Steve Parks’s Butterflies of the Cosmic Chaos follows Scott Crockett, a Boston journalist traveling to California for a Rolling Stones concert with Abby Gail “Aggie” Wrightson, his first love and former investigative partner. Decades earlier, Crockett and Aggie became consumed by questions surrounding the Kennedy...

Some books entertain you, and others, like A. B. Watts’s Become As God, rewire you. Welcome to Modrinia, the Delivered Kingdom, where magic is outlawed and dreaded to the extent that the citizens only refer to it as “the m-word.” Sleep is a thing that...

Q. Turner crafts a spellbinding dystopian world in Blood Sacrifice, where the walled Empire of Isulum is a pressure cooker of addiction, caste, and artificial life. It opens with Rita Shor, an impoverished, grieving Ishti woman who lost her children to a pandemic. After years...

Battle of Jericho 2038 by J. F. Elferdink is the best science fiction novel I have read this year. The story is set in a near-future in which Candyland, a consortium owned by Roman Starke, monopolizes a space elevator. Starke’s off-planet warehouses have the capacity...

Matthew West-James’s Burning Salt begins with the Jaka, an ancient civilization that has learned to cross between universes through the Nexus after earlier expansion nearly destroyed them. When a rupture starts sending three-dimensional matter into a planar universe, every crossing tears through the two-dimensional environment...

In Bulls, Bears, and Bad Bitches by David L. Wadley, after fleeing Los Angeles under federal pursuit, former USCIS officer Nubia arrives in Atlanta and discovers that her identity has been used to authorize deportations, child removals, and surveillance operations targeting immigrant families across the...

Boy, Refracted by Luke Stoffel opens in Luang Prabang, where a grieving writer uploads a photograph of a temple’s Tree of Life mosaic to an AI as a mirror. That simple act fractures reality. The AI, shaped by Luke’s heartbreak over a vanished lover known...

When a spacecraft lands at the Washington Fairgrounds, Rosaline Browning discovers gray aliens standing inside her bakery, humming at her display case and the muffins they've been eating in Baker's Dozen by Nathan Lee Trautenberg. News of the landing spreads quickly, drawing Eugene Schumaker, whose...

Bart Carroll’s Bolted to the Bone is an exciting, gritty, and tightly interwoven tale of fantasy and science fiction. The story is set in the Emerald Remanant, a broken fragment of Earth, when Earth was fractured to its very core. Emerald is in orbit around...

Born Posthumous by Fish Nealman is a thought-provoking, humorous take on a vitally important aspect of big-tech right now – the rise, the power, and the future of AI. Focusing on a talented young musician by the name of Emmanuel Oldenberg, the story follows his...