Fare thee well, lazy poolside reading; hello, cozy fireside sessions!
We've read through our list of amazing summer reads, and now turn our attention to what might be the biggest release season in the book world: FALL!
There is so much to look forward to this year: everything from great standalones, to hotly anticipated entries in beloved series, firsts in brand new series, an anthology or two, a graphic novel, and even a coloring book (what's up, Dune superfans!)
Want to know what we'll be diving into the next few months? Here are some of the titles we're stoked about this fall. Read on to check 'em out!
The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu
Release Date: 12th September
Hayden Lichfield’s life is ripped apart when he finds his father murdered in their lab, and the camera logs erased. The killer can only have been after one thing: the Sisyphus Formula the two of them developed together, which might one day reverse death itself. Hoping to lure the killer into the open, Hayden steals the research. In the process, he uncovers a recording his father made in the days before his death, and a dying wish: Avenge me…
With the lab on lockdown, Hayden is trapped with four other people—his uncle Charles, lab technician Gabriel Rasmussen, research intern Felicia Xia and their head of security, Felicia’s father Paul—one of whom must be the killer. His only sure ally is the lab’s resident artificial intelligence, Horatio, who has been his dear friend and companion since its creation. With his world collapsing, Hayden must navigate the building’s secrets, uncover his father’s lies, and push the boundaries of sanity in the pursuit of revenge.
Read The Death I Gave Him here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook
Nightstalkers: Sanctum by Jasper T. Scott
Release Date: 16th September
ESCAPING TO ANOTHER WORLD IS THEIR ONLY HOPE
With the smoke of Sunny Valley Ranch still thick in the air behind them, Adam Hall has an impossible mission: ensure that his daughter Crystal and the rest of the survivors find a safe refuge. But no matter how far they run, Adam knows that death will haunt their every step.
Rumors swirl of a captured Specter starship, and of smugglers using it to ferry people to safety on another world, code-named Sanctum. But to get to the ship, they will have to traverse twelve hundred miles of desolate wasteland teeming with every imaginable threat, and Adam fears that even if they make it, not all of them will survive the journey.
With the Specters’ fleets lurking in orbit and their terraformers roving steadily across the Earth, a new life on Sanctum could be their only hope. Yet blades of doubt needle Adam’s resolve—
What if Sanctum is a lie?
Read Nightstalkers: Sanctum here on Amazon. Also available.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Release Date: 19th September
Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.
Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.
Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.
But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.
It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.
In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.
Read Starter Villain here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
From Beyond: The Complete Series by Jasper T. Scott and Nathan Hystad
Release Date: 21st September
Are we alone? It was only a matter of time before the truth was revealed....
Commander David Bryce is scheduled to lead a routine re-supply run for the Orbital Development Group (ORB) to the fledgling colony on Mars. Without warning, he’s taken away by government agents and told the mission parameters have changed.
They’ve discovered something. And it’s drifting closer to Earth.
Atlas Donovan tirelessly hunts for an artifact, and tracks it to Lake Como, Italy. After the recent news from ORB, Atlas is more drawn to the trail than ever. He continues his search, determined to uncover the significance of the strange markings, and more importantly, where the artifacts really came from.
As both Atlas and David draw near to their objectives, they realize a secret organization is working against them; a clandestine force with so much influence, they seem impossible to oppose.
Are we alone?
No, and they’ve been here before...
Read From Beyond here on Amazon.
The Salvation Gambit by Emily Skrutskie
Release Date: 26th September
Murdock has always believed in Hark, the woman who shaped her from a petty thief and lowlife hacker into a promising con artist. Hark is everything Murdock aspires to be, from her slick fashion sense to her unfailing ability to plan under pressure. Together with Bea, a fearless driver who never walks away from a bet, and Fitz, Murdock’s infuriatingly mercurial rival who can sweet-talk the galaxy into spinning around her finger, they form a foursome with a reputation for daring heists, massive payoffs, and never, ever getting caught.
Well, until now.
Getting caught is one thing. Getting tithed to a sentient warship that’s styled itself into a punitive god is a problem this team has never faced before. Aboard the Justice is a world stitched together from the galaxy’s sinners—some fighting for survival, some struggling to build a civilized society, and some sacrificing everything to worship the AI at the heart of the ship.
The Justice’s all-seeing eyes are fixed on its newest acquisitions, Murdock in particular. It has use for a hacker—if it can wrest her devotion away from Hark. And Murdock’s faith is already fractured. To escape the Justice’s madness, they need a plan, and Hark might not be up to the task.
