Far-future fiction feels brilliantly ambitious

If you’re not familiar with Claire North, you’ve been missing out. Beginning with 2014’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, she’s published a string of beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, occasionally mind-blowing novels.

North’s latest, Slow Gods (Orbit, 448 pages, $26), might also be her most ambitious.

Consider its setting: the far-flung future, where entire civilizations are about to be wiped out by a supernova. Consider its narrator: an interplanetary pilot who died and was reborn, who has since lived several lives. Consider the story: spanning vast distances and centuries of time, from its first sentence (“My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself…”) it promises — and delivers — something we’ve never seen before. Magnificent.

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Charlie Webb isn’t what you’d call a successful lawyer. He’s mediocre — he knows he is. He takes mediocre cases, the kind of thing a successful lawyer wouldn’t waste his time on.

But things are about to change. When he agrees to defend an artist who’s accused of stealing his own painting (really), Charlie has no idea what sort of trouble he’s about to get into. Or what he will have to do to extricate himself from a dicey situation.

Phillip Margolin’s An Insignificant Case (Minotaur, 352 pages, $14) is a terrific legal thriller. Which isn’t a surprise: Margolin, who was a criminal defence lawyer before he switched careers, has been writing crime fiction for nearly 50 years. Like John Grisham or Scott Turow, he deftly balances character and story, and excels at keeping us guessing by taking the story in directions we haven’t anticipated.

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Polostan (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $24), the new novel by Neal Stephenson, introduces us to Dawn Rae Bjornberg, whose life is, shall we say, complicated. Born to an American family of anarchists in the infancy of the 20th century, Dawn spends her early years in Russia before returning to the U.S., where she runs afoul of the law. Escaping back to Russia, she begins the long process of becoming a spy.

Stephenson, whose books are typically filled with breathtakingly original ideas (see, for example, 1999’s spectacular Cryptonomicon), nearly outdoes himself here, crafting a story that sets our imaginations afire and leaves us, at the end, breathless.

This is the first volume in a projected series, the Bomb Light cycle, and volume two can’t come soon enough.

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You might be familiar with the talented, prolific Neal Shusterman for his Arc of a Scythe science fiction series, which is marketed for young adult readers but resonates with the grown-ups, too.

While MindWorks: An Uncanny Compendium of Short Fiction (Simon & Schuster, 592 pages, $28) is also marketed as YA, the collection could just as appropriately be shelved with adult fiction.

Shusterman is a remarkable storyteller, with an apparently limitless imagination and a knack for making even the most out-of-left-field premise (such as a teenager who, if he gets too close to someone, absorbs their essence) seem not only plausible, but natural.

The stories tend toward the dark, and some of them are genuinely frightening, even if you’ve read a lot of horror and you think you’ve seen it all. There are also a couple of stories set in the world of Arc of a Scythe, and one delightful little vignette that’ll make you giggle. A real treat for short-fiction fans.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.