New science-fiction books offer techno terror, body horror and a novel-length poem

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages, $37.99

In “Exiles” Mason Coile (a pseudonym adopted by Andrew Pyper) follows up the success of “William” with another futuristic tale of techno terror.

This time, a three-person team journeys to Mars in order to prepare for the colonization of the red planet. They don’t, however, receive a warm welcome from the robots who have been sent ahead of them. Is there something wrong with the robots, or is their strange behaviour due to the hostile presence of a beetlelike alien that’s also been awaiting the team’s arrival?

“Exiles” presents itself as a mystery, making play out of the way the humans have become machinelike in their adherence to a routine of “protocols” that have been programmed into them via their training, while the robots have evolved in surprisingly human, and not always friendly, ways. The suspense ratchets up nicely in this quick read, leading to more than one twist at the end as flawed humanity once again rears its disruptive head.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025

Nnedi Okorafor, editor

Mariner Books, 416 pages, $24.99

Though often lumped together, as they are in these annual volumes, science fiction and fantasy are very different genres and often appeal to different readerships. Perhaps for this reason, Best American has taken to explicitly labelling the stories as one or the other, even when the distinction isn’t so apparent — a point made clear right from the first entry in this new edition: a message from another kind of intelligence that takes the form of an experimental prose poem.

But this year’s editor, Nnedi Okorafor, doesn’t believe in the labels anyway. As she writes in her introduction, when she was growing up, “Everything was everything. Boxes had no place in my reading experience.” That said, her selection of stories leans toward fantasy, and longer pieces in general.

There’s also an emphasis both on a more domestic vision of SF that’s focused on personal (and human-alien) relations, as well as commentary on contemporary American politics (something that has become hard to avoid). One notable example: a revamping of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic moral fable “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” called “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim, which makes something old into something new by being less about the future than about our own dystopic present.

Syncopation: A Novel in Verse

Whitney French

Buckrider, 300 pages, $24

Recent years have seen several long narrative poems or “novels in verse” finding a home in science fiction, with such leading Canadian examples as Jason Guriel’s “Forgotten Work” and “The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles” and Sheri-D Wilson’s “The Oneironaut.”

“Syncopation” is a long poem with a story to tell about two women, O and Z, living in a future world plagued by acid rain, recurring earthquakes and the aftermath of the Memory Wars. Together, they go on a journey in time and space — Canada, to begin with, and then rocketing out of our solar system.

To many readers the very idea of a long poem may seem like a contradiction, and reading these books a challenge. There isn’t a strong linear narrative, and what with the frequent gear changes to different poetic forms, readers more interested in the novel than the verse will have to be on their toes.

That said, the story does eventually cohere, and it’s Whitney French’s ability to blend experimentation in language with an earthy, often documentary-like directness that makes “Syncopation” a unique genre experience.

The Merge

Grace Walker

Mariner Books, 320 pages, $35

In the 1936 movie “The Devil-Doll” a mad scientist comes up with a plan to solve the world’s overpopulation crisis by shrinking people to one-sixth their size, which will lead to their consuming one-sixth the resources.

In “The Merge,” facing population and environmental pressures that have only grown worse in the years since that movie came out, the plan is to combine multiple minds in a single body, which would in theory at least reduce our energy footprint by half.

Merging might not seem an appealing prospect, but for Amelia it makes sense as her 65-year-old mother Laurie has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And so the creation of Laurie-Amelia is duly performed at a Cronenbergian institute known as Combine.

What could go wrong?

Well, if you think something about this sounds more than a bit off, rest assured that after a slow build “The Merge” shifts into psychological thriller territory and ends up taking the reader for quite a ride. This is a solid debut from Grace Walker that works both as a suspense story and a deeper take on how much we can, or want to, share of ourselves.