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6 New SFF Books Invading the Literary Fiction Section
I sometimes think of SFF as the home base of genre crossover. The speculative genres’ interest in reshaping old stories into new, spinning out thought experiments, or creating something spectacularly heretofore unthought of—well, that’s the meat of fiction, isn’t it? Usually it’s the plot-based crossovers that get the attention—plop your noir ‘40s cops on an alien world, or inject Greek mythology with robots. But as much as house sigils on shields and the winks of roguish pirates, writing style makes a genre, and makes it worth revisiting—and so-called literary fiction is as much a genre as anything else. It’s a blurred line to be sure, as plenty of books on the SFF shelves at Barnes & Noble feature gorgeous prose, but whether you put it down to publisher preference or stylistic quirks, there’s no denying the fact that “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction are talked about in different ways, even when they’re really all baked into the same fantastic(al) pie. With that in mind, I’d like to bring to your attention six recent SFF releases you won’t find shelved with the rest of the SFF—six books with the same ambition, world-building, and engaging characters you love, viewed from a slightly different angle.
Version Control, by Dexter Palmer
In the not-too-distant future, we focus our attention on a couple who seem drenched in melancholia. Rebecca is drowning in depression after a tragedy, working a dead-end job, seemingly unable to climb out of her rut, disturbed by dark dreams, feeling disconnected from a world that seems more than slightly unreal. Phillip is mired in seemingly permanent professional disappointment, his devotion to a widely derided invention ensuring he’ll never move forward. Here’s where the SFF comes in, because his invention is all about, shall we say, allowing humanity to explore shifting temporal realities (but don’t call it a “time machine”). Faulty or not, we know Chekov’s temporal displacement device is going to fire off sooner or later, but that’s not the focus of the novel, which is more concerned with the interior and exterior struggles of two people who have been dealt a terrible blow. The science and ideas are beautiful, but it’s the people, messy, broken, and raw, who will keep you reading, and wanting more.
The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray
Wrasy’s latest gives us ample reason to employ the modifier “Kafkaesque” right off the bat, and how much more literary can you get? Meet Waldemar Tolliver (aka Waldy), who awakens one morning to discover a nasty surprise. No, he hasn’t been turned into a bug—he’s been pushed completely out of time, and he would very much like to get back in, please. As it turns out, he’s got a lot to overcome first—seems that he isn’t the first of the Tollivers to tangle with a temporal anomaly, and his shares his family history from his omniscient vantage point outside of the flow of time. This ambitious novel turns out to be is a multi-generational family saga about a family obsession with mysterious “Lost Time Accidents.” It’s a novel packed with incident and rich in ideas: what do we think time is? How do we experience it? And, more importantly, how does it affect us personally—is it true, as O’Neill wrote, there is no present or future, only the past, recurring again and again? With lovely, experimental writing, Wray gives readers plenty to wrestle with.
Smoke, by Dan Vyleta
Here’s your English boarding school story—a classic of literary fiction and SFF alike, if a certain boy wizard in glasses has anything to say about it. This England is more or less an analog for smoky Victorian Britain, but instead of representing Adam Smith-ian commerce and Dickensian workhouses, the smoke clogging the air has a far more sinister meaning. In this England, smoke signals a personal evil. It emanates from the bodies of people, supposedly most thickly from those whose souls are the blackest, the darkness within made manifest. The virtuous smokeless rule, and soot-stained sinners are looked upon with loathing. The boys at this boarding school are being educated to be smokeless—but of course, the adults in their lives are playing a deeper game. There’s much more going on than the children realize, and much of what they have been told is made up of lies. This is a novel packed with political intrigue, magic, and boyhood adventure, dysfunctional families and questions about the nature of evil—the insidious, everyday variety we often don’t bother to consider, that the residents of Smoke’s London can never ever forget.
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The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, by D.G. Compton
Originally released in the 1970s, this one has been reissued by the New York Review of Books, and it certainly deserves to be classified as a classic. In this world, essentially all disease has been eradicated, save for old age. Which explains why it becomes a nightly national news story when Katherine contracts an illness and learns she has only four weeks to live. Her chronicler is Roddie, who made the incredibly creepy and fascinating choice to have his eyes replaced by cameras—all the better to record everything he sees around him. This book has a lot to say about what the loss of privacy does to a person, and in the age of reality TV, tell-all confessionals, the government surveillance state, and omnipresent social media, it’s more relevant than ever.
Ships in 1-2 days.
A Hundred Thousand Worlds, by Bob Proehl
Valerie Torrey and her husband were actors on a sci-fi tv show. Then Something Bad happened, and she ran far, far away with her toddler son, and stayed there for six years. Eventually, she accepts that she needs to reunite father and son. But she’s not going to do so directly—not until after a road trip visiting sci-fi conventions across the country, not until after she shares with the boy a story that may take the whole trip to tell, even as it reveals the secret of why it is happening in the first place. Proehl peppers his prose with all the in-jokes and allusions genre fans could ask for from a book that spends time contemplating fandom, but ultimately, the whole wacky backdrop is really just that. This is a story about a mother and her son coming to terms with the past, but doing so with the help of tools and tropes many SFF fans will recognize as their own.
The Hike, by Drew Magary
Anyone who reads Jamboroo obsessively during the NFL season would do well to pick up Magary’s latest unclassifiable novel. This one is out in August, and it’s surreal. But Surreal, you know? There’s a method to the madness that explodes across these pages. The story centers on Ben, a fairly regular family man who one day decides to set off from his hotel room on a hike. And then there’s a man with a Rottweiler for a head. And then things get really weird, as absolute insanity takes the reins. Ben is chased, threatened with death, running frantically along a “path” in search of a character called “The Producer” in hopes of solving his increasingly bizarre problems. The plot unfolds in a waterfall of strangeness that will please anyone looking for hilariously macabre adventure. But there’s also more to it than weird for weirdness’ sake. The really hard journey isn’t navigating a nonsensical exterior world, but facing family and personal issues head-on. Here, it just happens to be done with a talking crab as intermediary.