Even more books to check out in September 2026
A ton of new stories from some of my authors
The flood of books continues for the month of September, but first, I've got two short missives for you.
Last week, I went up to my kid's school, where a performance was due to take place: Sea Fantasy - The Pearl by a French group called Plasticiens Volants. I saw them last year when they performed at the Vermont State House, and was awed by their giant puppets and interaction with the crowds. Like that last performance, they waded into the assembled crowd in the school field with giant inflated creatures: fish, eel, jellyfish, and octopus, as well as snails and sea horses.
This wasn't so much a story as an experience, and I was reminded of the beauty that human creativity brings. In an age when we're increasingly surrounded by AI slop and cookie-cutter stories, this was something to behold: performers interacting with us in unexpected and spontaneous ways: moving and reacting and deciding in an avalanche of tiny decisions and choices. I loved watching it from beginning to end. (And if you're in Vermont, they'll be coming to the State House this weekend. You should check it out.)
One last thing for those in the Vermont area: on Burlington, we'll be holding the next installment of the Green Mountain Book Festival between 10AM and 7PM on Saturday, September 19th.
Last year's fest was great (here's my keynote interview with John Scalzi from it), and this year, we're focusing on a different topic: nature and environmental writing. This year's lead guest is Ethan Tapper, author of the fantastic How to Love a Forest (review), along with Paul Bierman, V.J. Comai, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Susan Kaplan, Robert A. Mello, Amy Seidl, Michael Snyder, and Robert Zaino, who'll be talking about forests, climate change, and policy and civic action. You should come! You can find more details and RSVP here.
If you missed it, here's the list for the first half of the month. You can also check out all of the prior installments via the Book List tag.
Okay, here are 18 new SF/F (and other) books to check out in the middle of September:
The Strangers by Naomi Alderman (September 22nd)
Naomi Alderman mixes memoir and speculative fiction together in her latest in what appears to be a fascinating novel. A novelist named Naomi Alderman is contending with the passing of her mother and failed pregnancies when she spies a strange creature in a game camera installed at her parents' house. It's small, has a trunk, and a flat face, and nobody knows where it came from. They pick up the name "mimmoth" and seem to be intelligent and harmless, but won't be captured or take food from people. Soon, they're spreading all over the world, and as the fictional Alderman comes to terms with her grief, she finds that she shares some sort of connection to the creatures, and gets sucked into a tidal wave of conspiracy theories as they begin to have an effect on the global ecosystem.
The Guardian says "The Strangers is a deeply moving and wise book, asserting the painful truth that we simply do not get to choose the things that we lose."
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter by Isaac Asimov (September 8th)
Blackstone Publishing has been reprinting Isaac Asimov's space opera series, and this is the penultimate installment, following David Starr, Space Ranger, Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, and Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury.
In this installment, we're dealing with a case of sabotage. A group of scientists were operating out of a facility on Jupiter Nine on a top-secret project, devising Agrav, a new advance in space travel, and someone is undermining the project. As David Starr begins his investigation, it becomes apparent that the culprits might not be human.
Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo (September 15th)
Back in 2020, I picked up and loved Leigh Bardugo's dark academia novel Ninth House, about a woman named Galaxy “Alex” Stern, who is accepted to Yale after a rough life, where she discovers that several of the school's secret societies are deeply immersed in an underground magical world. I really loved it, although I haven't had a chance to check out the second book in the series, Hell Bent. Now, she's got a third installment of the series, Dead Beat, which wraps up the story.
Andrew Liptak
After her last trip to hell, Alex left a door open, and now demons have begun arriving in New Haven and Yale, upending the established order. Alex and her friends have been hunting them down, but it's a flood that's slowly becoming overwhelming. To stop the tide, they have to look to some of the school's deepest secrets, and to Alex's own family history for solutions.
Mazywood by Tananarive Due (September 22nd)
Due introduces us to a filmmaker named Johnny, the grandson of a famous Black actress named Mazelle Washington. He's brought his family to a California lodge that she left him, Mazywood, and he's hoping that it'll be a peaceful time.
He was mistaken: while there, he begins to learn about some dark secrets that go back generations at the place, and he begins to figure out Mazelle's true story: a brilliant career in cinema, but harboring a secret that came with considerable cost. Now, Johnny has to confront the truths that she buried, and he's accidentally brought his family to the door of the monster that lurks there.
Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying "Due crafts memorable and deeply human characters, good and bad alike, and provides a searing, incisive take on the politics of Black performance past and present. Add in nail-biting chase scenes and a blistering final twist, and this heart-pounding horror story further cements Due as one of the greats."
Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs by Jon Else (September 8th)
Not science fiction, but one that caught my eye nonetheless: this is a new history of the atomic age, framed around the development of one nuclear weapon, Priscilla. In it, Else takes a look at the science and expertise that went into the development of the world's nuclear weapons, and examines their impact on the world through their makers, the people they were used against, and the people who advocated for controlling them. Along the way, he examines how the bombs were tested and stockpiled, and how close we came to wiping ourselves out.
Andrew Liptak
Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, saying "Present-day relevance makes this message urgent. As treaties end, and the U.S. begins an extended nuclear upgrade, writes Else, “a visit to Frenchman Flat should be a requirement for holding public office in America. An important account of nuclear hubris and its incompletely tallied costs."
Rooted by Leopoldo Goût (September 15th)
A woman named Aurora returns home to Mexico after a successful effort to get a series of artifacts returned to the country, including a statue of an Aztec god known as The Flayed One. But when she returns home to Mexico City, she finds it unrecognizable and is plagued by darker memories of her past. Things seem to be getting worse, and she has to dig into her family's past to make sense of what's happening to her and the city she once called home.
Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying "Goût effortlessly balances shifting timelines and creates a sense of unreality through prose as lovely as it is haunting."
Strange Is the Light by Sarah Maria Griffin (September 8th)
Every year, Daphne McSharry looked forward to escaping from her life on a dreary Dublin estate for a coastal village called Valentia, where she and her friends could run wild for the summer. She and her friends played a tabletop RPG set in an imaginary world that they created, and as they played, their sense of reality changed things, until one fateful roll and choice that extracted a terrible cost.
Now, decades later, she and her friends are returning to Valentia, where they'll have to face their secrets and choices to figure out who has a future.
An Empire In The Clouds by AI Jiang (September 15th)
Princess Xīlián of Piāo has discovered that her estrange family's advisors are working to overthrow them and killer her brother, who sits on the Imperial throne. She flees her home to try and find someone to help, leaving the floating Imperial city for the drowned world below, where high-tech companies have destroyed the environment but devised ways to make people immortal.
There, she finds her exiled brother Làng, and they have to work to find a way to disrupt their attacker's plans. At the same time, an outcast called No Face has been abandoned ny the empire and has been plotting to destroy the family who cast him out. When Xīlián is imprisoned and he finds out about her past, he's caught up in their plot and agrees to help them to save their families and homes from destruction.
Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang (September 8th)
I'm a big fan of R.F. Kuang's novels – Babel was a great bit of magic and colonialism, Katabasis was a gripping story of dark academia, and Yellowface, well – that captured the anxiety that social media brings to the publishing industry nicely. Her next looks to be just as fascinating: the story of a freshman named Lily Chen who heads to Taipei in an immersive learning language program to learn Chinese so that she can connect to her family's story and culture. She finds that it's difficult: classes are hard and her classmates are frustrating. When her grandfather dies, she's forced to come to terms with how she relates to her family's story and what that means for her identity.
Andrew Liptak
The New York Times says that it's "Kuang’s most muted offering to date, and her most sophisticated by a mile. She’s scaled back the high jinks and dialed down the stakes from international war and murder to the banal dramas of roommates and midterms and sisters and sex, and of returning immigrants’ silent, “subjunctive” fantasies of who they might have been had they stayed. Now that the curtains of Kuang’s more habitual genre influences have fallen, what’s left is pure literary fiction, and she does it so well that if you didn’t know better it would be hard to imagine her writing in any other register."
A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen (September 15th)
Jules had once been cursed and had been transformed into a harpy for two years. Now cured, she spends her time working as a cursebreaker and taking on random other jobs, while also balancing her ties to her mother's aristocratic world and the harpies that she once lived alongside.
When her friend Anthony comes to her needing help with a cursed sword, she finds that there's more to the story than meets the eye. The sword is an ancient, powerful weapon forced by a magician to cut through human uncertainty. It's been brought out to challenge a new law that's threatening the rights magical and nonmagical alike. It's personal for Jules, as the lord behind the law was the one who cursed her, and she's determined to make sure that he won't hurt anyone else ever again.
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel (September 15th)
Emily St. John Mandel is another author who's work I've really appreciated over the years: I loved both Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, and I'm looking forward to what she has in store with this new one, Exit Party.
