Author Jason Pargin has made a career out of hilarious and fast-moving books with surprisingly intelligent and thoughtful things to say, despite all the jokes and blood. His latest, Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia, continues this happy trend. This is the third book in the Zoey Ashe series. The books are near-future dystopian crime-ish romps about Zoey Ashe, a low-ambition but very clever and mouthy young woman who inherits a massive fortune from a ruthless crime lord, who was apparently her father. Despite the hopes of all around her, money does not change Zoey. In this book, Zoey and mill ..read more

The Tusks of Extinction is a short novellette/novelito (smaller than a novella) where mammoths have been resurrected and are roaming the Russian plains. It’s surreal, clever, original, and shot through with Russian darkness and heaviness. It’s so short that I can’t tell you much about the plot without giving it away, but we see this world through the eyes of poachers, a murdered elephant biologist and activist, and the mammoths themselves. There’s some switching between events in the past and the future, without telling you what’s going on, so that takes a little while to comes to terms with ..read more

Check out the fingers on that AI hand. Not the proper way to hold a sword. There are a couple of science fiction books in this list, but right now, most silkpunk stories are fantasy. Here be dragons. Author Ken Liu freely admits that he came up with the term “silkpunk” to sell his book The Grace of Kings. The publisher needed a way to sell the book, and “silkpunk” was Liu’s answer. According to Liu, “In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in ..read more

In the near-future world of Venomous Lumpsucker, everything has continued to get worse, to the point where a corporation can make a species extinct as long as they pay enough extinction credits. The unintended consequences of this setup are many, all of them absurd and horrifying, which somehow makes this world feel especially plausible. A biologist is trying to find, and potentially save, the last venomous lumpsuckers in the world. These are small but clever fish, possibly the most intelligent fish species out there. She’s joined by a variety of odd characters, all of them embroiled in the m ..read more

It is not always easy to get AI image generators to do what you want. I ended up with “astronauts inside Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.” Gas giants are wonderfully weird, mysterious, and incredibly dangerous. It’s surprising there aren’t more gas giant stories out there. But until that onslaught comes, these books might keep you sated.   12 Saturn Rukh by Robert L. Forward – 1997 In the near future, five intrepid men and women have been paid a billion dollars each to risk the first voyage into the upper atmosphere of Saturn. The goal: to convert atmospheric chemicals into fuel to power i ..read more

Heaven’s River is the fourth book of the excellent Bobiverse series, and instead of cruising along well-worn narrative paths, author Dennis E. Taylor expands his universe and characters in unexpected and interesting ways. The book clocks in at 600 pages, but it maintains a fast, page-turning pace the whole way through. Bob-1 attempts to rescue a lost friend while exploring a mysterious alien megastructure and interacting with aliens, but also has to contend with the growing possibility of civil war within the Bobiverse itself. If you don’t know what the Bobiverse is, I recommend reading the fi ..read more

The annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. These are the winners from the year 2000 on, and it’s a hell of a list.   24 Distraction by Bruce Sterling – 2000 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 kno ..read more

With the recent onslaught of multiverse superhero movies out there, I’m feeling a little multiversed-out, and it takes something special for me to get back into it. These books all fit the bill.   15 The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – 2012 1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man’s-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone? 2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burn ..read more

A lot of philosophy seems to boil down to: “So, this life thing. What are we supposed to do with this? And crap, there’s all these other people; that makes it even more complicated! Let’s drink.” The books below examine what it means to be human, to be part of humanity, and what you would do or sacrifice for what you really loved.   27 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – 2021 Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass ..read more

Many of this year’s best fantasy books feature plenty of magic, monsters, and mayhem, with dashes (or more than dashes) of romance.   29 The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera – 2023 Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader worl ..read more