The best new science fiction books of October 2025, featuring Chris Hadfield and a tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin

Like many of you, no doubt, Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite sci-fi writers. So I am really excited about a collection out this month that brings together the maps she would draw when starting a story, and also celebrates her brilliant and wise writing. Not least because we’ve just read The Dispossessed with the New Scientist Book Club: do come and join us and share your thoughts on this classic novel with fellow fans!

The sci-fi out this month looks forward as well as back, though. Ken Liu brings us a thriller set in the near future, and I’m keen to read Megha Majumdar’s tale of a flooded Kolkata and a desperate mother. There’s also fiction from astronaut Chris Hadfield and a new release from Mark Z. Danielewski, author of the epically strange House of Leaves.

Le Guin, the blurb for this tells us, would draw a map when beginning one of her brilliant stories, such as the Earthsea series (I do remember the archipelagos at the start of those books) and Always Coming Home. The new collection compiles those maps and accompanies them with interviews, poems, recipes and stories from a range of contributors. This book sounds like a real treasure trove for my fellow Le Guin fans and me.

In this sci-fi thriller set in the near future, hacker Julia is recruited to help save a kidnapped “dream artist” and unravel a virtual reality mystery. This is the first in the Julia Z series from the Hugo award winning Liu.

Reynolds, who wrote an excellent sci-fi short story for New Scientist a few years back, here tells the tale of a private investigator named, somewhat unexpectedly, Yuri Gagarin, who is looking into a death on a starship carrying thousands of sleeping passengers through space.

I must admit that I’m not sure how far this strays into science-fictional territory, but I would say there is plenty of crossover between sci-fi fans and lovers of Danielewski’s seminal House of Leaves. In fact, my colleague Jacob Aron picked it as one of the best sci-fi novels of all time. So I imagine some of you will, like me, be excited to learn Danielewski has a new novel out this month. It ostensibly follows two friends in the small city of Orvop, Utah, out to save two horses from slaughter – but I am sure there is going to be an awful lot more to it than that, and I’m here for it.

This dystopian novel takes place in a world where an illness has robbed people of their memories, and where they visit The Centre to relearn how to speak and live. But as “shards of memories” start to return to them, it threatens The Centre’s strict curriculum and the students start to question what is really going on. I love the fact in their free time, they watch old videotapes and take on the names of the characters from them – Chandler and Gunther, Maria and Chino!

Conform by Ariel Sullivan

Garnering comparisons to The Hunger Games, this is set in a dystopian society where everyone is judged by their ability to conform, and where one woman finds herself in a love triangle. We’re promised a look at the dangers of social and genetic engineering, too.

This slice of space horror will be just the ticket for the Halloween season. Halley is on the run after exposing an interplanetary conspiracy. She hides out on the Elysian Fields, a drifting crypt in space dreamed up by a trillionaire who thought the rich could lie in cryo-sleep until medicine caught up with mortality. It has floated silently for over a century, after the programme was abandoned, but now Halley is on board, and something feels wrong…

Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s cold war thriller is set in the 1970s, amid the space race between the US, the USSR and China, as a new Apollo mission launches into orbit. This is the third title in the series after Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders and The Defectors.

This sounds like a must-read to me. It’s set in a near-future Kolkata, where climate change and food scarcity are causing flooding and famine. Ma is set to join her husband in Michigan, bringing her 2-year-old daughter and elderly father with her. But just as they are about to leave, Ma discovers her immigration documents have been stolen. Cue a frantic search for the thief over the course of a week. Meanwhile Boomba, the thief himself, commits escalating crimes as he seeks to care for his family. How far will each go to protect their children as catastrophe approaches?

Lucy, whose earliest memories are of the covid-19 pandemic and who now fights to restore lost species, and Hester, born on the day of the Chernobyl disaster, both dream of a time when wolves return to Britain. This is “tremendous” and “unforgettable”, according to no less than Kim Stanley Robinson.

We get two for the price of one in this double-header – a pair of crime stories set in a far-future science-fictional universe. Miller’s Red Star Hustle follows a high-class escort on the run who falls for the “studly and noble clone of a murderous puppet monarch” (I am very taken by that combination of words). Kowal’s Apprehension sees a grandmother on an alien planet set out in pursuit when her grandson is kidnapped by a terrorist organisation.

If you thought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the zenith (or nadir) of Jane Austen reinventions, then think again: this is a remix of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein that reimagines plain sister Mary Bennet as a brilliant scientist who wants to reanimate the dead… in order to find a husband. But then she meets a remarkable young woman who makes her reexamine what she really wants.