11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this April
Another busy month for new books
Over the weekend, I headed down to Concord, NH to Gibson's Books to see John Scalzi. He just released his latest book, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, and given that he isn't in this neck of the woods all that often, I figured it was a good time to get some copies signed and to get out of the house for a quick day trip.
It was a fun afternoon: he read from his upcoming Old Man's War novel, The Shattering Peace (due out in September), read a story about Wil Wheaton getting killed by Crocs (the footwear), and answered some audience questions before signing copies. I got my ARC of this latest book (I should have a review put together in the nearish future) signed, as well as my copy of Redshirts and The God Engines. All in all, a fun time.
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This is the first of two lists this month: I'll have another one headed out the door for you in a couple of weeks. As always, you can see prior lists via the Book List tag.
Okay, here are 11 new SF/F books to check out in the first half of this month:
Gateway by Craig Alanson (April 1st)
Craig Alanson adds an 18th installment to his military science fiction series Expedition Force. The series follows a group of humans who're conscripted into a long-running, interstellar war, and have branched off into their own adventures in deep space. In the last book, Task Force Hammer, the Merry Band of Pirates suffered a crippling setback, and their fight is potentially over, unless they can perform a miracle.
Andrew Liptak
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (April 1st)
Robert Jackson Bennett kicked off a new trilogy last year with The Tainted Cup, about an eccentric investigator, Ana Dolabra and her assistant, Dinios Kol, who're looking into the mysterious death of an imperial official.
In this followup, the pair are dispatched to Yarrowdale, where an Imperial treasury officer has vanished from a locked room without any trace. Ana quickly discovers that the officer didn't vanish, he was murdered, and by someone who can apparently pass through doors like a ghost. Their assassin appears to be targeting a special, high-security facility called the Shroud, where the Empire keeps fallen titans to extract the magical components in their blood – something that it relies on to keep the world in order.
Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying "Bennett skillfully integrates humor and magic into the complex puzzle plot and plays fair with planting clues for the reader."
The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman (April 8th)
Matt Dinniman's Dungeons Crawler Carl series continues with its fifth installment (it's preceded by Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, and The Gate of the Feral Gods, and will end next month with The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.)
The series takes place after aliens radically transform Earth into a series of dungeons as a sort of test, and follows Carl, a Coast Guard veteran and his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut as they make their way through each challenging dungeon. In this installment, they've reached the sixth floor of the dungeon: the Hunting Grounds, where they face dangerous jungles, dinosaurs, and more.
There are new challenges: the crawlers who've been fighting their way through the levels are now joined by outside tourists, including those willing to join in on the hunt.
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory (April 1st)
Two best friends, JP and Dulin go on a road trip after JP has an aggressive form of cancer. The two decide it's a good time for one last trip: a bus tour across America that follows a series of glitches that exposed the world as a digital simulation seven years ago.
As they embark on their trip, they're accompanied by a strange group of people who're undertaking their own journeys: a nun looking for an absent God, an influencer who wants to make sure her soon-to-be-born child is too famous to be deleted, a group of elderly who are living their best lives, and a professor who's trying to escape from sociopaths who look at The Matrix like a holy text. As they take in each strange stop, they're coming closer to meeting the people behind the simulation.
Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "It’s a testament to Gregory’s skill at character development that the people in this novel, and not the bizarre phenomena they’re observing, are the most fascinating part. This is a marvel."
A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang (April 8th)
Liu Lengeng is the oldest princess of the Feng royalty, and is slated to be the next bride to the human king. The Feng are people who live closely with nature, but their lands are threatened by human expansion. Her arranged marriage is one way to slow down the encroachment, and she plans to kill her husband and stop the practice.
In the days ahead of her wedding, Lufeng is trapped in the human palace and begins to discover some hidden secrets about her people's origins and the threats that humans represent.
The Book That Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence (April 8th)
This is the third installment of his Library trilogy (following The Book That Wouldn’t Burn and The Book That Broke the World), about a boy named Evar, who was trapped for ages in an ancient library and is trying to unravel its mysteries, and who encounters Livira, who arrives and gets entangled in his quest.
