On Books
by Kelly Jennings
Along with a lot of other people, I really enjoyed Babel (Harper Voyager, 2022) by R.F. Kuang. I haven’t really liked Kuang’s other novels (a minority position), so I approached her new novel, Katabasis (Harper Voyager, August 2025), with some wariness. As it turns out, the novel is an engaging page-turner that is also occasionally bleakly hilarious.
A katabasis is a common trope in literature, especially in epics. Literally it means “going/traveling down,” and it refers to the part of the hero’s journey that descends into the underworld, where the hero meets various dead people and gains important knowledge that can be brought back to the world of the living. Thus, Odysseus learns from Achilles that it is better to be alive and a slave than a hero in hell; and Gilgamesh learns from Utnapishtim that death is necessary because humans cannot bear immortality; and Dante learns a lot of stuff about medieval Catholic theology and Florentine politics that honestly kind of bores us now.
Dante’s experience is central to Kuang’s Katabasis, since the underworld entered by her two heroes is roughly based on the hell experienced by Dante’s main character in the Inferno. This is not to say Kuang’s hell is the same as Dante’s. One of the pleasures of the katabasis as a trope is discovering how hell differs for various travelers. In the way that science fiction doesn’t really tell us about the future, but comments on its contemporary world, a katabasis doesn’t deal with actual hell so much as the concerns of the writer’s own world. Thus, Dante meets various Florentine politicians and sinners, and Odysseus meets heroes, seers, and his mother. Kuang’s hell is filled with academics and set in academia, and deals with twenty-first century issues.
In this novel, all the mythic and fictional trips to the underworld in literature are treated as historical events, and our two main characters, Alice and Peter, students of “analytic magik” at Cambridge, have done extensive research into these various historical accounts of katabases around the world. Since most of these accounts do not agree, the two of them have some discussion about what map of hell is most accurate, and how they might accomplish their goal, which is to bring their advisor, Jacob Grimes, back from hell.
This requires them to first find Grimes in the underworld and then do a spell that will restore him to (a kind of) life. Alice plans to use one sort of spell; Peter a different one. Both spells are important thematically in the book, though for different reasons. Slight spoiler: Peter plans to work an exchange spell, in which one person’s life/death is traded for someone else’s. This is more or less how Alcestis rescues her husband from death: exchanging her life for his. Alice briefly believes that Peter plans to exchange her life—Alice’s life—for Grimes; this is a plot misdirection, but the exchange spell plays a major part in the book’s climactic scene.
At the start of the book, we’re led to believe that Alice and Peter need to rescue Grimes from hell for practical reasons. Jacob Grimes is a Nobel Prize laureate and a former president of the Royal Academy of Magik. He only takes a few students, and very few of those graduate; but those who do can write their own tickets. Without Grimes alive to act as their advisor, both Alice and Peter lose the future they have been working for. As the text notes, “without Professor Grimes, [Alice] had no committee chair, and without a committee chair she could not defend her dissertation, graduate, or apply for a tenure-track job in analytic magik.”
On this journey through hell, Alice and Peter gain knowledge about themselves as well as the world, and we geta much closer look at who the two of them are and what actually motivates them. As graduate students at Cambridge, they’re clearly among the most gifted young magicians in the world; but both have been traumatized by their relationship with Grimes, who is a cruel, manipulative bully. Yet he is still their ticket to the brass ring of an academic career.
Kuang has said elsewhere that she started writing the book in a kind of whimsy—“haha, academia is hell”—and as she progressed through the book, she realized—oh, no—that academia is hell. This for me was one of the best parts of the book, causing many winces and much grim laughter, as Alice’s experiences mapped onto my own. I especially like the part near the start as Alice realizes that the skills she learned to get through graduate school (endurance, hyperfocus, denial) are the same skills she needs to get through hell. I also really like that part of hell where people are forced to write and rewrite dissertations. If they can just write a passing dissertation, they can leave hell for a better place. That part gave me flashbacks, as did the various writers’ workshops and critique groups embedded in the novel. I don’t know if this book will be as painfully hilarious to people outside the academy, but for someone (me) who took nine years to get through graduate school and spent decades as a professor, it hits hard.
