The best new sci-fi books of 2025 from Adrian Tchaikovsky to Martha Wells

So far, it has been an encouraging year for science fiction. My favourite new offering to date is probably Hal LaCroix’s Here and Beyond, but then, I’m a sucker for a good ark-ship story.

In LaCroix’s take on the trope, a vessel called Shipworld is heading for HD-40307g, “a habitable Super Earth hug orbiting a simmering red dwarf star”. It is a journey of 42 light years – meaning that none of the 600 souls who begin the journey will actually live to see HD-40307g. Only the Seventh Generation will make planetfall.

There are rules on board. People are given a treatment that allows them to stay healthier longer, but they aren’t allowed to have children until their 50s. Everything must be in support of the Mission – reaching the planet – even though no one on board alive will see it.

Ark-ship stories (also known as generation-ship stories) suffer from the structural challenge of having to shift among sets of characters as generations are born and die, which can be distancing for the reader. LaCroix, fortunately, is wonderfully good at quickly building characterisations and drawing you in. Indeed, as generations come and go, our knowledge of the history of Shipworld helps the story develop into a satisfying and meaningful drama. We the readers end up being more expert than each new generation, as living history slips into deep past for those on board.

LaCroix sometimes seems to shy away from the most dramatic moments. His most surprising choice is to render quite mute the most shocking event in the story: a mystery object deliberately turning and choosing to bear down on Shipworld. This isn’t to complain; these are artistic decisions LaCroix makes.

The ending, meanwhile, didn’t quite land for me personally, but then, producing a really satisfying ending to a story that has been 360 years in the making is no mean feat, and this mesmerising, finely tuned story is a worthy addition to the great ark-ship canon.

Anyone enjoying Alexander Skarsgård’s delightful turn as Murderbot on Apple TV+ may also want to treat themselves to the story in its original form. Luckily, Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries novellas were reprinted as three omnibus editions earlier this year. (By the way, when I read the first novella, I thought Murderbot was female; apparently it’s quite common to assign Murderbot your own gender. Anyway, Skarsgård was a surprise pick to play “her” when I found he had been cast!)

Adrian Tchaikovsky has had another busy six months producing more work in the general arena of non-human intelligence. In February, his novel Shroud examined the very unhuman-like alien lifeforms inhabiting a horrifyingly dark and noisy moon. Then, last month, the third novel in his Dogs of War sequence, Bee Speaker, was published. The books are less well-known than his smash-hit Children of Time series, but they also examine what kind of people non-human species of animals – with a bit of tinkering – would turn out to be.

Tchaikovsky is brilliant at thinking his way into the minds of these tinkered-with animals. I found my heart really going out to Rex, the star of the first novel in the series, as he juggles being a good dog with the fact that he is also a deadly, 7-foot-tall, “bioform” fighting machine.

Two notable artificial intelligence-related books this year include Laila Lalami’s beautifully written dystopian novel The Dream Hotel, and Grace Chan’s clever and thoughtful virtual-reality novel Every Version of You, in which humans escape catastrophic climate change by uploading their minds to a virtual paradise.

Meanwhile, Kaliane Bradley’s bestselling The Ministry of Time came out in paperback in March, and I quickly made up for my failure to read it in hardback. It’s an easy book to eat up, with lots of delicious energy to it. Another great read, out in April, was Roz Dineen’s climate change novel Briefly Very Beautiful, which I found hard to put down.

Here’s to even more thought-provoking sci-fi in the second half of this year. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Emily H. Wilson is author of the Sumerians trilogy

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