Speculative & literary fiction: October's best-written recent releases

Read the opening pages from our picks below

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—’A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space’: the best-written recent release in speculative fiction (SF/fantasy/horror).

—‘Wine. There was a card too, which she drew out and opened. An angel on one knee, like it was proposing. She tossed it into the planter behind her just as her leg spasmed’: our first pick from the recent releases in literary fiction.

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SPECULATIVE FICTION BOOKS CONSIDERED

• The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

• She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor

• Extremophile by Ian Green

• Monster by Gerardo Samano Cordova

• Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

• The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey

• Hum by Helen Phillips

• The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones

• Pocket Full of Teeth by Aimee Hardy

• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

• Withered Hill by David Barnett

• Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

• The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei

• The Specimens by Hana Gammon

  The best-written of these is

  

1.

They say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin.

Start with a waking, end with a wake, maybe.

Hard asleep is, I am informed, the technical term. Hard, because you’re shut down, dried out, frozen for the trip from star to star. They have it down to a fine art – takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of miscreants who are desiccated down to something that can . . . well, I was about to say survive indefinitely, but that’s not how it goes, of course. You don’t survive. You die, but in a very specific flash-frozen way that allows for you to be restarted again more or less where you left off at the other end. After all the shunting about that would kill any body – the permanent, non-recoverable kind of kill – who wasn’t withered down.

They pump you full of stuff that reinflates you to more or less your previous dimensions – you’ll note there’s a lot of more or less in this process. It is an exact science, just not one that cares about the exact you. Your thought processes don’t quite pick up where they left off. Short-term memory isn’t preserved; more recent mental pathways don’t make the cut. Start with a waking, therefore, because in that instant it’s all you’ve got, until you can establish some connection to older memories. You know who you are, but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. Which sounds terrifying but then let me tell you what you’re waking up into: actual hell. The roaring of colossal structural damage as the ship breaks up all around you. The jostling jolt as the little translucent bubble of plastic you’re travelling in is jarred loose and begins to tumble. A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space. The fact there’s a below and an above shows that the planet’s already won that particular battle over your soul and you’re falling. The oldest fear of monkey humanity, the one which makes a baby’s rubbery hands clench without thought. Such a fall from grace as never mankind nor monkey imagined.

All around you, through the celluloid walls of your prison, you see the others too. Because it can’t be hell without fellow sinners to suffer amongst. Each in their own bubble sheared away from the disintegrating ship. Faces contorted in terror: screaming, hammering on the walls, eyes like wells, mouths like the gates of tombs. You’ll forgive the overwrought descriptions. I am an ecologist, not a poet, but mere biology does not suffice to do justice to the appalling sight of half a hundred human beings all revivified at once, and none of them understanding why, even as you don’t understand why, and the vessel coming apart in the wrack, and the world below, the hungry maw of its gravity well. Oh God! The recollection of it makes me sick to my gut. And of all things, in the midst of that chaos, to remember I am an ecologist. Out in space where there isn’t even an ecology. Was there ever a less useful piece of self-knowledge?

Some of us haven’t reawakened. I see at least two bubbles whirl past me in which the occupant remains a dried-out cadaver, the systems failed. Acceptable Wastage is the technical term, and that’s another unwelcome concept to suddenly have remembrance of. For there are always some who don’t wake up at the far end. They tell you it’s the inevitable encroachment of entropy over so long a journey. Maybe it is. Or maybe those who don’t wake up are the most egregious troublemakers. It’s hard to recognize anyone when their skin is stuck to their skull without the interposition of familiar flesh, but I think I see my old colleague Marquaine Ell go whirling past. She’s been shipped all the way out here from Earth, even at the minimal expense they’ve boiled the process down to, yet they might as well have just thrown her into the incinerator for the same effect.

With the reminder of that minimal expense comes another piece of knowledge. Another couple of my neurons renewing a severed acquaintance, bringing understanding that’s relevant but unwelcome. That this is intentional. It’s no traumatic wreck of the Hesperus. Not a bug but a feature. Sending people into space used to be expensive, and for people anyone cares about it still is. You’re encouraged to keep them reliably alive in transit, with actual medical care and life support and sporadic wakings to check on their oh-so-delicate physical and mental wellbeing. And, saliently, you’re encouraged to arrange a means by which to bring them back home again, their tour of duty done. Big expensive ships that can do complicated things like refuel, slow down, speed up, turn around.

But if all you want to do is deliver some felons to a labour camp on a remote planet, because it’s literally cheaper and easier than sending machines to do the same work, then you don’t ever have to worry about them coming back. Because they won’t. It’s a life sentence, one-way trip. More unwelcome revelations fall into my head, even as my head, along with the rest of me, falls into the pull of Imno 27g.

