Listicle: 10 sci-fi novels that explore strange new worlds

Think star-crossed romance, but in the literal sense. Korean author Kim Bo-Young puts an unnamed couple on opposite sides of the universe. They decide to time their travel so they can arrive on the blue planet in time for their wedding. They end up spending light years apart, only able to communicate through letters that arrive years after they were sent. The story was never meant to be a book; it was commissioned as a proposal by a Korean man for his girlfriend. Aww.

A rare genetic mutation causes three-year old Akili to become the smartest human on the planet. The world’s top scientists are figuring out ways to kill Akili, worried that it’s the start of a race of superhumans that will wipe out Homo Sapiens. The part that feels eerily real is the book’s social and political setting – a US administration similar to George Bush’s government, which is conducting dangerous biochemical research and secretly surveilling the world.

Are we living in a simulation? In comedian Kanan Gill’s sci-fi comedy, madcap detective P Manjunath and his despairing assistant Heng always end up frustrating Dr Krishna’s plans to destroy their universe. They don’t know it, but their lives are endless simulations inside a bigger simulation, one after the other. It’s like Inception, but with universes instead of dreams.

Five years before a climate apocalypse nearly wipes humans out of existence, the danger signals are all there: More hurricanes, air choked with microplastics, oceans bubbling with filth. When doomsday finally hits, Katie and her son Harry live in isolation, trying to navigate the new normal of their destroyed world. Author Sarah K Jackson’s own eco-anxiety inspired her to write this debut novel, which reads almost like a warning.

Debut author Grace Curtis’s novel is about the world of the future. A travelling hotel in space (a kind of intergalactic cruise liner) offers the finest views of the galaxy. But staff witness new things every day – guests with secret pasts, imperial spies from distant planets, and mysterious conferences held on-board. It’s like Star Trek, but there’s delicious space food and drinks too. No, Scottie can’t beam you out of a mess.

Adina, an extra-terrestrial, is born to a human family to spy on Earthlings and transmit the information back to her superiors back in the far reaches of space. As she grows, she encounters failure and rejection and has to make sense of class divides, racial prejudices, and violence in 1970s US. Of course, it’s an elaborate metaphor – aren’t they all? But it’s a story about what the human condition is objectively like.

In the hotel of the title, director of security January Cole is living Schrodinger’s worst nightmare. A murder has been committed but the corpse seems to exist in an alternate version of reality, which makes it hard to solve the case. In this madness, eccentric, ultra-rich guests keep arriving at the hotel to take flights to and fro between different timelines. There are ghosts too. And as usual, the government’s trying to control the concept of time and gaslight everyone.

TikTok pranks have users shifting furniture slightly to the left to mess with their family’s sense of reality. In Version Control, it’s the same phenomenon, but on a global scale. Rebecca Wright senses that something is off – the President doesn’t feel quite right, strange dreams feel too real. Is she just paranoid, or are her physicist husband’s experiments with reality causing shifts in the universe?

It’s the 22nd century and humans live at the bottom of the sea – the surface of the Earth is burned up from ultraviolet radiation. Author Chi Ta-wei’s speculative novel follows Momo, a dermatologist, grappling with her queerness in a sub-aquatic society dependent on cyborg labour and surveillance. It predicted much of the tech that’s become or is becoming normal today – fitness tracking, social media and capitalist regimes.

It’s like The Matrix, The Twilight Zone, and Black Mirror combined. The characters in Anomaly are from starkly-different backgrounds – a French-origin architect from Mumbai, a closeted pop star from Nigeria, a chef who’s an assassin by night – but they are all on the same flight. Months later, the exact same flight lands at the JFK airport, with the same crew and passengers. Who are the real passengers, and who are the duplicates? Everything’s up in the air.