Sometimes it feels like all fiction is fantasy. Is it any easier to believe in the reality of an Elizabeth Bennett than a Katniss Everdeen? All authors are spinning a web—creating worlds that don’t exist and inviting readers inside. But there are authors who revel in pushing the boundaries, in sending their imaginations to the far corners of the universe, and those are the authors we celebrate in this issue.
Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House, June 10): Like the borders of the science fiction and fantasy genres, the giants on board the spacecraft Audition are constantly expanding. Stanley, Alba, and Drew are crammed into whatever spaces they fit into when they got too big to move around, and now all they can do is talk—which is convenient, because the ship runs on their chatter, turning “[their] noise into speed and steering.” The other 15 ordinary-sized crew members seem to have disappeared, and now, through the giants’ voices, the reader can put together the stories of the giants’ lives before their forced journey on the Audition and of the catastrophic trip itself. Our starred review says, “Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.”
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory (Saga/Simon & Schuster, April 1): It starts off sounding like a joke: “A retired engineer, a comic-book writer, a rabbi, and two nuns take a tour of glitches in the simulation that is the world.…” There’s also a pregnant teenage influencer and a conspiracy podcaster, not to mention a professor on the run from a bunch of murderous incels. Our starred review says, “It’s a testament to Gregory’s skill at character development that the people in this novel, and not the bizarre phenomena they’re observing, are the most fascinating part. This is a marvel. Big-hearted, generous, and beautifully written.”
The Ephemera Collector by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (Liveright/Norton, April 1): It’s 2035, and humans have created colonies to plunder Mars. There’s also an undersea nation called Diwata, inspired by Octavia E. Butler and the Black Panther Party. Xandria Anastasia Brown is a curator of African American Ephemera in Los Angeles whose passion is collecting objects from Diwata, to preserve them for the future—but she’s slowed down by Covid-induced memory loss and aided (maybe?) by AI helper bots. Our review says that Jackson’s novel “displays an astonishing breadth of imagination spanning centuries—there’s everything from a far-future symposium attended by an immortal Xandria to an exploration of Diwata’s origins.…A daring Afrofuturist debut.”
Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill (Orbit, February 25): Jenny Greenteeth isn’t one of a kind—in fact, she’s part of a group of magical water-dwelling creatures with green skin and sharp teeth who all share the name Jenny Greenteeth. Our Jenny lives in a lake near a town with the supremely British name of Chipping Appleby, and when a woman named Temperance Crump is tossed into the lake for being a witch, they discover that the town’s new parson is in fact the evil Erl King. With the help of a hobgoblin named Brackus, Jenny and Temperance set off on a quest to save Britain’s magical beings from this ancient creature. Our starred review says O’Neill’s debut is “full of magic, but even more heart.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