I also very much liked Alice’s attempts to grapple with feminism and whether women actually need feminism. (Can’t they just succeed by being better than everyone else? Can’t they just not be sexually objectified?) Women aren’t really oppressed, Alice claims. Only weak women are oppressed, Alice insists. Women can escape oppression by just refusing to be oppressed, she believes. And then—oh no.
This is a delightful katabasis with well-done character arcs for both Alice and Peter. There are also wonderful minor characters, and the payoff, when it arrives, is satisfying. This book will be a treat especially for academics, as I noted above, but also for fans of katabases or of R. F. Kuang.
In the novel Observer (Tor, September 2025), Nancy Kress, a long-time “hard” science fiction writer—which is to say a writer who makes science the main character in her fiction—teams up with Robert Lanza, a renowned biological scientist.
Lanza has worked and has written several books explaining and arguing for biocentricism. The central tenet of the biocentric view of the universe is that consciousness creates reality. In Observer, that view is the main point and the main character of the novel. Lanza has in fact stated elsewhere that he wanted to write a novel that would explain biocentricism and what it means for “space, time, and the nature of life and death. . . .”
Observer, originally released in 2023 by the publisher The Story Plant, and rereleased by Tor in September 2025, is set in the near future. It concerns a research project funded by a wealthy Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Samuel Watkins. Combining various theories in physics with Lanza’s biocentric premise, the project means to prove that consciousness—in this case human consciousness—creates reality. There are a lot of explanations of physics and the observer theory in the novel, but the takeaway is that, with a meticulously designed chip inserted into a person’s brain (a chip that connects them to complex software that reconfigures/resets the algorithms that the brain uses to perceive and thus create reality), that person can perceive (and thus create) an alternate universe. This AU continues to exist after the person leaves it. The person has, in effect, created an entire new universe by perceiving it—by being its observer.
There’s a lot more to the theory than that, which I won’t attempt to explain here. The novel does that, maybe in a little too much detail (it reads very much like a physics lecture at times). Our perceptions of the project are filtered through the point of view of Caroline/Caro Soames-Watkins, great grandniece of Sam Watkins, who is a gifted neurosurgeon. Caro is recruited by Sam to be the neurosurgeon in the project after his initial neurosurgeon dies. Skeptical and reluctant to get involved with such an apparently gonzo project, Caro is impelled by her various catastrophic life circumstances to (eventually) agree to do the work.
These catastrophic circumstances provide much of the incidental plot in the novel; the main plot, as I’ve stated above, is playing out the biocentric theory and what it might mean if it is true. If we, as beings who possess consciousness, do create reality in the act of observing it, if our acts of observing create infinite multiverses, if matter and time and energy are all the same thing, then what does that mean about us and our existence?
I’m not sure this is a good novel, in the traditional sense, but it’s good science fiction. The endless lectures about physics and observer theory, justified in the story because various characters want to convince Caro to take part in the project, are occasionally hard sledding. They’re also necessary if the reader is to understand and accept the whole Observer premise. At the end of the novel, I was not quite convinced. I was, however, fascinated, and a lot more convinced than I had expected to be at the start. Read this one if you like a lot of science in your science fiction.
Jo Walton is one of my favorite writers, and I was pleased to score an early copy of her new book, Everybody’s Perfect (Tor, June 2026). Written in the form of an acta, or a collection of documents meant to decide whether or not a person qualifies for sainthood, the novel takes place almost entirely in a realm called the Serenissima, which is sort of like Venice, and then again very much not. The Serenissima can apparently be reached through Venice, or from places in various other worlds. The Serenissima is the eighth hypostasis.
Those who have read Walton’s Thessaly trilogy may remember that the hypostases played a role in that. The hypostasis in the classic sense means the underlying substance that supports reality. It’s a term from Greek philosophy, which gets used in different ways by different philosophers, and then later by Christian philosophers in yet different ways. In Walton’s novels, it means the nine different realms or realities or states of being in which things and people can exist. To paraphrase a character from the novel, the nine hypostases are like a multilevel fountain, each realm flowing down into the rest. The first hypostasis is the realm of God the Prime Mover; the next is that of the angels, messengers, and small-g gods; the third is the realm of forms as in Platonic forms; and so on, down to the seventh, which is the realm of matter, and where the various worlds are located; and to the eighth, which is the Serenissima, which is where most of the events of the novel take place.
