Best summer books of 2024: Science fiction

Vangie’s Ghosts by Paul Di Filippo (Blackstone)

Vangie, who has profound autism, can flit between her selves in alternate realities. This brings her into conflict with similarly powered megalomaniac Durant Le Massif, who is bent on dominating the multiverse. Di Filippo, a past master at this sort of thing, adroitly keeps his zigzagging narrative on track.

Calypso by Oliver K Langmead (Titan)

A generation-starship story told in blank verse, Calypso centres around the clash between technophilia and rusticism among colonists as they arrive at a distant new world after a decades-long journey and set about terraforming it. Fusing Ancient Greek epic with far-flung futurism, this is bold, innovative stuff.

High Vaultage by Chris and Jen Sugden (Gollancz)

The Sugdens, husband and wife, adapt their comedy-drama podcast Victoriocity into novel form, to great effect. A former policeman and a journalist team up to investigate a kidnapping and bank robberies in a deranged steampunk London where industrialisation has run rampant and Queen Victoria is half robot. Inspired and hilarious.

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Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley (Solaris)

A strange, quasi-religious pilgrimage serves as the narrative spine for an exploration of language, codes, cryptic clues, the multifarious connotations of the number three, and the ephemerality of the online world. Whiteley’s novel is one of those rare experimental works that succeeds both as engaging fiction and cerebral sport.

Thirteen Ways To Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf (Angry Robot)

Occultism and cyberpunk noir rub shoulders in Woolf’s zippy, highly entertaining debut. A superstar actress enlists one of her many clones to eliminate all the others, as part of the publicity drive for her latest movie. Love, however, proves to be the enemy of, and salvation for, rampant egotism.

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