Fiction Five: Embark on the imaginative

Let's dive into the unknown. From tomorrow to the distant future these novels look closely at the mysteries of Artificial Intelligence, simulated realities and interplanetary colonization. Here are five speculative titles dropping in April that are out of this world.

When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

For decades JP and Dulin have been best friends. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles. These physics-defying glitches and miracles started cropping up seven years earlier — right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum.

Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of lascivious octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last. Everyone is barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.

“When We Were Real goes far beyond the usual SF novels of living in a simulation. Its poignant, appealing, boisterous characters know they are simulations, and as they get on with their complicated digital lives, they—and we—explore what it means to be real, to be human, to be alive. A must-read by one of science fiction's most versatile and talented authors.” — Nancy Kress, winner of six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award

Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing her as a fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. However, his wife might be leaving him and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

“Told with Blake’s signature wit and driven by a cast of morally gray characters you will hate to love and love to hate, Gifted & Talented is equal parts black comedy, sharp indictment of privilege and power, and soaring, vicious drama. Addictively entertaining, this is Blake at the height of her abilities.”― Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lady Macbeth

Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

In the authoritarian Federation there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning. This is threatening to set off a chain of events that may mean the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run. She's trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo. 

Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, is desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance. Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, wrote the book that inspired a revolutionary movement. Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics. Nurlan is a hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents and assassins are everywhere.

“Thought-provoking in the extreme, Nayler's sci-fi cyberthriller will trap fans of technothrillers in its web.” ―Library Journal

Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something – a mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend walks up and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods.

“Chuck Wendig weaves his magic once more, turning a lonely staircase in the woods into a searing, propulsive, dread-filled exploration of the horrors of knowing and being known. I’d follow him anywhere.”— Kiersten White, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hide

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed

Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she’s approached by a visitor from the future. He's a young man from a human settlement on Mars traveling backward through time to intervene in the fate of a warming planet.

Roban lives in the Colony, a sterile outpost of civilization, where he longs for the wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face down an uncertain future. 

Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph. For his rationalist daughter Kenzie, such idealism is not enough to keep the rising floods at bay, so she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond.

"A satisfying work of climate fiction involving interplanetary time travel ... and the conclusion packs an emotional wallop. Fans of slipstream fiction like Cloud Atlas will find a great deal to enjoy here." ― Publishers Weekly