Skeld Season, Spider Brides, and Black Orbs: February’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

Spring is almost here, but still just far enough away that we’ve got another month of snow days and hopefully cozy reading time. If you’re feeling romantic for Valentine’s, there’s a monster romance—so long as you don’t mind spiders—and a couple who act out their love story through every conceivable book genre. We’ve also got a symbiote terrorizing an Antarctic research station, ordinary women transformed into temporary Medusas, and a reality-warping postpartum mystery.

Ewhan Kim (translated by Sean Lin Halbert), The Black Orb
(MIRA Books, February 4)

In this absurd and apocalyptic novel, a massive black orb suddenly appears in one of Seoul’s residential neighborhoods and begins swallowing people whole. Jeong-su Kim (thirtysomething and single, a rising office manager and a disappointing son) is among the first witnesses and so the first to run from the orb—and then orbs, as they multiply and move across the land, citizens disappearing in their wake. As he searches for his parents, Jeong-su instead encounters opportunistic looters, fledgling religious cults, and peers questioning why and how can we escape?, even as they come to realize that there is no answer.

Ali Smith, Gliff
(Pantheon, February 4)

The cover copy for Ali Smith’s new standalone dystopian novel (following the Seasonal Quartet) is, in fitting with its anti-surveillance-tech ethos, very spare: There is a brother and a sister, a house with a red circle drawn around it, a horse discovered in a field. But if you’d like to know a little more about Gliff (named for said horse, a word that could mean anything and everything), here goes: Teenagers Briar and Rose are left alone when their whistleblower mother is called away on a family emergency. Fending for themselves, they dutifully follow her anti-data teachings, not relying on the “liabilities” of smartphones. However, this serves to brand them as Unverifiables by the British government, which threatens to bulldoze their home and forces them to shelter with a group of squatters. Glimpses of a “Brave New World” five years on reunite the siblings in a totalitarian future, depicting the difficulty of growing up in a world where you can only trust what you witness through your own eyes, not a screen.

Hache Pueyo, But Not Too Bold
(Tordotcom Publishing, February 11)

Hache Pueyo translated her own monster romance novella from the original Brazilian Portuguese, a gothic thriller about Dália, protegée-turned-new-keeper at Capricious House. Only, the current lady of the house is Lady Anatema, a humanoid spider who has eaten both the former keeper as well as any potential brides who come her way. At first Dália’s duties entail merely locking and unlocking the many tiny drawers containing Anatema’s memories. But as they spend more time together, the Lady finds her new keeper irresistible… perhaps even wife material. This sounds like a hair-rising story, though who can say whether that’s intrigued desire or the phantom feel of spider legs.

Michael Nayak, Symbiote
(Angry Robot Books, February 11)

Michael Nayak (researcher, engineer, scientist, pilot, and more) draws upon his experiences at the South Pole for this thriller with nods to The Thing and Contagion. In 2028, with World War III brewing between America and China, American researchers isolated at Amundsen-Scott Station in Antarctica encounter their own diplomatic snafu when a crew of Chinese scientists knock on their door begging for help… and carrying a fresh corpse. The Americans’ reluctant offer of sanctuary is one they’ll come to regret, as they unwittingly invite in an ice-thriving symbiote—and this one doesn’t just body-snatch, it creates a telepathic hive-mind.

Sam Mills, The Watermark
(Melville House, February 11)

A metafictional adventure for fans of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, The Watermark explores whether our relationships end or keep going based on free will or the hands of Fate. That’s novelist Augustus Fate, who seeks to defeat his writer’s block by imprisoning a flesh-and-blood couple within the plots of various stories, love and otherwise. Jaime and Rachel’s meet-cutes and milestones repeat over and over, sometimes as a Russian tragedy, other times as a post-apocalyptic AI thriller—not to mention the constant shifts between typeface and POV. This sounds like a fascinating deconstruction of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we want.

Laura Robson, A Curse for the Homesick
(MIRA Books, February 18)

I love the sound of this melancholy, modern fairy tale set in a remote European country called Stenland, its female inhabitants cursed by skeld season: a three-month period during which any girl or woman could wake up marked by the three lines on her forehead. If she doesn’t take proper precautions, she will turn anyone she looks in the eye into stone. A trio of girls—Tess Eriksson, Linnea Sundstrom, and Kitty Sjöberg—live under the constant rules of skeld self-preservation, yet also experience the familiar adolescent push-and-pull of evolving friendships and falling in love… which for Tess is with Soren, whose parents her mother killed during her own skeld stint.

Edward Ashton, The Fourth Consort
(St. Martin’s Press, February 25)

A few weeks ahead of the release of Mickey 17 in theaters (adapted from his novel Mickey7) comes Edward Ashton’s next sci-fi standalone, this one about pioneering alien cultures and the communication breakdowns that come with first contact. Dalton Greaves is one of humanity’s first representatives to the Unity, a supposed pan-species confederation, but his welcome is less than stellar, as he finds himself struggling to represent what Earth wants out of this partnership. Other factors working against him include Unity’s own strife with the Assembly, another pan-species confederation, and maybe suddenly Dalton is on the wrong side? When things go sideways, he’ll have to navigate an entirely new alien culture on a recently-discovered planet… as well as Neera, a human already affiliated with Unity, who may think there’s only room for one human in space.

Karen Thompson Walker, The Strange Case of Jane O.
(Random House, February 25)

As someone still figuring my way through a second postpartum, you’re always going to hook me with genre-bending stories about the transformative—often dangerously so—nature of motherhood. Especially from Karen Thompson Walker, whose other litfic novels explore speculative happenings of an unmooring nature, from an epidemic of sleep to the shifting rotation of the Earth. Here, the destabilization is on a smaller scale, presented by the case study of the eponymous Jane O. A new mother suffering from disturbingly real hallucinations of a dead person, who then goes missing, her case provokes conversations about believing women struggling with postpartum, no matter how inexplicable.

Gareth L. Powell, Future’s Edge
(Titan Books, February 25)

If you were a fan of Yume Kitasei’s The Stardust Grail, this standalone space opera horror crossover seems to hit a lot of the same touchpoints: Archaeologist-turned-pirate Ursula Morrow, infected with an alien parasite via an otherworldly artifact, is tasked with tracking down that same curio, as it may hold the key to what remains of humanity after the Earth was destroyed. What starts on a refugee planet blasts off on a road trip story, with tinges of military SF and a love triangle between two humans and a ship AI. Not to mention that Ursula’s infection makes her basically invincible—sounds like a fun romp.