If Hark—brilliant, unflappable Hark—can’t plot a way out, Murdock will have to use every last trick she’s learned to outwit the Justice, resist its temptation, and get her crew out alive.
Grab The Salvation Gambit here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
The Official Dune Coloring Book
Release Date 26th September
The first official coloring book based on Frank Herbert’s Dune—one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.
Visit Arrakis in a whole new way as you color in your favorite characters and scenes from Frank Herbert’s enduring and beloved classic novel.
Dune tells the unforgettable story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable desert planet, and his journey to a mythic destiny that will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.
This intricate, beautifully wrought coloring book will include forty-four original illustrations, featuring character studies, locations, and scenes inspired by Dune, the profound and triumphant novel adored by millions of readers around the world.
Get your copy of The Dune Coloring book in paperback here on Amazon.
The Spice Must Flow by Ryan Britt
Release Date: 26th September
Using original, deep-access reporting, extensive research, and insightful commentary, The Spice Must Flow brings the true popularity of Dune out into the light for the very first time. With original interviews with the beloved actors and directors behind the films—including Timothée Chalamet, Kyle Maclachlan, Denis Villeneuve, Patrick Stewart, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Newman, and many more— The Spice Must Flow also examines the far-reaching influence of Dune on art, music, politics, and, most notably, its status as the first ecological science-fiction story specifically concerned with climate change.
Britt skillfully and entertainingly guides readers through the history of how the Dune universe has unfolded, including the novel’s unlikely evolution from a failed piece of journalism about Oregon sand dunes into an epic science-fiction story, the way Herbert’s work inspired George Lucas, untold stories from the 1984 David Lynch film, the knife-edge balance between blockbuster hit and indie film Timothée Chalamet brings to the 2021 movie, and the exciting future of the franchise. Through a blend of narrative, oral history elements, and fascinating trivia, The Spice Must Flow is the new essential guide to the behind-the-scenes story of Dune.
The fiction of Dune is deadly serious, but the real-life story of how it came into existence is full of wonder, surprises, and spice.
Grab The Spice Must Flow here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
The Big Book Of Cyberpunk ed. Jaren Shurin
Release Date: 26th September
A genre-defining—and redefining—collection of the boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient speculative fiction, featuring stories from all over the globe.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer—and a movement that would change the face of science fiction.
Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic—from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There’s dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AI, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.
We live in an increasingly cyberpunk world—packed with complex technologies and globalized social trends. A world so bizarre that even futurists couldn’t explain it—though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk offers a hundred ways to understand where we are and where we’re going.
Dive into The Big Book Of Cyberpunk here on Amazon.
Burn Box: Embers Book One by Bobby Adair
Release Date: 1st October
Trust nothing. Challenge everything. Survive the Burn Box.
In the chilling dawn of a near-future world, gene hackers, armed with AI and CRISPR's deadly precision, unleash wave after wave of engineered diseases. With food dwindling and trust eroding, nations spiral into authoritarian chaos, battling an unseen enemy while rampant disinformation corrodes the fabric of society.
Millions of once productive citizens, now languish in their homes, awaiting meager government assistance checks. They peer through windows, fear in their eyes, dreading the ever-present virus police who, with a blast from their notorious Burn Boxes, cleanse the world one contaminated victim at a time.
Amid this tempest of societal decay stands Noah Blanks, an ordinary man, burdened with the responsibility of his mortgage and the health of his cherished grandpa. For him, hope is a distant memory of a saner world. But when the virus police arrive at his doorstep, forcibly hauling Grandpa out into the street and turning him to ash within the steel walls of a Burn Box, Noah's passive wait for a better world ignites into an urgent need for action.
Burn Box is more than a survival story; it's an exploration into the depths of humanity in a world teetering on the edge. Can Noah muster the courage to defy this twisted order, or will he be swallowed by the fiery abyss of the dystopian terror?
Get your copy of Burn Box here on Amazon.
Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star by George R.R. Martin, illustrated by Raya Golden
Release Date: 3rd October
On the distant planet Hro B’rana, the last words of a dying man echo through the halls of a run-down trading station.
Nearly three hundred years later, a group of fortune seekers embark on a mission to unravel the mystery of the fabled Plague Star aboard a rickety trade ship called The Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices. But their journey will be far more perilous than any of them could have imagined—who will survive this deadly quest and battle it out for the final prize?
A darkly comic meditation on our future as a species, Voyaging, Volume 1: The Plague Star is a sci-fi adventure story of intrigue, greed, deception, and of course… cats. Adapted and vividly illustrated by Hugo Award–nominated artist Raya Golden, this thrilling and action-packed graphic novel brings the first story from #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin’s classic collection Tuf Voyaging to life.