Walton does a lot with this concept. Because the Serenissima can be reached from various worlds, it is inhabited by various species, all of which have more or less human bodies, but different heads and natures and biologies. For example, the first account in the collection is written by Pell, who is a Laodikan, a species with a bird-like head, possessing a beak and feathers and the ability to mimic sounds and sing beautifully. Laodikans reproduce by laying eggs, and have an intricate culture partly based on when (what time of day in what season) each individual hatches from its egg. There’s also Yix, who is a beggar child and an Andoman, a species with a dog-like head, and Tiry, who is a Bauta, a being whose head as far as I could piece together looks something like a preying mantis’s. In the Bauta culture, individuals aren’t given names—instead, they are identified by their scent, which is distinctive within family groups, so that your family name is your name. There is also the Khadsha, a species with a built-in domino mask; and several others, including the Vannandi, who are something else entirely.
Walton doesn’t explain all this, but lets us learn by being immersed in the world. It’s a strategy that works at least partly because the world and the characters are so intriguing and engaging. There is a plot—a plague called the blight that several of the main characters suffer from, and a mystery religion sort of thing, in which people learn to do magic—but it’s these characters and the world of the Serenissima that keep us reading.
In the Serenissima, reality is created by believing things are real. This is a bit like the observer-created consensus reality in Lanza and Kress’s Observer, except far more mutable. For example, if you don’t keep an eye on your boat, or pay someone to keep watching the boat, it can stop existing. Whole islands can disappear or change their natures because people don’t pay attention to them. If you believe pearls are in the water, then pearls are in the water. A common form of greeting is “I see you,” which helps you (and others) stay real. This is a kind of consensus reality that makes magic possible—those who are skilled or talented at shaping reality by believing in it can do great good or, I suppose, great harm, though we don’t see much of the latter in the novel. Also, if a lot of people believe a specific thing is real, then it becomes real—so the people who live in the Serenissima have that power available to them.
As I said above, from Earth the Serenissima is reached through Venice, and it is very like Venice. People in the Serenissima can also travel to Venice, and to different times in Venice, which creates a kind of time travel, both for people from Venice and for those in the Serenissima. This is a whole aspect of the world that Walton only glances at in this volume. I love time-travel stories, so I’d love to see it explored in future volumes set in this world, if Walton plans to write them.
The pacing here is gentle, and this is not really a plot-driven narrative, so if you’re looking for that sort of SFF, this may not be for you. It’s precisely the kind of novel I love best, though, so if you’re like me, you won’t want to miss this one.
Esperance (Daw, 2025), by Adam Oyebanji, is a science fiction novel that starts off like a mystery novel—a hard-boiled Chicago police detective is called to the scene of a murder. A young African medical student and his one-year-old son are found dead in an expensive high-rise apartment, a dead barracuda beside them. The student’s wife lies unconscious in another room, heavily sedated. Did she kill the two of them? And if not, who did?
The narrative veers from the typical mystery novel when the autopsy shows that the two were drowned in sea water. The apartment has no bathtub, nor anything large enough to drown a grown man. Furthermore, there is ceiling plaster under the student’s fingernails, and blood and claw marks on the ceiling of the room where he was found.
The detective, Ethan Krol, who has just been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor, spends what may be the last days of his life tracking down leads. He soon finds similar cases of people who have been found drowned in seawater hundreds of miles from the sea and makes a connection that allows him to predict the next victims.
Meanwhile, Abidemi Eniola, or Abi, a tall strong woman with dark black skin, steps through a gate into Bristol, England. It soon becomes clear to the reader that she is not from Earth. She befriends a local woman, Hollie, who helps her on her quest, which starts with finding the records of a ship called the Esperance. The Esperance was engaged in the triangle trade, back at the end of the eighteenth century—the one with slaves from Africa as one leg of the triangle. Abi wants to find the most direct descendant of the owner of the Esperance. Why, we don’t learn for a while. We also don’t know if Abi is connected to the murders, or, if so, how she is connected.
