The best recent science fiction novels – review roundup

Eric Brown on Alastair Reynolds’ Poseidon’s Wake, Sarah Lotz’s Day Four, Kit Reed’s WHERE, Ian Whates’s Pelquin’s Comet, Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters and Stefan Mohamed’s Bitter Sixteen

Glittering future … Alastair Reynolds follows the Akinya dynasty from Kenya to the stars. Photograph: ESA/Hubble Collaboration/CNP/Corbis

Eric Brown

Thursday 18 June The Guardian

A former astronomer with the European Space Agency, Alastair Reynolds writes expansive, cutting-edge SF that explores the future with the analytical eye of a scientist. Poseidon’s Wake (Gollancz, £18.99) completes the trilogy begun with Blue Remembered Earth and On the Steel Breeze, following the Akinya dynasty from Kenya to the stars, and while it works as a standalone it’s best read in sequence. The narrative charts the lives of several members of the Akinya family and the quest to develop faster-than-light travel when a message is discovered emanating from the star system Gliese 163. Reynolds blends AIs, mysterious aliens, intelligent elephants and philosophical ruminations on our place in the universe in a well-paced, complex story replete with intrigue, invention and an optimism uncommon in contemporary SF.

Admirers of Sarah Lotz’s debut solo novel, The Three, will be hoping for more of the same in the sequel Day Four (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). But whereas The Three was a freewheeling narrative set globally, Day Four is a more introspective, claustrophobic story set aboard a cruise liner in the Gulf of Mexico; and where the previous novel was a large-scale examination of worldwide disaster and cultural mores, Day Four plays with our dread of confinement and impending death. 

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