Drawing upon Irish history and mythology, Dave Rudden’s Sister Wake (Hodderscape, £22) revolves around its titular character, “a living saint of the Goddess of Death” and “a figurehead of the Rising” as the people of Croí finally rebel against the Answermen who have colonised their neighbouring island for hundreds of years, during which the natives have been stripped of their faith and language.
The fantasy elements are terrific, and particularly when the Croí’s monstrous gods rise from their long slumber, but Rudden is also excellent at peeling back layers of history to excavate the human cost of colonisation: “Was she only now understanding what it meant that the Croí were an occupied people? That occupation wasn’t just a theft of land or wealth or crops or resources or religion or language, it was a theft of lives – 30 years of fatherhood from this corpse, 20 years of housework and planting from that.” The first of a proposed trilogy, Sister Wake is a politically charged fantasy epic rooted in the everyday brutalities of oppression.
Thomas R Weaver’s debut novel Artificial Wisdom (Bantam, £16.99) is set in 2050, with the world preparing to vote for a global protector (“a sanctioned dictatorship”) who will be given a mandate to reverse “the climate apocalypse”. Will the world choose the former US president Lockwood, or Governor Solomon, the AI that runs the vast floating island of New Carthage in the South Atlantic?
Acting on a tip-off from a whistleblower, investigative reporter Marcus Tully arrives on New Carthage armed with information that might blow the election sky high, only to discover the terrible truth about the extent of New Carthage’s geoengineering. The techno-futurism is expertly done, the AI is chillingly plausible (“I haven’t gone rogue,” Governor Solomon tells Tully. “I’m not a HAL, not a Terminator.”), and the result is a very satisfying crime fiction/sci-fi hybrid that raises fascinating questions about the planet’s immediate future.
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Elly Griffiths’s The Frozen People (2025) introduced DI Ali Dawson, a detective who works for a London-based Cold Case unit that specialises in time travel. A direct sequel, The Killing Time (Quercus, £22) begins with Ali investigating the death of a young man who was inordinately influenced by Barry Power, a psychic medium who claims that he can travel through time and who bears an uncanny resemblance to Klaus Kramer, a Victorian-era acolyte of Franz Mesmer with a distinctly sinister reputation.
Split between the modern day and Victorian London, the story finds Ali tracking down her time-travelling cat, seeking out a genius physicist marooned in the past, and embarking on a torrid affair with a Victorian gentleman. All of which is good fun, but the sequel lacks the laser-like precision of its excellent predecessor, and particularly in terms of its rather ramshackle plotting.
Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire (Broken Binding, £20) opens with teenager Calen Bryer undergoing The Proving, his tribe’s rite of passage. And none too soon, for Calen, who has only ever known his rural village, very quickly finds himself thrust into an epoch-defining conflict as humans, elves and dwarves go to war with an evil Empire. Unaware that he is a “Draileid n’aldryr”, or “Dragonbound by fire”, Calen possesses “the spark”, a mysterious life force that allows him to bend the laws of physics to his will.
Cahill wears his inspirations on his sleeve – the most obvious of which are The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars – and his teenage characters can get irritating in their clumsy attempts at badinage, but the world-building is superb and the story has all the epic sweep of classic fantasy.
LitRPG combines sci-fi narratives with the conventions of role-playing computer games, a good example being Matt Dinniman’s series of Dungeon Crawler Carl novels. Operation Bounce House (Michael Joseph, £22) is a stand-alone novel centring on Oliver, a young farmer on the planet Sonora who is horrified to learn that Sonora has been targeted by Apex Industries as the setting for its latest shoot-’em-up game, Operation Bounce House, during which a robot army, remotely controlled by gamers back on Earth, is unleashed to prosecute “an act of senseless genocide”.
It’s a smart concept that couldn’t be more timely, as the Sonoran natives, bunkering in and desperately fighting back by converting their farming tools into weapons, are immediately branded terrorists and dehumanised by Apex Industries as a subhuman species, and thus fair game for slaughter: “They tell the public it’s because of terrorism, but it’s about real estate. And money. That’s what it’s always been about.”
The best sci-fi is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, and Matt Dinniman’s cinematic vision delivers handsomely on both counts.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
