The best new sci-fi of May 2025 featuring a moving, near-future tale from Grace Chan

While there are no big names publishing new science fiction novels this May, there are some real gems nonetheless – including a big tip from me, Grace Chan’s near-future Every Version of You. I want to press it into the hands of everyone I know. There are also two fascinating sci-fi-edged thrillers out this month, by Adam Oyebanji and Barnaby Martin, while Catherine Chidgey’s creepy The Book of Guilt has intrigued me enough to make it my next read – if it’s not ousted by Bora Chung’s real history-inspired story of war on an alien planet, Red Sword, that is…

Set in late-21st-century Australia, this novel (published in Australia in 2022 but out now more widely) follows Tao-Yi in a world where most people spend their lives in an immersive virtual reality called Gaia. Every morning, she climbs into a pod in her apartment to enter Gaia, where she works and socialises. In the real world, the unrelenting heat of the sun means there are no trees left and hardly any animals: this is a terrifying vision of the future. When a new technology allows people to permanently upload themselves to Gaia, Tao-Yi’s partner Navin, whose real body is failing him, wants to do it. Tao-Yi isn’t so sure. This is my favourite book of the year so far – a brilliant and moving slice of sci-fi that I can’t stop thinking about. Watch out, New Scientist Book Club: I think this may be one for us later this year!

I love a speculative thriller and this one, about the scars left by the Atlantic slave trade, looks cracking. It opens with an impossible death – a man and his son who seem to have drowned in seawater, but who are 1600 kilometres from the nearest ocean. As detective Ethan Krol investigates, he learns more about the mysterious Abi Eniola, who claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria but whose high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest there may be something else going on.

On a disputed planet, a woman is forced to fight for her captors, battling (we are told by the publisher) “scientific abominations, and truly alien terrain to uncover the truth about her identity and that of her enslaved companions”. South Korean writer Bora Chung drew on real history to write this novel – that of the Korean soldiers who fought on behalf of the Qing dynasty against Russia. It looks like a must-read to me.

An intriguing piece of sci-fi horror here, from former Horror Writers Association president John Palisano. It’s set on a moon-sized cemetery in space, the Eden, where a cosmic entity is bringing back the souls of those buried aboard. Ava, whose lost love, Roland, is one of those spirits, must fight back against it before it reaches Earth.

I’m hoping for shades of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in this novel set in an alternate version of England in 1979, where triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last residents of a home in the New Forest. The home is part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme (whatever that is, it sounds sinister), and every day they are watched over by three mothers: Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. “Their nightmares are recorded in The Book of Dreams. Their lessons are taken from The Book of Knowledge. And their sins are reported in The Book of Guilt,” says Chidgey’s publisher. As the government begins shutting down its Sycamore Homes, the children realise their lives might be very different from the version they’ve been fed. I’m so desperate to discover what the mystery is that I have this one on my bedside table ready to go.US readers will have to wait until September.

This is pitched as speculative fiction, which, as far as I can tell, means it’s not quite fantasy and it’s not quite sci-fi – or if it is, then it’s on the literary end of both. In any event, it sounds really intriguing. We follow Lina and her father as they arrive at the Sea, a shape-shifting building “made of time”, where “pasts and futures collide” (that feels time-travelly enough for this round-up). There, they meet their neighbours, from a 17th-century Jewish scholar excommunicated for his radical thoughts to a poet from the Tang Dynasty. But why are Lina and her father there?

I will nearly always fall for a story in which a mother has to protect their child in a dangerous future world – and, yep, I’m going to be reading this one too. This particular dangerous world is one where a deadly heat forces people to live by night, and where the mysterious Soundfield arrived 20 years earlier, producing a constant hum. Scientist Hannah used to work on the Soundfield, trying to solve its mysteries; now she must keep her gifted son Isaac safe.

Our sci-fi columnist at New Scientist, Emily H. Wilson, recently pondered the concept of “climate fiction” and what should count as a piece of “cli-fi”. This novel should definitely be in that mix: it’s set in a future where fierce wildfires are raging. When a young mother and her daughter turn up at Iris’s hotel in the German spa town of Bad Heim (where guests are now rare), Iris wonders if they pose a threat.

I like the pitch for this novel: “boy meets girl meets AI therapist”, in which Adrian decides to try out Sike, a new AI psychotherapy app that tracks its users’ every move and emotion to guide them towards “mental contentment”. He falls for Maquie, a venture capitalist looking for the next big tech hit, but she refuses to use Sike.

Jeff is living a mundane life until he sees the “Pale Woman” and his reality shifts. Now he is mercenary Jezz, fighting alien insects on the front line. This is described by its publisher as The Matrix meets Joe Haldeman’s military sci-fi novel The Forever War, which is certainly intriguing. Plus I always love an alien insect.

The art and science of writing science fiction

Explore the world of science fiction and learn how to craft your own captivating sci-fi tales on this immersive weekend break.