by the sound of this novel, in which Harlow, looking for her lost friend Annie, discovers fragments of the dead in AI-generated videos, while Kieran, also on Annie’s trail, finds a community looking for ghosts that have gone missing. Its publisher promises that it will explore what new forms haunting might take, as new technologies emerge. It might not be straightforward sci-fi, but it does sound interesting.
Metro 2035 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
This is the final novel in the Metro trilogy, which inspired the Metro computer games. It takes place 20 years after world war three wiped out most of humanity, with the only survivors those who made it into Moscow’s subway system. Artyom is relentlessly trying to lead his people back out into the light and is searching for signs of life on the surface.
The Many by Sylvain Neuvel
This first-contact story sees five people in the small city of Marquette, Michigan, discover that their minds are merging, as “something larger and stranger than they could ever have imagined” begins.
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