Time Travel Romance and Haunted TV Channels: October’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy

It being spooky season, there’s some undeniable horror crossover in these books: haunted dolls, angels that drive you mad, impossible pregnancies as invasive body horror, a nostalgic television dimension that may trap you forever. But there’s also the paradoxes of love across timelines, first contact in parts of the world (and our history) that we rarely see, and a sweeping new space opera built on mathematics and language. And let’s not forget, from our 2026 SFF preview, Nghi Vo’s demonic historical dark fantasy The Scarlet Ball and Becky Chambers’s cozy sci-fi As You Wake, Break the Shell. Enjoooooy!

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Audrey Niffenegger, Life Out of Order
(Hanover Square Press, October 6)

Audrey Niffenegger has long teased the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, featuring Clare and Henry’s Chrono-Displaced daughter Alba and her two husbands—Oliver, a time traveler like her, and Zach, existing in linear time. The stakes and scope are bigger this time around, encompassing an uncomfortably familiar dystopian present and a much more disturbing far-future, with Alba carrying the burden of future knowledge like her father, except in her case it’s about the fate of the world in addition to the outcomes of her various relationships. But she’s just one narrator, as readers will get to hear from Clare, Zach, Oliver, Alba’s mysterious stepsister Isadora, and a few more surprise viewpoints.

Samantha Josephs, Carrying
(Putnam, October 6)

One of the year’s most unhinged premises comes from this trans body horror debut, as perfect housewife Martha begins to suffer the strain of performing impeccable femininity as a stealth trans woman. Keeping her husband happy yet oblivious—managing his baby fever with staged fake miscarriages—only goes so far when Martha begins suffering an inexplicable illness that culminates in an impossible pregnancy. Part The Substance, part Rosemary’s Baby, part something entirely original, Martha’s journey takes her into entirely new territory with her body she’s so carefully controlled. What’s more, it brings her closer to people who give her what she never thought she’d find: someone who has been through the same thing.

Annalee Newitz, A Wall is Also a Road
(Tor Books, October 6)

If I were to consistently trust any author with the perspective of a non-human protagonist, it would be Annalee Newitz. In their latest, Gardenpath is a genderless slime mold graduate student writing their dissertation on multicellular life and where it thrives. Their fieldwork just so happens to take them to Pompeii, circa 79 AD. Taking the form of a human, Gardenpath befriends a sex worker named Murtis, while trying to warn her about the impending eruption of Vesuvius, yet also gathering enough research to please their corrupt professor. It’s a mind-expanding premise and a fascinating vision of intelligent life in space beyond our little planet, especially taking place in what we consider ancient history.

Claire North, As We Fall Through Time
(Orbit Books, October 13)

If you were a time traveler, would you let a pesky little thing like the canonical timeline stop you from being with your soulmate? Not so for Cal, who meets soldier Olivier during the Napoleonic Wars and creates a paradox to keep him from dying on the battlefield… only for Olivier to disappear from the timeline entirely. And then Cal’s time traveler colleague Fadimatu encounters her own mummified corpse in a museum in 2018—another paradox. Now they must work together to figure out how and where (or rather, when) the timeline is unraveling.

Alex T. Singer, Angel Country
(Saga Press, October 20)

In an alternate-history 1904, America is still only thirteen colonies, due to the dark forces of maddening angels that warp humans’ minds and bodies. Scientist Ada Franklin is working on a prototype for human-angel communication—only to wake up in her own grave, inexplicably killed and resurrected. Her former research partner has absconded with her life’s work, presumably to put toward greedy human means of Manifest Destiny. Acting as both Frankenstein and monster, Ada must resurrect her former lover, also mutated by their work,  and chase her rival across the country before he can make contact with angels.

Jane Schoenbrun, Public Access Afterworld
(Hogarth Books, October 27)

I’d like to think that Jane Schoenbrun and I frequented the same Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction communities in the early 2000s, even if we discovered Slenderman and other Internet urban legends at different times. With the completion of their “screen trilogy” with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, they are exploring many of the same horror themes in a new medium: print! Bleakly sifting through the Internet’s darkest clips, trans content moderator Bethany Peters is shocked to discover a reference to Public Access Afterworld—a pirate TV network whose surreal broadcasts she vaguely remembers from her adolescence watching with her best friend. But is Bethany prepared to step into this other dimension, and for what its monstrous inhabitants will reveal about her past?

Yoon Ha Lee, Code and Codex
(Saga Press, October 27)

Yoon Ha Lee’s tremendous new space opera is literally built upon words—that is, the reality-altering lingua rubra, wielded by the powerful Censorate. This singular language in different mouths can control people: the Peacock Aurelia uses the Panopticon Gaze to surveil her empire through citizens’ eyes, while the Basilisk, prisoner of the Urtext Fortress, can kill with the Gaze of Guillotines. When Valentina, Aurelia’s companion and chief Censor, happens upon a book of forbidden-language poetry, her temptation threatens Aurelia’s reign over the Censorate.

Daryl Gregory, The Porcelain Sisters
(Tachyon Publications, October 27)

If I had a nickel for every fall 2026 book encapsulating female rage and power within a haunted doll, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. Barbara Truelove’s She’s a Doll is very much in conversation with Daryl Gregory’s latest, in which a pair of sisters (one human, one porcelain and possessed) go toe-to-toe with a clan of French sorceresses. When a typical sisterly argument leads to doll Isabel getting damaged, human Ruth takes her on the road to track down La Fabricante (The Dollmaker). But instead the sisters wind up confronting assassins, demons with human familiars, and revelations about their late mother’s place within Le Clan des Sorcières.

Wole Talabi, The Fist of Memory
(DAW, October 27)

In this first contact technothriller, a mysterious spaceship carrying an alien hive mind called the Irunmole appears above Nigeria. As the extraterrestrials prepare their arrival, down on the surface several strangers find their fates linked. Itumeleng is a South African astronomer who has put aside his family’s faith and traditions, yet it’s those visions that aid him in identifying the Irunmole in the first place. Meanwhile, conflicted assassin Tope takes another typical job from witchdoctor Baba, only for everything to go sideways and send her on the run—right in the path of Itumeleng, who also recognizes her from his visions. Add in another assassin, obsessed with the singular memory of the title, and you have a thrilling new take on first contact.