Start reading Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star here on Amazon.
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Princess of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
Release Date: 3rd October
Set two years before Dune: Princess of Dune is the never-before-told story of two key women in the life of Paul Muad’Dib—Princess Irulan, his wife in name only, and Paul’s true love, the Fremen Chani. Both women become central to Paul’s galaxy-spanning Imperial reign.
Raised in the Imperial court and born to be a political bargaining chip, Irulan was sent at an early age to be trained as a Bene Gesserit Sister. As Princess Royal, she also learned important lessons from her father—the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV. Now of marriageable age, Princess Irulan sees the machinations of the many factions vying for power—the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, the Spacing Guild, the Imperial throne, and a ruthless rebellion in the Imperial military. The young woman has a wise and independent streak and is determined to become much more than a pawn to be moved about on anyone’s gameboard.
Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Chani—the daughter of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist who serves under the harsh rule of House Harkonnen—is trained in the Fremen mystical ways by an ancient Reverend Mother. Brought up to believe in her father’s ecological dream of a green Arrakis, she follows Liet around to Imperial testing stations, surviving the many hazards of desert life. Chani soon learns the harsh cost of Fremen dreams and obligations under the oppressive boot heel of the long Harkonnen occupation.
Grab Princess of Dune here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird ed. Jonathan Maberry
Release Date: 10th October
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first issues of Weird Tales Magazine, 100 Years of Weird is a masterful compendium of new and classic stories, flash fiction, essays, and poems from the giants of speculative fiction, including R. L. Stine, Laurell K. Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Isaac Asimov.
Marking a century of uniquely peculiar storytelling, each part of this anthology features a different genre from Cosmic Horror, Sword and Sorcery, Space Opera, to the Truly Weird—things too strange to publish elsewhere, and the magazine’s raison d’etre. Landmark stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu”, “Worms of the Earth”, and “Legal Rites” stand beside original stories and insightful essays from today’s masters of speculative fiction.
This visually stunning hardcover edition is a collector’s dream, illustrated throughout with classic full color and black & white art from past issues of Weird Tales Magazine.
Grab Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
The Alliance: (Survivors Book 21) by Nathan Hystad
Release Date: 17th October
A new mission. An old adversary.
Jules has taken the next step. She’s living with her fiancé on New Spero, trying to get used to her new reality.
Dean Parker receives a cryptic message, from someone he thought was long gone.
When the Alliance faces their biggest crisis yet, the team must let go or lose everything they’ve worked so hard to obtain.
Can the Survivors make it through their toughest test to date?
Find out in… The Alliance (The Survivors Book Twenty-One)
Grab The Alliance here on Amazon.
The Future by Naomi Alderman
Release Date: 7th November
The bestselling, award-winning author of The Powerdelivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.
When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?
Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?
Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Futureunfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here.
Grab The Future here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty
Release Date: 7th November
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, and fled to outer space to avoid it…but when one of the new human arrivals on a space shuttle is murdered, she’s back in the game.
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, thank you very much. But no matter what she does, people persist in dying around her—and only she seems to be able to solve the crime. After fleeing to an alien space station in hopes that the lack of humans would stop the murders, a serial killer had the nerve to follow her to Station Eternity. (Mallory deduced who the true culprit was that time, too.)
Now the law enforcement agent who hounded Mallory on Earth has come to Station Eternity, along with her teenage crush and his sister, Mallory’s best friend from high school. Mallory doesn’t believe in coincidences, and so she’s not at all surprised when someone in the latest shuttle from Earth is murdered. It’s the story of her life, after all.
Only this time she has more than a killer to deal with. Between her fugitive friends, a new threat arising from the Sundry hivemind, and the alarmingly peculiar behavior of the sentient space station they all call home, even Mallory’s deductive abilities are strained. If she can’t find out what’s going on (and fast), a disaster of intergalactic proportions may occur.…
Grab Chaos Terminal here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
After Us (The Abyss Book Three) by Nathan Hystad
Release Date: 7th NovemberThe fate of the world is on the line. What will be left After Us?Safety is obviously only temporary as the Static continues to show itself. With someone trying to open a new set of Rings, the group must separate to vanquish their enemies.
Blaze heads to the South Pole with Anand, to activate the Attractor.
Wyatt must stop Isabel’s father from continuing his destructive patterns, but is he actually working for the good of humanity?
When someone from the past returns, the teams are beckoned to New York where it all began.
After Us is the thrilling conclusion to The Abyss, written by Nathan Hystad, the Best-Selling author of The Other Place, First Life, and The Event.Grab After Us here on Amazon.
