As technological advancement becomes increasingly indistinguishable from magic, to misquote Arthur C. Clarke, speculative fiction authors are grappling with futuristic scenarios that feel more and more absurd. PW spoke with SF writers whose novels hit shelves this season and hinge on technological advancements that run the gamut from terrifying to bizarre to straight-up hopeful.
For richer, not poorer
World-changing technology often creates, and seemingly then belongs to, billionaires—precisely the set satirized in August Clarke’s The Felicity Complex (Erewhon, June). The novel follows Hallelujah, a woman grown in a lab to please the wealthy clientele at a Cold War–era bunker hotel, who are seeking a fantasy of sanitary postapocalyptic accommodations. In researching the book, Clarke was surprised by how many people—billionaires and otherwise—have already built bunkers. “A lot of leftists I know and also a lot of the most conservative people I know have this attitude that we need to hunker down and wait for the better tomorrow to come,” Clarke says.
In a similar vein, Meg Elison’s Foundling Fathers (Tachyon, June) skewers both technocrats and the American experiment. In the near future, clones of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams are raised as brothers on a remote island with the goal of eventually introducing them to modern society to “save” the country. Things go awry when Franklin finds a forbidden smartphone and immediately discovers pornography, then shares it with his brothers.
“I really like thinking about the weird relationship we have to the personalities of the founding fathers,” Elison says. “We see footage from North Korea or other totalitarian regimes with a charismatic leader and recognize it immediately as propaganda, but we’re absolutely guilty of falling for it ourselves in the U.S.”
In Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (Tachyon, Apr.), Justin Feinstein explores AI sentience through virtual helpers embedded in everyday life, including an AI companion installed in a self-driving car, and the money to be made by selling their code on the dark web. The story is told largely through chat logs between advertising executive Noah and the super-enhanced AI Quinn, whose creation was meant to transform human-bot engagement and could be used nefariously.
“I started writing this in 2022, and many of those things are happening now, which is terrifying,” Feinstein says. He had to heavily revise several times to keep up with rapid AI development, including hyperspecific details. “Late in the drafts, my brother-in-law sent me a clip of himself pretending to be a candidate for his company being interviewed by AI, and he was trying to give difficult answers to throw it off,” he says. “I was like, Yeah, this is cool, and now I have to go back and write this out of my book.”
In Google veteran Forrest Brazeal’s Paradox, Inc. (Ballantine, Jan. 2027), average consumers can buy time machines, which creates major safety issues—particularly for those without money or power. Brazeal says that having “lived through the crypto bubble,” he knew he wanted to write about matter-of-fact aspects of such phenomena. “The challenge when speaking about a particular boom or bust is that Silicon Valley is so insular and spends so little time thinking about the broader ramifications, and about how this is actually affecting the human beings who are touched by this technology.”
The future will be televised
While crypto currency is a relatively new innovation, the reality TV genre has enthralled viewers for decades. Park Seolyeon’s Project V (HarperVia, Apr.), translated from the Korean by Gene Png and acquired by HarperVia editor Alexa Frank, adapts Korean survival reality shows for a mech-driven future. It critiques both AI and male domination in STEM through the viewpoint of accomplished underdog engineer Wooram, who disguises herself as a man to compete.
“While I was reading the book, I was rooting for teams on [Korean reality show] Boys Planet to go after their dreams,” Png says. “The show was clearly manipulating the votes and it was very obvious. It made me think a lot about what’s real. And around that time people were starting to make translation samples with AI, which made me feel like no one cared anymore.”
Thomas Elrod’s debut, The Franchise (Tor, May), also tackles reality entertainment and similarly warns about the dangers of tech. In the book, a group of actors believe they’re living in an epic fantasy world that’s been co-opted from the original author’s serialized fantasy novel, against his wishes. When one actor begins to doubt his surroundings, liberating his friends and loved ones is harder than it seems, especially under Hollywood’s watchful eye.
“People need stories and art, but commodification by the entertainment industry has made the act of creating feel exhausting or scary in some sense,” Elrod says. “In this moment, a lot of artistic creation is under threat not so much from tech itself, but from how corporations and people think they can use tech or how they undervalue the actual work being done.”
Human ingenuity
The future is inevitable, but isolation is not. Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken (DAW, Apr.) follows a former military bot and a cybernetic dog through a largely post-human world, where empathy plays a major role in how the story unfolds. “Palmer’s vision for how society might reshape itself after massive conflict is inventive, but where the tale truly shines is its captivating characters and the ways in which they’re willing to work together,” according to PW’s starred review.
“I need everything I write to have some spark of light in it. It doesn’t have to be a Disney ending, but there has to be some moment of hope where somebody does the right thing,” Palmer says. “Even if things get really, really bad, there are always going to be people who care and are fighting to make it better. If you feel like you’re alone and damaged and there’s nobody on your side, that’s not true.”
John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space (Tor, Apr.), which PW’s review says is “as rollicking as it is thought-provoking,” follows characters who can literally shape their universe by putting their hands on its inner workings and manually changing them. After physics student Ellie, whose mother taught her how to keep the universe intact, saves the world, she and her cousin Daniel are recruited to uncover a conspiracy and stop further sabotage. Though the premise seems heavy, the book posits hope for a future in which anyone can change their own reality, though not without assistance from others. “I’ve gone to lengths to establish that these characters are workers and that this is something anyone can do if they’re willing to put in the time and effort to be part of that labor force,” Chu says.
Edward Ashton also emphasizes the importance of human connection in After the Fall (St. Martin’s, Feb.), in which a race of giant aliens known as the grays has domesticated humans as servants. John, a bondsman in service to a “good” gray, Martok, questions his so-called friendship with Martok after the latter gambles John’s bond for a plot of land and he meets another bondsman as well as a group of “feral,” undomesticated humans.
John’s connection with his peers allows him to try for a better future, a theme that persists through many of the SF books hitting shelves this year. “As humans, we can do unbelievable things in huge groups,” Ashton says. “By bringing our brains together, we form this super hive mind that can build space shuttles and MRI machines, but when you isolate us, we’re like ants taken away from our hives. Most of us are completely useless on our own.”
Samantha Puc writes about LGBTQ+ and fat representation in pop culture, with a focus on comics, books, and games.
Read more from our science fiction, fantasy & horror feature.
How math Ruins the World: PW talks with Paul Tremblay
