The opening page of Malka Older’s new book says simply, “There are other ways to live.” That idea carries through so many of this year’s best science-fiction books, which are full of questions about how we might live differently with one another, on our troubled planet or in the furthest reaches of space. Science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, is not predictive but descriptive, and what contemporary science-fiction authors are so often describing is a world that seems to be less and less built for humans to thrive in it. We are still close enough to 2020 that we’re reading books that have their roots in that particularly tumultuous year—roots that dig deep into surveillance, capitalism, protest, inequity, and failures to learn from the past.
Read Full Article »
