Ring in the new year with new science fiction
January 2nd marks National Science Fiction Day, commemorating famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s birthday. This year to celebrate the occasion, we compiled a list of some of our best science fiction books and primers on the genre, including titles in our Radium Age and Twelve Tomorrows series. Explore our collection below, and sign up for our newsletter to be the first to hear the latest updates from the Press.
The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories by Francis Stevens
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man’s-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, introduced by Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.
R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life by Karel Čapek
R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life offers a new, highly faithful translation by Štěpán Šimek of Czech novelist, playwright, and critic Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, as well as twenty essays from contemporary writers on the 1920 play. R.U.R. is perhaps best known for first coining the term “robot” (in Czech, robota means serfdom or arduous drudgery). The twenty essays in this new English edition, beautifully edited by Jitka Čejková, are selected from Robot 100, an edited collection in Czech with perspectives from 100 contemporary voices that was published in 2020 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the play.
The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks
In The People of the Ruins, Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neomedieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the postcivilized life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.
The Curie Society: Eris Eternal by Heather Einhorn, Adam Staffaroni and Anne Toole and edited by Joan Hilty
Our heroic teen science prodigies are back for a new mission with the Curie Society, an elite secret organization where brilliant women can pursue the furthest reaches of their intellect, and this time they face a threat more serious and more sinister than anything they’ve encountered before. Maya, Taj, and Simone are supposed to be spending their summer broadening their horizons, but their plans take a strange and puzzling turn when the Curie Society’s original chapter, at the Sorbonne in Paris, calls on them for help. Daksha, a Society alumna, is promoting cutting-edge science and technology startups at a showcase event, but someone has threatened to stop her and the proceedings. When Daksha is poisoned, the team swings into action to investigate.
The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in this collection you’ll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy’s satirical novella about a lost race of Bengali supermen in Uganda. Also included are Jagadananda Ray’s “Voyage to Venus” (1895), Nanigopal Majumdar’s “The Mystery of the Giant” (1931), and Manoranjan Bhattacharya’s “The Martian Purana” (1931).
Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art edited by Indrapramit Das
In this volume from the Twelve Tomorrows series, Deep Dream, ten writers imagine the different ways in which art forms might evolve, devolve, shift, and transform in the decades and centuries to come. They consider how the rapid progress of technology will interact with different mediums of art or give rise to new ones, and what the lives and inner worlds of different kinds of artists might look like in the future as they adapt to rapidly shifting eras amidst anthropogenic global threats like climate change and fascism.
Man’s World by Charlotte Haldane
In the not-too-distant future, England’s population quality and quantity are under scientific control: Only those deemed the fittest are permitted to procreate. Women are either groomed to be “vocational mothers,” or sterilized and put to other uses. Written by an author married to one of the world’s most prominent eugenics advocates, this ambivalent adventure anticipates both Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale. When a young woman rebels against her conditioning, can she break free?
Forthcoming: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine
In The Greatest Adventure, an expedition to Antarctica discovers remnants of an elder race with advanced technology. These ancients had discovered the secret of developing new life-forms. . . but when the mutations threatened to run amok, their creators entombed their entire civilization in ice. Intrepid aviatrix Edith Lane and her comrades must flee through caverns inhabited by the mutated monsters, and when frozen spores begin to thaw out, the planet is threatened by malign plant life. The Greatest Adventure is a tale of horror by John Taine—the pseudonym of mathematician Eric Temple Bell—that is not without moments of humor.