The mystery of the murders and of Abi’s connection to them is the business of the novel. It does get solved, and in a satisfying way. But the book’s real pleasure comes from the interaction of Abi and Hollie, who are delightful characters. Abi is a fish out of water in Bristol and later in Scotland (imagine a person who has learned their English from watching early twentieth century American movies trying to communicate with citizens of Edinburgh). It’s fun to watch her experiencing and commenting on twenty-first century life. Hollie, who at first appears to be a street-smart hustler, soon reveals more depth. We come to both like and admire her.
The Chicago detective, Ethan Krol, is not as pleasant, but equally well done. His character arc is believable, and though as a reader I never really came to like him, Oyebanji does make me understand him. The real interest, though, remains Abi and the world she comes from, especially its technology. While I would have liked to know more about that world, this is nonetheless a satisfying novel. Read this novel if you like a little mystery in your science fiction.
Overgrowth (Tor Nightfire, May2025), a new book from Mira Grant (a pen name of hyper-prolific Seanan McGuire), reminds me a bit of Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood (1987–1989). Butler’s trilogy opens with the Earth all but destroyed by a disaster that includes nuclear war, and the survivors, picked up by the Oankali, being given a “choice.” The Oankali are a tentacled space-faring species that makes a habit of blending its genetic material with those from the planets it passes: a trade, as this is called by the Oankali. The choice they give to humanity is this: either the surviving humans interbreed with the Oankali, producing a new species that is neither human nor Oankali, or they can be sterilized and left to live out their natural lives without any hope of reproducing.
This is because, the Oankali explain, humans possess a genetic contradiction: they are intelligent, and they are hierarchical. The combination of those two traits has led to the destruction of the species and its planet; the same “contradiction” will always, in any future where humans are allowed to reproduce, lead to the destruction of the species. Michael Bérubé, in his The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species (Columbia University Press, 2024), calls this trope creating an “ex-human” species. He sees it in Butler as well as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Three-Body Problem, and other works. “Ex-human” means people are no longer human. Creating an ex-human species becomes necessary when humanity as it currently exists is hopelessly doomed.
Grant’s Overgrowth is a variation of this trope. In Butler’s work, the Oankali don’t usually put an end to the species they are trading with—it is only necessary in the case of humanity because humanity is doomed. In Overgrowth, a space-faring species of carnivorous plants habitually invades planets and feasts on the inhabitants (meat, as they call them). Like the Oankali, the invaders in Overgrowth will use the raw material of the Earth to grow multiple ships that will launch into space, repeating this cycle. (Grant’s invaders, like the Oankali, use organic material to make their ships, their tools, their technology.) The nature of humanity is almost a side issue, but Grant does make it clear that it is our characteristics as a species that doom us.
The invaders select planets to invade by sending out seed pods, which drift through the universe until they pick up signs that show a planet has developed a large-enough population of intelligent meat. It needs intelligence because the alien plant people blend with the meat they devour. If the meat is not intelligent, the invaders will lose their own intelligence. The seed pods cast their seeds on to a planet with sufficient meat-based intelligence; each seed germinates a plant that, in the case of Earth, lures in a human (usually a child, since they need the prey to be small) that the plant then devours. A few days later, the plant expels an exact copy of the child, who returns to their family and explains (compulsively) that they are an alien, harbinger of an alien invasion even now on its way to Earth.
Overgrowth is told from the point of view of one of these children, Anastasia Miller. So far as her family knows, Anastasia wandered off in the woods of Washington State as a three-year-old; when she returns, she says, repeatedly, that she is not their baby anymore, but an alien. Thirty years and lots of therapy later, we meet Anastasia in Seattle, Washington, in 2031, where she has a dead-end job that suits her fine, a small group of close friends, and a herpetologist trans boyfriend. She is still compulsively telling everyone she is an alien, here to warn people about the coming invasion. Her friends accept this without believing it; her coworkers bully her over the matter; her family is estranged. (This latter is not because they think she’s crazy; it’s because they know, deep down, she is not.)
