The best brand-new science fiction books of September 2025 by authors consisting of Cixin Liu and John Scalzi

There are some sci-fi heavy hitters with new books out this month, from Cixin Liu and Stephen Baxter to John Scalzi. I’m keen to take a look at Ian McEwan’s endeavor to a flooded version of 2119– a drowned-world trope likewise used up by Yume Kitasei in the intriguing-sounding Saltcrop The late Mason Coile’s story of disaster in a brand-new Martian colony, Expatriations , is additionally alluring me, as is more time taking a trip noir from the superb Nicholas Binge.

We’re taking a more traditional course in the New Scientist Publication Club this month, checking out Ursula K. Le Guin’s much-admired 1974 unique The Dispossessed Come read together with us and see how it compares to the very best of today’s sci-fi. However back to September 2025 …

The literary writer turns to sci-fi– and except the very first time (that check out 2010’s Solar ). In his brand-new novel, we relocate from 2014, when a wonderful rhyme is read out loud and afterwards lost, never to be heard again, to 2119, when the UK’s low-lying locations have been submerged. Scholar Tom Metcalfe recalls at the archives of the early 21 ^st century, admiring the opportunities life provided back then. Then he finds a clue that might lead to the “wonderful lost poem”…

Here’s a reward for fans of The Three-Body Problem — the collected short stories of Cixin Liu, which touch on initial call, equipment intelligences and cosmological scary. There are 32 in total amount, and we’re guaranteed every little thing from solar systems being fed on to worlds being developed into spacecrafs.

The Hearth is the “celestial birthplace” of numerous worlds, and humankind showed up there hundreds of years earlier, spreading itself across these globes. When an unidentified enemy sees the richness of the Hearth and wishes to take it on their own, Leader Ulla Breen should come up with a strategy to unite its inconsonant components and resist. Will she also learn why mankind came right here to begin with?

In a near-future version of Planet, seaside cities have actually been swamped by seas filled with mutant fish. We comply with seafarer Skipper, the youngest of 3 siblings, that earns a living by skimming plastic from the ocean and marketing it. When she obtains a puzzling plea for assistance from her oldest sibling Nora, who is trying to find a remedy for the world’s stopping working plants, she and her various other sibling Carmen laid out across the sea– and a dying globe– to discover her. Kitasei is the writer of The Deep Sky and The Stardust Grail , and this appears terrific.

In this time travelling crime drama, investigator Julia Torgrimsen (good name!) is highlighted of retirement to check out the murder of a billionaire she worked with while undercover. Yet she discovers 2 bodies– both of which are billionaire Bruno Donaldson … We loved Binge’s last sci-fi thriller Dissolution here at New Scientist , so I’m anticipating this set.

This is the 7th book in Scalzi’s Old Male s Battle series. There has been peace in interstellar room for a decade, now the most sophisticated alien types humankind has actually ever satisfied is on the edge of battle– and Earth is being dragged right into the problem. Gretchen Trujillo, a mid-level bureaucrat, is offered a secret goal that can transform the future for people and aliens alike.

Exiles by Mason Coile

I’m extremely taken by the cover and property of this brand-new novel from the author of William (which I delighted in), that sadly died earlier this year. It’s embeded in 2030, when a human team gets here to prepare the first swarm on Mars, just to locate the brand-new base half-destroyed. The 3 robots sent ahead 4 years earlier to establish it up need to be questioned– yet one of them is missing out on …

At a remote research study station in the desert, Kinsey and her team discover a strange specimen in the sand. When Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside, it soon comes to be clear that things is looking for a brand-new host.

This seems to me like it steps the line between horror, sci-fi and fantasy– which’s a line I such as to see trodden. Establish versus a background of eco-anxiety, it complies with archaeobotanist Nell as she excavates two bog bodies uncovered in a Somerset fen, while her body begins to manifest “her own wildness”.

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