Head below for the full list of science fiction titles heading your way in November!
Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change.
November 7
Chaos Terminal (Midsolar Murders #2) — Mur Lafferty (Ace)
Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, thank you very much. But no matter what she does, people persist in dying around her—and only she seems to be able to solve the crime. After fleeing to an alien space station in hopes that the lack of humans would stop the murders, a serial killer had the nerve to follow her to Station Eternity. (Mallory deduced who the true culprit was that time, too.) Now the law enforcement agent who hounded Mallory on Earth has come to Station Eternity, along with her teenage crush and his sister, Mallory’s best friend from high school. Mallory doesn’t believe in coincidences, and so she’s not at all surprised when someone in the latest shuttle from Earth is murdered. It’s the story of her life, after all. Only this time she has more than a killer to deal with. Between her fugitive friends, a new threat arising from the Sundry hivemind, and the alarmingly peculiar behavior of the sentient space station they all call home, even Mallory’s deductive abilities are strained. If she can’t find out what’s going on (and fast), a disaster of intergalactic proportions may occur.
The Tatami Time Machine Blues (Tatami Galaxy #2) — Tomihiko Morimi, transl. by Emily Balistrieri (HarperVia)
During a scorching August in Kyoto, our protagonist and his worst friend, Ozu, are locked in a glaring contest in a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room. Ozu has spilled Coke on the air conditioner’s remote control—the only AC in Shimogamo Yusuisuiso, their famously shabby sweatbox of an apartment building. Vengeful and despairing, our protagonist discusses countermeasures with his secret crush, the reliably blunt Akashi, when Tamura, a strange young man with a bad haircut, appears. Tamura claims to be a time traveler from 25 years in the future, and shows off the time machine he uses to travel. Our protagonist has a brilliant idea: the sweetest revenge would be to go back one day in time and retrieve the functioning remote control. His simple fix is complicated by Ozu and several others who are also eager to take a ride back in time. But in attempting to alter the past, our protagonist foresees the world’s extinction. Even more troublingly, Akashi mentions she’s bringing someone to the upcoming bonfire… and it’s not him. Only one thing remains certain: it’s going to be a very long month. Obliteration? Salvation? Coca-Cola? Castella cake? What does the time machine hold for our (not quite) heroes? It all depends on which one gets there first.
Through the Storm (TransDimensional Hunter #2) — John Ringo, Lydia Sherrer (Baen)
Becoming a global celebrity overnight would make most people happy. Not Lynn Raven. As a teenage gaming prodigy, she’s enjoyed years of anonymity behind the virtual mask of Larry Coughlin, war-hardened vet and virtual gaming mercenary. But now Lynn has stepped out of the shadows to compete in the cutting-edge augmented reality game TransDimensional Hunter that has taken the world by storm. And she’s winning. But with success has come swarms of paparazzi drones, jealous teammates, and a backstabbing rival team that will use any trick in the book to ruin her. Then there’s the game itself. At times, the “augmented” reality seems too real for Lynn’s comfort, and strange accidents keep happening. Something is going on; she just has to figure out what. Lynn would much rather fight monsters than do paparazzi interviews, but somehow she’ll have to master both—and pass her senior year to boot. She managed to step into the real, but will the storm of reality now defeat her for good?
November 14
The Lost Cause — Cory Doctorow (Tor Books)
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go? For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn’t controversial. It’s just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks. But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their “alternative” news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that “climate change” is just a giant scam. And they’re your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they’re not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.
Hellweg’s Keep – Justin Holley (Flame Tree Press)
Thirty-seven miners disappear without a trace within a Titanium mine, Hellweg’s Keep, deep within Zeta One, a moon orbiting the planet, Terra. When FBI agent Kendra Omen arrives via the spaceship Marietta, strange phenomenon begins to manifest… suicides, shadows a shade darker than the shadows they move within, disembodied whispers, and Kendra would swear she catches a glimpse of her own deceased daughter walking the dimly lit halls of Hellweg enterprises. But that’s impossible. Isn’t it? As evidence of occult practices at the mine emerges, Kendra realizes the answers they seek, and hopefully the thirty-seven miners, will only be found underground in the claustrophobic labyrinth of shafts and natural caverns within Hellweg’s Keep.
System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) — Martha Wells (Tordotcom Publishing)
Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize. But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