When a broadcast from the invaders is picked up and released by an obsessed astronomer (who at age eight had an encounter with one of the seed plants, but survived it), Anastasia’s friends still don’t really believe her, at least not 100 percent. But Graham, her boyfriend, agrees to travel with her to visit the astronomer, where Anastasia can listen to the broadcast signal and determine what it means. What is 2031 like, on planet Earth? Well, you know. Collapsing safety net, runaway global warming, poverty, war, desperation. These are all a result of humanity’s flaws, as is (as we learn) the actual invasion itself. Humanity reacts to the news of the invasion as you would expect us to do, with fear and violence. Humanity reacted to the warnings from the plant-children with derision, disbelief, and bullying. Anastasia is so close to her friend-group, her found family, because these are the only people who were willing to treat her well despite her compulsion to tell everyone around her that she is an alien and that aliens like her are on their way to invade. By the end of the novel, I’ll admit, I was less on the side of humanity than I expected to be. The alien plant species, despite their plans to devour almost nine billion of us, kind of started to look like they had a point. Maybe humanity is hopelessly doomed. Maybe we do need an ex-human future.
This book could have been shorter—its second act gets a little tedious. But the first act and the ending are good, and the book as a whole is engaging and thought-provoking. I won’t say this is the best book I read this year, but it is a valuable contribution to the ex-human genre.
Revising a fairy tale—or any tale—can be fruitful. When we recast the events of a well-known story from a different angle or from a different character’s point of view, we are doing a form of comparative literature. Here is what the first story said, speaking to its own culture; here is what this new story says, speaking to a different culture. By examining assumptions and expectations, the reader (and sometimes the writer) learns more about both cultures. In Cinder House (Tor, October 2025), Freya Marske shows us a different sort of Cinderella.
Ella in this version is a ghost, murdered at age sixteen by her stepmother, who murders her father at the same time. Ella haunts the house she was murdered in, or maybe possesses that house. She feels through the house—she can feel sun on the roof tiles, and people touching its surfaces. She feels footsteps and broken windows. Some of the best writing in the novel occurs when Marske describes Ella’s sensations as she feels through the house. This aspect of the haunting has a downside, however: Ella’s stepsisters can hurt her by hurting the house. They use this feature to torture and to control Ella, turning her into their obedient servant.
Ella also cannot, at least in the first half of the book, leave the house. She is trapped there with her abusers. Even after she finds a way to escape the house and its grounds, each night at midnight she is yanked back to the house again. Wandering the night market on one of her late-evening rambles, Ella makes the acquaintance of a fairy named Quaint—the parallel to the fairy godmother in the original story, except Quaint is more fey than fairy. She does teach Ella some things about magic, and she does make it possible for Ella to go to the ball (for a price), but she’s never really benevolent, and Ella must stay on her guard to keep from being trapped or stolen by Quaint.
Similarly, Prince Charming in Marske’s version becomes a prince given a gift by a fairy at his naming, a gift which is double-edged. He dances so beautifully that everyone who sees him dance is charmed into loving him. But the love overwhelms the person, so that they attack him—rape or attempt to rape him—quite against their will. To dance is the prince’s one real love, and he cannot do it where anyone can see him, not unless he wants to make people into monsters.
There’s also an extra princess in Marske’s version, and this is the part of the novel I like the most. Once Ella finds a way to leave her house for a few hours each evening, what does she do with this new-won freedom? She goes to night school! Also to the ballet and to plays and concerts. Ella’s greatest love is the liberal arts. She also begins corresponding (she can touch objects inside her house, so she can write letters) with a professor of Magical History in the neighboring state of Cajar, Scholar Mazamire, to learn what she can about her own ghost-nature and about Quaint, and about magic in general.
The women in Marske’s Cinder House are not so much interested in pretty gowns and charming princes and marriage, in other words, as they are in learning and art, in gaining knowledge and skills. This is true even of the stepsisters, one of whom is very wicked indeed; and the wicked stepmother is far less interested in being wicked than in achieving her goals. (She murders Ella and her father more as a means to her end than out of cruelty.) The prince, too, sees marriage and even being a prince as a duty; his real interest lies in dance. Ella, despite her limitations, is far more interested, sexually, in the prince’s intended bride than he is. (We’re in a world where bisexuality and same-sex attraction are common and unremarkable, though it is made clear that the prince must marry someone who can produce his child.) The outcome to Ella’s attraction is one I wasn’t expecting, though I probably should have been.
This book contains beautiful writing and wonderful characters. If you enjoy retellings of fairytales, you won’t want to miss Cinder House.