Witchcraft, AI and an awful lot of bats. The best sci-fi books out this month
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR by Nnedi Okorafor (Gollancz £20, 448p)
WHEN Zelu, a paraplegic author writes a life-changing, bestselling sci-fi novel, you’d think her Nigerian family would be pleased.
Think again: they’re bluntly opposed to pretty much everything she does: whether that’s smoking a bit of weed, writing bestsellers or using advanced robotics to allow her to walk again. Wrapped up in this narrative are extracts from the actual novel, where humanity has been subsumed by its own technology and disembodied artificial intelligence forces are waging war against ‘humes’ – robots with actual bodies. It adds up to a multi-layered American/Nigerian feast of mind-stretching ideas and big emotions, until a brilliant endtwist flips everything over and makes you reassess what you’ve read.
BAT EATER by Kylie Lee Baker (Hodder & Stoughton £20, 304pp)
COVID is ravaging New York City, and the Chinese – Bat Eaters – are getting the blame. When Cora Zeng’s sister is pushed under a subway train in a racist attack, she takes the only job on offer: cleaning up the blood and gore after violent crimes.
Mutilated bats at crime scenes alert her team to the presence of a serial killer, but just when the trail starts to go cold, terrifying apparitions appear – hungry ghosts out of Chinese folklore to point Cora in the right direction.
Operating on the ragged edge of obsession, madness and rage, never has the phrase darkly compelling felt more appropriate.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is available now from the Mail bookshop
WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS by Grady Hendrix (Tor Nightfire £22, 496pp)
YOU’D hope a novel set in a sweltering, sweat-drenched Florida summer might compensate for a bleak British winter. You’d be wrong: this visceral tale of oppression, resistance and consequences provides chilly horrors.
Wellwood House is where pregnant teenagers are sent, out of sight and out of mind, before their babies are taken and the girls returned to their families. Fern, newly arrived and newly pregnant, can only wonder at the cruelty and injustice until a mysterious librarian offers her a book on sisterhood and witchcraft. Then everything changes, for here’s the truth: witchcraft works but has consequences of its own, and Fern must try to escape the forces of darkness she has summoned.