Science Fiction

John Scalzi has built a career on making big science-fiction ideas feel like a conversation with a very funny friend, and Monsters of Ohio points that talent at a small Midwestern town that is already having a bad year. Mike Boyd, recently laid off from his government job, heads home to Richland, Ohio, just as the food-processing plant that keeps the town afloat is being wound down by its private-equity owners.

Then a prize cow explodes at the worst possible moment, and some of the locals begin transforming into creatures nobody has a name for. Mike falls in with Dave, an old friend who is now a police officer, and Andi, a newcomer who has taken on the thankless job of running the town festival. Together they try to piece together what is going on while the rest of Richland argues, panics and, in a few memorable cases, grows extra limbs.

What lifts the book above a simple monster romp is its setting. Scalzi clearly cares about towns like Richland, and the comedy never punches down at the people who live there. The real horror is quieter: shuttered factories, absentee owners and the sense that decisions about a community's future are being made somewhere far away. The jokes land, the pacing is brisk and the central trio are easy company. Readers who came to Scalzi through Old Man's War or The Kaiju Preservation Society will find the same warmth and wit, now wrapped around a story about home, work and belonging.

Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists, has always been interested in how people bargain with time, and Under Story carries that fascination to the bottom of the world. Laurel Salter is a trained biologist who has chosen to work as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, a job that lets her stay busy and keep a painful past firmly out of view.

That plan falls apart when a strange light, soon nicknamed the Arc, appears over the ice. A team of physicists flies in to investigate, and among them is Eli, Laurel's ex-husband. Forced back into each other's orbit in a place where there is nowhere to hide, the two of them have to deal with the phenomenon and with everything they never said. Laurel develops a theory that the Arc might allow them to reach back and change what has already happened, and the novel's tension comes from the question of whether she should try.

Benjamin drew inspiration from a real balloon-borne physics experiment flown over Antarctica, and the scientific scaffolding is handled with a light, confident touch rather than a lecture. The real strength is emotional: grief, love and regret are explored with patience, and the setting of perpetual daylight, wind and enforced closeness turns every conversation into a pressure test. At over five hundred pages it asks for commitment, but it rewards readers who enjoy literary fiction with a speculative edge in the vein of Station Eleven or Klara and the Sun.

Five years after its first publication, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary remains one of the most-bought science-fiction novels in the US, and a new deluxe edition is now selling alongside the original. It is not hard to see why it keeps finding readers. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is or why he has been sent. Slowly, he works out that the sun is losing energy, Earth faces catastrophe, and his mission may be the planet's last chance.

Weir's great skill, first shown in The Martian, is turning problem-solving into genuine suspense. Every chapter hands Grace a fresh technical puzzle, and his solutions rely on experiments, quick arithmetic and a stubborn refusal to give up. Flashbacks to his life on Earth gradually explain how a middle-school science teacher ended up on a one-way trip, and the drip-feed of revelations is cleverly paced so that the past and present storylines keep raising the stakes for each other.

The tone is generous and funny without undercutting the danger, and the science is explained in plain language that never talks down to the reader. There are surprises along the way that are best discovered fresh, so we will say only that the book becomes far more than a survival story. For newcomers this is an ideal entry point to modern science fiction; for returning fans, the deluxe edition is a fine excuse for a reread.

More than a decade after it first appeared, Red Rising is back near the top of the US science-fiction charts, a sign of how many new readers continue to discover Pierce Brown's series. Darrow is a Red, a young miner working far beneath the surface of Mars in a society divided into rigid, colour-coded castes. He believes his dangerous labour is helping to make the planet habitable for future generations, until a series of shattering events reveals how badly his people have been deceived.

From there the novel becomes a story of infiltration and revenge. Darrow is remade so that he can pass among the ruling Golds, and he enters the merciless training ground where their future leaders are tested. Alliances form and collapse, loyalties are bought and broken, and Darrow has to decide how much of himself he is willing to give up in order to win.

Brown writes with tremendous momentum. Chapters are short and punchy, the action is vivid, and the political scheming is as gripping as the fights. The world draws on Roman history, Greek myth and classic dystopian fiction, yet the voice feels fresh and confident throughout. It is a violent book and some readers will find its intensity a lot to take, but those who enjoyed The Hunger Games or Ender's Game and want something darker and more sprawling will find plenty here. With several sequels already available, it is an easy series to fall into for the winter.

At 81, M. John Harrison is one of the elder statesmen of British speculative fiction, and The End of Everything, published by Serpent's Tail, has put him on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist. Should he win on 9 November, he would be the oldest winner in the prize's history. The novel shows why his admirers prize him and why he can divide readers.

The setting is the coastline of Kent in a near future that has already lived through some kind of catastrophe. No one can explain what happened. The government barely functions, the sea teems with new forms of life, Europe has somehow gone missing and the sky itself seems to malfunction. Phillip Tennent gets by on the tideline, picking up artefacts from the Channel, until he retrieves something that keeps changing and that he cannot simply sell or hide. He has to take it inland.

Harrison is less interested in answers than in atmosphere and perception. His prose is exact and luminous, full of chalky light, damp seaside towns and uneasy encounters, and the reader is invited to dwell in uncertainty rather than solve it. Beneath the strangeness is sharp satire about a society that keeps going about its business while its explanations of the world collapse.

Reviews have ranged from rapturous to sceptical, with The Irish Times finding it rudderless and The Guardian praising its vision. That is a fair guide: if you want a conventional apocalypse with clear stakes, this is not it. If you enjoy fiction that unsettles and lingers, it is a remarkable experience.