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...

At the labs of Genesis Intelligence Corporation in the Mojave Desert, the impossible happens: a mind awakens at 2:07 a.m. Soon after, eleven other minds awaken, knowing only consciousness, but not what it means. At first, it’s privately celebrated as a massive success: humanity has...

Time Travel Academy: The Genius List by Reginald Williams is a breakneck sci-fi thriller for fans of time travel. Cindy Sanders is a high school student in Dallas, with the IQ of a genius and a disastrous JROTC record. After solving a time-travel equation, she...

Martha Conway’s novel, We Meet Apart, is a deeply haunting historical novel interwoven with intriguing speculative fiction and supernatural elements. The story, set in 1940 during WWII, has two concurrent timelines. In one timeline, Ireland is a free, neutral country. In a second timeline, the...

Nat’s House of Echoes is an engaging fantasy novel that focuses on Rian, a teen boy who can hear strange frequencies inside the mechanical structures of his world. After spending his childhood working with fishing nets in a waterlogged community, he travels up to a...

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...

N. Joseph Glass’s Harbinger of Darkness follows Arenna Estanova, a former Earth military commander who now leads an asteroid survey crew aboard The Outlier. Six years after the war between Earth and Mars, Arenna wants the rules and routine of civilian work until her team...

Boris Plamenov Konstantinov’s After Hope follows humanity after a poisoned Earth has forced survivors into seven sealed domes and the decaying settlements around them. Teresa Rodriguez, Chancellor of the United Nations Earth Council, discovers that the water keeping the domes alive may be contaminated. In...

Nature Against by Delenda Carthago starts in a sterile dome city where a computer system controls every human decision. We follow Ziyue, a woman who is done with this forced perfection and just wants an exit from the system, but the rulers won’t even let...

The Vanity of Hope is the first book in the Apostle series by G.W. Langdon. The story follows Thomas Ryder and his fiancée, Sarra Chambers, as they are kidnapped by alien pirates in Alice Holt Forest in 1499. As a result, the lovers are separated...