In this installment, the fate of the library hangs in the balance, on one book that holds incredible powers. Everyone who's important to Livira is scattered across time and space, and she has to find a way to solve the long-standing issue that has caused so much conflict in the library.
Writing for Grimdark Magazine, John Mauro raved about the book, saying "The Book That Held Her Heart is the perfect conclusion to Mark Lawrence’s most ambitious trilogy to date. Altogether, the Library Trilogy is one of the most profound and wholly original works of fiction that I’ve read in the past two decades."
The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran (April 8th)
A courier named Armand Pierce started off with his job a decade ago with an attaché case surgically attached to his wrist, and lives by a code: "the delivery is everything." He'll do whatever he needs to do to get his package safely to its destination. It's an important job: the internet no longer exists and all business depends on the Guild and their couriers.
When Armand arrives at a destination and finds that he case he's been carrying is empty, something strange is afoot, and it's already cost the lives of three prior couriers. He'll have to figure out what's going on before the Guild catches up to him.
Library Journal says that "the combination of climate apocalypse and political side effects, layered in levels of intrigue and mystery and leavened by romance, makes for an engrossing novel."
Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler (April 1st)
This is one of my most anticipated reads of 2025: a new novel from Ray Nayler, whose novel The Mountain in the Sea absolutely blew me away.
In the nearish future, Europe is ruled by a series of artificial intelligences, while the Federation (in what was once Russia) is ruled by a president who's held onto power by downloading his mind into a series of new bodies. We follow a programmer named Lilla, who's devised a new technology that allows for people to enter one another's minds – and which might play a role in toppling the Federation's brutal leader.
When she visits the Federation to visit her dying father, she's arrested, leaving her technology in the hands of a friend in London who now has to figure out what happened with her, all while Europe's leaders have begun to act irrationally, threatening to upend the established order of the world.
Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable."
Andrew Liptak
Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer (March 28th)
Ada Palmer is known for science fiction series Terra Ignota (Too Like The Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and Perhaps the Stars), but she's also an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her next book comes out of that world: an examination of the rise of the Renaissance era and how the conception of it as a golden age for Europe isn't entirely accurate: she explores how the story of the period has evolved through fifteen portraits of notable figures that provides a more nuanced look at the story.
One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson (April 1st)
For decades, Ella has been trapped in a simulation by the founder of a simulated colony-planet, where she's forced to pretend to be his five-year-old daughter. He controls every aspect of her reality, controlling the colonists and running experiments. His need for control is becoming more and more dangerous, and Ella realizes just how perilous her existence is: she watched him delete her stepmother and anyone else who tried to help her.
A Technician is scheduled to visit the world every 60 years, and Ella has been waiting, hoping for a way to escape before she takes drastic measures that could have consequences that impact the entire universe.
Writing for Locus Magazine, Gary K. Wolfe says "the question of how to escape a simulation, or to gain control of one’s own programming, can make for a narrative strategy as familiar and yet original as a good locked-room murder mystery. In Thompson’s case, it can also serve as a suspenseful and often provocative exploration of obsession, control, and the search for freedom in a world that seems to be aligned against you."
Choir of Hatred by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (April 15th)
One of my favorite books of 2024 was Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's novel Pilgrim Machines (set in the same world as his earlier novel The Salvage Crew). The book followed an intelligent spaceship as it traveled further and further from Earth, learning more about the larger universe and the nature of intelligence as it did so. It's a spectacular read, and I was thrilled to see that Wijeratne is returning to the same world with another book: Choir of Hatred.
Andrew Liptak
This one looks like it'll be something different from those two prior books: Wijeratne's dipping his toes into the military science fiction genre with this one. The Rubber Ducks is a crew that's on paper listed as a catering company, but they're really the team that you'd want to hire when you really need some fighting to be done. This is an insta-buy for me: I'm really excited to see what this one brings.
That's it for today. What are you currently reading, and what catches your eye this month? Let me know in the comments.