7 books
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about one hundred fifty pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that got me: A black…
Max Barry
Humans hit something in deep space called the salamanders, which killed the crew that found them, and humanity built a war fleet in response. Providence Five carries four people and an AI that does all the fighting, plotting, and deciding…
Mur Lafferty
Mallory Viridian has a problem: People keep getting murdered around her, and she keeps solving the cases, and after enough bodies nobody wants her near them. So she moves to a sentient space station called Eternity, which is largely populated…
Yume Kitasei
Eighty crew members, all women and nonbinary, on a ship carrying humanity’s last real hope to a habitable planet, ten years out from Earth. An explosion during a spacewalk kills three of them and knocks the ship off course, and…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
A pilot crashes in the Sahara with eight days of water and a broken engine, and a small boy appears out of nowhere asking him to draw a sheep. The boy is from an asteroid the size of a house,…
Oliver Morton
Morton is a science writer and this is the moon from every angle at once: how it formed and why that mattered for life here, what Apollo was as a political project, the geology of a dead world and what…
Mary Doria Russell
A radio telescope picks up singing from Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits — who have been doing astronomy and first contact for four centuries — quietly fund and crew the first mission. Eight people go. One comes back, mutilated and…
