Originally published: https://amazingstories.com/?p=225105

Robots lead the march this September by providing something fun and engaging.  Set My Heart to Five, is Simon Stephenson’s debut novel about robots, feelings, and screenwriting. More robots facing human dilemmas can be found in An Unnatural Life, a novella by Erin K. Wagner about a robot convicted of murder on Europa. Both stories take on the same territory but attack it from very different directions.

Space opera fans have their work cut out for them choosing between two really excellent novels, Fearless by Allen Stroud and To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini.  Both start stories that will continue in their respective universes with the promise of more great stories in the deep black.

Hench, Natalie Zina Walschot’s debut novel, is an outstanding assault on superhero ideology by a sidelined henchperson who shows that the spreadsheet is mightier than random mutant superpowers. The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson is a sci-fi/horror tale made for streaming, with zombified teens and plucky outcasts, but it’s no relation to the Amazon Prime series Tales from the Loop.

It’s the time of year when we look back at what last year gave us, and Jonathan Strahan has put together the first in a new series of anthologies with The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction filling the gap left by Gardner Dozois death in 2018. It’s not the only Best of SF anthology, but will probably be the definitive one going forward.

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Originally published: https://amazingstories.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=219339

This month we’ve got some excellent debut novels, starting with Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, a parallel worlds novel that deftly turns the notion of the explorer as a person of privilege on its head. There’s also  The Mother Code by Carole Stivers, a pandemic novel where humanity’s next generation is in the hands(?) of robots designed for space exploration, but coded with a mother’s touch. Finally, Architects of Memory is a very strong debut from Karen Osborne in which a plucky crew of salvage tug misfits gets caught up in a corporate struggle for an alien artifact. The premise may sound familiar, but Osborne brings rich characterization and excellent plotting to the tale.

If you’re looking for SF so hard it’s hardly SF, dock at Space Station Down by Ben Bova and Doug Beason, where terrorists take over the ISS with a plan to deorbit it onto NYC, and if the Big Apple doesn’t have enough problems, check out Bystander 27 by Rik Hoskin, a mind-bending take on the superhero reality and what it means.

Mil-SF and Space Opera fans should enjoy Debt of Loyalty by Christopher G. Nuttall, the second in this series, following Debt of Honor last year. A king in exile with half the fleet and a conflict waged by opposing admirals who once served together make a complex and well-told tale.

Mirage by Julie E. Czerneda continues her Web Shifter’s Library series with the return of Evan Gooseberry, an ambassador to alien races with anxiety issues and the shapeshifting alien(s) who manage the All Species’ Library of Linguistics and Culture. It might be subtitled, Fun with Esen and her Friends at the Library, and it wouldn’t be wrong.

City Under the Stars by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick — Since we started out with debut novels, it’s only fitting we end with a last work, or at least a final collaboration. In 2018 science fiction lost one of it’s most treasured editors and authors, Gardner Dozois, who compiled The Year’s Best Science Fiction for 35 years, but along the way he also worked on a collaboration with Michael Swanwick. The two batted ideas back and forth for decades, and though it was originally planned as a longer work, Michael opted to close the story where they’d left off with their characters looking forward to things to come. It’s a terrific piece of work,.

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