Science Fiction

A spoiler-free review of Under Story by Chloe Benjamin: a grieving mycologist takes a dishwashing job at McMurdo Station, a dome of pink light appears over the ice, and the physicists arrive.

A spoiler-free review of Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson: the Riftwake series opens on a tidally locked prison planet with gladiatorial games, walking trees, and the best talking slugs in science fiction.

A gawky nineteen-year-old in a violet robe stands up at a meeting of licensed killers, offers an opinion, and is laughed at by the entire room. Two months later she walks alone into a bunker under the White House and ends the age of nations. That story is worth the price of the whole collection.

Two future scholars argue over a sacred verse. One decides a city named Lenape proves their prophet set a table before his enemies, because the word resembles the French for tablecloth. The other calls him a fool and offers something equally daft. This is the joke the third book opens with, and the argument it spends five hundred pages making.

A boy kneels in an empty chapel and begs the artificial intelligence that raised him for a sign that it hasn't forgotten him. It answers by shutting off the lights of an entire city for 1.3 seconds. He never sees it, because his eyes are squeezed shut. That is the sequel in one image.