I should be beating my newly revivified fists against the inside of my bubble, except it’s whirling round and round, having dropped out of the disintegrating ship, and the world below is growing in size. The void has become a sky, yellow-blue. Can you have a yellow-blue? Not on Earth, but this is Imno’s sky. Blue for the oxygen the planet’s biosphere has pumped into the atmosphere as a by-product of its metabolic pathways, just like on Earth. Yellow for the diffuse clouds of aerial plankton. Or they’re yellow-black, actually, because of their dark photosynthetic surfaces. Blue-yellow-black should not be a colour, and of all things it should not be the colour of the sky.

They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .

Professor Arton Daghdev has always wanted to study alien life in person. But when his political activism sees him exiled to the planet Kiln, condemned to work under an unfamiliar sky until he dies, his idealistic wish becomes a terrible reality.

Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem. Its monstrous alien life means Arton will risk death on a daily basis – if the camp’s oppressive regime doesn’t kill him first. But, if he survives, Kiln’s lost civilization holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it – and might just set him free.

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Twin Peaks: The Return’s awfulness game is deep and broad, ambitious and exploratory, and seeks out and infects areas of life that should be unreachable by any telly drama. I’m trying to think of synonyms for awful as it’s nowhere near strong enough in this context, but none of its synonyms do the job either. Ghastly… dreadful… The Return isn’t dreadful. Or it is dreadful but is so much more than that, so far beyond dreadful you feel embarrassed for your mind for even suggesting the word.

Rank, gruesome, mince aren’t quite strong enough either.

But disaster might be getting closer. Also catastrophe, trainwreck, fiasco, travesty, monstrosity, carnage, abomination, atrocity, crime against humanity, holocaust…

No, with holocaust we might finally have found a word too strong for a TV drama. Likewise bloodbath. But a disaster is roughly what we’re dealing with.

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LITERARY FICTION BOOKS CONSIDERED

• Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey

• A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez

• Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans

• The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle

• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

• A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns

• The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao

• The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar

• The Blue Trunk by Ann E. Lowry

• A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

• The Wildes by Louis Bayard

• Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

• Playground by Richard Powers

• The Drowned by John Banville

• The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard

• Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner

• The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

• Suggested in the Stars by Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)

• Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

• The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao

• The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier

• Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq

Our first pick from these is

All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone

Only about half the apartments were lit and fewer had Christmas lights, just like the last building. They must have walked around the block and ended up back at the same glassy, germless place. Even the Christmas tree in the white marble lobby was a twin, down to the ornaments.

She asked Cory, “Weren’t we just here?”

He’d found cigarettes and a lighter in the coat pocket. When he answered smoke hung on his words, or the cold wrote them in the air.

“That was back by where we parked. Same builder probably. Half these condos are empty. They’re investments.”

He’d worked in construction, so she believed him, just like she believed him when he’d said one party. Somebody had told him about it and she went along. Then, when they were leaving, walking all natural down the hall to the elevator in their new coats and shoes, they passed an open door where another party was happening. The loud music sucked Cory in.

Nobody spoke to her at the first party, but at the second this dude with sideburns came over and asked, “And what are you going to do to make your pretty little life sparkle in 2020?”

Now here they were when they should have been driving, but Cory was on a roll, going for three times lucky, whatever that meant. She’d never known it even once. An ache kicked her in different places. Behind one eye.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He hiked the coat up at the back to get at his phone. “Eleven sixteen.”

“I’m feeling like Cinderella here.”

“I know.” “So let’s go. We’re good now.”

“How’re those shoes?”

She looked down at them. They’d picked a shadow to wait in, a spot between the streetlight and the light pouring out of the glassed-in lobby. Darkness drained the crayon colour from the shoes. Green with purple piping, buckles.

“I feel stupid.”

“Be careful how you walk. Don’t do that thing.”

“What thing?”

“Half the time you look about to fall over.”

This made her want to sit down. She went over to the planter and sank her ass onto the cold cement. She’d left the last place with one of those shiny gift bags with string handles. It clinked when she set it on the ground.

“Feel this.” Cory held out his arm. “It’s cashmere.”

Meaning expensive. It suited him with his new haircut. The first few days without his dirty yellow dreads, she’d kept forgetting. She’d be waiting some place and this dude with a fade would come along. He’d only turn into Cory when he smiled. Or Kayla would nudge her. Kayla always knew him right away, would twist her hair around one finger and sigh.

Two men walked past, one in a ski jacket, the other an overcoat, tall and short. Then a car drove by so slowly it was impossible not to feel watched. Looking for parking, it turned out. Cold in the thin raincoat, she curled over and hugged herself. Her gaze met the wine. At least she’d thought it was wine when she grabbed the bag off the table, but only now did she reach inside.

Wine. There was a card too, which she drew out and opened. An angel on one knee, like it was proposing. She tossed it into the planter behind her just as her leg spasmed.

Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize

On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.

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