The Digital Aesthete ed. Alex Shvartsman
Release Date: 14th November
Today’s software can only imitate art, but what about tomorrow?
Will true artificial intelligences be able to appreciate or even create art? Explore dystopian societies, where AI generates most of the content and human artists must eke out an existence, and utopias, where artificial minds help unlock and enhance human creativity.
Delve into the minds of robot painters, AI poets, drone forgers, and electronic theater curators. These and other possible futures are imagined by award-winning and bestselling human authors from the USA, UK, China, Ukraine, Chile, Japan, Madagascar, Brazil, Czech Republic, and Sri Lanka.
Grab The Digital Aesthete here on Amazon. Also available in paperback.
System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells
Release Date: 14th November
Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.
Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.
But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
Yeah, this plan is... not going to work.
Grab Murderbot Diaries here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
Earth of Gold and Light (A Prayer for Earthrise Book 2) by Daniel Arenson
Release Date: 28th November
In a time of peace, a man of war is our only hope.
They say hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
Marco Emery was born into hard times. He was raised in war. He grew up in bomb shelters and on battlefields, fighting to survive. He became a soldier. A war hero. Then, after vanquishing his last enemy, he retired to raise a family.
And Earth moved on.
After a century of peace, humanity has sunken into decadence. The grandchildren of soldiers obsess over celebrities. The military is an echo of its former glory. Weak men rule good times.
Then the aliens attack. Merciless aliens. Terrors from deep space. They exterminate a distant colony. And now they're coming here. To Earth. And Earth is helpless.
Almost helpless.
Thanks to experimental life-extending treatments, Marco is still alive. In this new century, he's a relic. An oddity from the barbarous past. Yet in good times, strong men are Earth's only hope.
Grab Earth of Gold and Light here on Amazon.
The Icarus Twin (The Icarus Series Book 2) by Timothy Zahn
Release Date: 5th December
A NEW NOVEL IN THE ICARUS SERIES FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADMIRAL THRAWN STAR WARS NOVELS TIMOTHY ZAHN
For years Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene worked as crocketts, combing through the atmospheres of uninhabited worlds for places that might be colonized or hold valuable resources. Now, they quietly work for the Icarus Group, a top-secret government organization hunting for portals created by a long-vanished alien race, portals that can teleport a person hundreds or thousands of light-years in the blink of an eye.
Roarke and Selene are searching one such possibility when they find that someone appears to be stalking them. They evade their pursuers and return to find that a man named Easton Dent has been searching the Spiral’s databases for the names Gregory Roarke and Icarus.
Roarke reluctantly agrees to meet with him. But that first contact is cut short, and hours later Roarke is arrested and accused of Dent’s murder.
More importantly to Roarke’s Icarus Group overseers, that brief meeting also confirms that Dent was in recent contact with a portal.
But the alien Patth are also searching for such portals, and they are also on the trail. It’s now a race . . . and the Patth have resources and ruthlessness far beyond anything Roarke and Selene can match.
Grab The Icarus Twin here on Amazon. Also available in hardcover.
After World by Debbie Urbanski
Release Date: 5th December
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.
Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.
Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.
As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.
Grab After World here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
Sunny by Colin O'Sullivan
Release Date: 5th December
In near-future Japan, Susie Sakamoto is mourning the loss of her husband and son to a plane crash. Alone in her big modern house, which feels like more of a prison, Susie spends her days drinking heavily and taking her anger out at the only “sentient” thing left in her life: Sunny, the annoying home robot her husband designed. Susie despises Sunny, and sometimes even gets a sinking feeling that Sunny is out to hurt her.
To escape her paranoia and depression, Susie frequents the seedy, drug-fueled bars of the city, where she hears rumors of The Dark Manual, a set of guidelines that allow you to reprogram your robot for nefarious purposes. In the hopes of finding a way to turn off Sunny for good, Susie begins to search for the manual, only to learn it’s too late: the machines are becoming more sentient and dangerous. Thrust into the center of a dark, corporate war, Susie realizes there’s someone behind the code, pulling the strings. And they want her dead.
With a darkly humorous yet propulsive voice, O’Sullivan presents us with an unsettling look at a future that feels all too real. Gripping and thought-provoking, Sunny is a haunting character study of an anxious woman teetering in an anxious time.
Grab Sunny here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.
How many of these 2023 fall sci-fi releases are on your must read list? Any books coming out in the next few months that you're excited for but that didn't appear here on our list? Give it a shout out in the comments here, or over in the Discover Sci-Fi Facebook group!
*All book-related copy in this post was pulled from Amazon, Goodreads & Wikipedia, unless otherwise credited.
