Robot Ghost Kitchens and Memory Capitalism: August’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

Humidity be damned, this month’s crop of books is sparking with exciting new premises and relationship dynamics. You’ve got robots-turned-cooks, an economy built entirely on mandatory memory collection, a polyamorous throuple romantasy, Practical Magic but make it a mother/daughter tale. And if you were a fan of Sideways Stories from Wayside School and/or Holes, have I got the adult fantasy debut for you…

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Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle
(Tordotcom Publishing, August 5)

This cozy near-future novella speaks to me as someone who watched our Brooklyn neighborhood’s restaurants take care of each other during covid lockdown, but Annalee Newitz’s new book will appeal to anyone who connects food with community. As San Francisco recovers from a devastating war, a band of recently reactivated robots take over a ghost kitchen to make the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the Bay—because even when you’re living through unprecedented times, you gotta eat.

Louis Sachar, The Magician of Tiger Castle
(Ace, August 5)

For whatever reason I’ve heard more than one person lately nostalgically reminiscing on Louis Sachar’s young adult novel Holes, which has made it extra delightful to point out that not only does he have a new book, but it’s his adult fantasy debut. That said, The Magician of Tiger Castle did initially start out as a YA romcom about Princess Tullia escaping her betrothal to the neighboring kingdom’s awful prince. Her father the king has employed failed palace magician Anataole to brew a potion that will make Tullia acquiesce; but as Sachar wrote his way into the story, he found himself identifying more with fortysomething Anatole, who regards Tullia as a daughter but also needs to prove himself to the king after decades of failing to deliver on his magic.

Lindsay King-Miller, This is My Body
(Quirk Books, August 5)

Lindsay King-Miller continues to explore queer horror, but whereas her debut novel The Z Word used found family and zombies, her follow-up focuses on blood family and exorcisms. Brigid knows she made the right choice to leave home, considering that her ultra-Catholic family would accept neither her sexuality nor the fact that she’s a single mom. But when her daughter Dylan morphs from typical teen acting-out to disturbing behavior, Brigid can think of only one explanation: demonic possession. And the only man she trusts to perform the exorcism is her uncle, Father Angus. Returning to her estranged family could help Dylan, but Brigid finds herself unable to assert herself in adulthood; and as she reconnects with Zandy, her first love, she begins to access the darkest adolescent memories that she had repressed.

Brigid Kemmerer, Warrior Princess Assassin
(Avon, August 12)

This romantasy is giving me fantasy Materialists vibes, if that movie’s love triangle had instead shifted into a queer polyamorous romance: Princess Jory and King Maddox enter into a betrothal with similar ulterior motives—he to access her family’s weather magic to stop his lands from burning, a blaze whose origin he’s hiding; she obscuring the fact that her family’s magic is fading. Struggling to retain her worth in this political alliance, Jory is tempted to run away with Asher, her childhood best friend-turned-assassin. But when Asher discovers that the Hunter’s Guild has dispatched him to kill the royal couple, he instead takes all three of them on the run.

Yiming Ma, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us
(Mariner Books, August 12)

Lately I’m seeing a lot of speculative fiction focusing on the commerce and consumption of memories, from Mia Tsai’s The Memory Hunters in last month’s SFF list to Neon Yang’s story “The Garden of Collective Memory” from the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity. Yiming Ma’s novel takes place in the far-future Qin Empire (what China renamed itself after becoming the sole global superpower), where mandatory Mindbank technology creates a new system of Memory Capitalism. That is, all citizens must record and upload their memories; some take that further by charging others to relive and even edit strangers’ recollections. When the unnamed narrator’s mother dies, he inherits her Mindbank—except that all of her memories are banned for threatening the carefully curated collective memory.

Seon-Ran Cheon (translated by Gene Png), The Midnight Shift
(Bloomsbury Publishing, August 12)

A detective, a vampire hunter, and a nurse walk into a hospital in Seon-Ran Cheon’s sapphic vampire murder mystery: Su-Yeon’s grandma is a patient at the hospital where four elderly patients have already inexplicably jumped from the same sixth-floor window; suicide, perhaps, but either way Su-Yeon fears for her grandma’s fate. Despite none of her colleagues believing her, Su-Yeon takes it upon herself to investigate—only to run into Violette, a self-proclaimed vampire hunter hot on the same case. Their reluctant team-up crosses paths with a mysterious nurse and mounting evidence that an immortal bloodsucker could actually be behind these deaths.

Hollie Overton, A Mother’s Guide to the Apocalypse
(Redhook, August 19)

TV writer and thriller author Hollie Overton explores climate change in her new speculative family drama set a generation from now. A Mother’s Guide to the Apocalypse initially takes the form of a mother’s anxious tracking of devastating storms and other disasters as she descends into the rabbit hole of survivalist prepping. No amount of doomsday prepping can save her from being swept away in a flash flood in LA. But eighteen years later, in a world transformed by climate change, her triplet daughters discover her apocalypse guide… and clues that their mother might still be alive.

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster
(Tor Books, August 19)

Big queer Practical Magic vibes from Charlie Jane Anders’ new contemporary fantasy novel about Jamie, ostensibly a New England academic but also a witch teaching her mother Serena witchcraft from a three-hundred-year-old book. As with many mother/daughter tales involving magic spells, there’s a dark family history snaking around their bond, and it will take more powerful spellwork than Jamie has ever harnessed to save Serena from her darkness.