5 SFF Books I Hope To Read Before 2026

This speculative novel follows an art appraiser named Eve in London in the early twenty-first century. There she meets an elderly gentleman named Max who seems so familiar to her. But then there’s also an Eve and Max a century earlier, a young couple lost in time, staying at The White Octopus Hotel in the Swiss Alps…

In this wild-sounding novel, two friends embark on a week-long bus tour to visit all the “physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles.” They popped up around North America several years earlier, after it was revealed that the world was just a simulation. Along with a bus full of eccentric strangers, the two friends tour these anomalies, as they head toward the final stop, which might hold the secret of the simulation.

This novel is a statement on privacy and totalitarian governments. In this future world, where China is the only superpower, people’s memories can now be recorded and even shared. Which, of course, means that corporations are trying to exploit and profit from them, and the government is trying to control them. When the unnamed narrator inherits a cache of memories that have been banned, he will risk his life to share them with the world.

Finally, an epic space opera from the award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Mawukana na-Vdnaze is unable to die, a situation that makes Maw something to be feared. It also makes Maw very useful as a pilot, a job that usually kills anyone who attempts it. In this universe where destruction, war, and death are everywhere, what is the point of living forever? And what does it really mean to live?