This one is set in LA in 2031, shortly after the collapse of the United States and a peacekeeping force has just withdrawn. Ari Waker's just been released from prison and she and her friend are on their way to a party. When they arrive, they experience something strange: some of the members vanish, while others appear to duplicate themselves. From there, Waker tries to figure out what is happening, with the narrative stretching out across the world from Greece to Paris and to the Moon as Mandel explores the life of a parallel version of Waker and the life she might have lived.
In its review, The New York Times says "Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds. Her characters are distinct in both worlds as the novel explores how circumstances determine our fates. The novel also sharply renders the psychology of formerly privileged Americans in a world turned, for them, upside down."
Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske (September 15th)
Students attending the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr are allowed five years to perfect their craft before taking the Grand Exam – a grueling, five-day test that pushes them to their limits and determines their future. Students are grouped together randomly and all must pass in order to succeed. Things go sideways when one student turns up missing, and they have to figure out who in their group has a secret that they're trying to keep under wraps.
The Rouse by China Miéville (September 15th)
China Miéville is back with his first solo novel in nearly a decade (his last was This Census-Taker and The Last Days of New Paris, before coming back in 2024 with a novel that he co-authored with actor Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere): The Rouse.
Set in the 1990s, the book starts off as a story about a mother named Maur and her son Ewan, who ends up joining Britain's Royal Air Force and becomes acquainted with a fellow solder, Steven, who's part of a mysterious unit that is working to weaponize the dead against their country's enemies. Ewan is then deployed to the Balkans, where he's killed. Maur then works to figure out the circumstances of her son's death, in which Miéville spends the next thousand or so pages diving deep into Britain's colonial history in an ambitious and sprawling narrative.
Writing in The New York Times, Jeff VanderMeer says "I’ve rarely read scenes so terrifying, achieved with a kind of stutter-step language, words that intensify and recede with such incantatory power. These passages seem unparalleled in literature and somehow bypass the brain to jolt the nervous system directly."
The Henchperson's Guide to Unionizing by Marshall J. Moore (September 22nd)
A lab assistant named Igor has spent a lot of time working for his master – robbing graves, mutilating and experimenting on bodies, and before too long, he and the Doctor are driven out of town an even-more isolated laboratory. Ravenwalf Manor is also the home to the Count (a vampire) and his partner, Conelia, as well as a witch and her familiar, Grimalkin.
While all three parties come to an agreement to share their space, Igor, Cornelia, and Grimalkin find that they have a lot in common, and that they're all unsatisfied with their lot and their masters' various plans to destroy the world and have to work together to stop those apocalyptic plans from unfolding, and ensure that the villagers they've been on the run from aren't going to catch up to them.
No Killing Goblins by pirateaba (September 22nd)
Hot on the heels of the first installment of their long-running Wandering Inn litRPG series, The Wandering Inn, pirateaba's next is the second part of the first book. It followed a woman named Erin Solstice who runs the titular inn, and came to this fantasy realm from a different world.
She's found some allies, but her companion Ryoka Griffin isn't interested in making friends, but would rather spend her time running. She ends up joining a guild that takes messages and packages across the city, and like Erin, she's trying to orient herself in this strange fantasy world. When a dangerous delivery comes her way, she's introduced to an adventuring group known as the The Horns of Hammerad, putting her into the crosshairs of a mysterious magician and powerful Lady.
Star Wars: Edge of the Abyss by Rebecca Roanhorse (September 15th)
Rebecca Roanhorse picks up the baton from Alexander Freed and last year's novel Star Wars: The Mask of Fear, which set the stage for the events seen in Andor. In it, we followed Mon Mothma, Saw Gerrera, and Bail Organa as they worked to orient themselves in the Empire's first year and figure out how to push back against the tyranny that they see surrounding them.
In this followup, the Empire has ruled the galaxy for a decade and has firmly established its rule across countless planets, putting the Galactic Republic firmly in the rearview mirror. In the Imperial Senate, Mon and Bail find their influence dwindling as the Emperor's will and policy become intertwined, and begin shifting their attention toward the growing resistance movements that are springing up across the galaxy. Meanwhile, a student group on Ghorman have begun building a resistance movement, while other splinter factions led by the likes of Saw and Anto Kreegyr have been fighting for control of their own priorities. When one of Saw's soldiers is captured, it could spell the end of the burgeoning resistance movement.
I'm a huge fan of Roanhorse's writing and Andor, so I'm really excited to see what this story brings.
The Infinite Extent by Dennis E. Taylor (September 10th)
Dennis E. Taylor has released (as an audiobook first), the sixth installment of his Bobiverse series (preceded by We Are Legion, For We Are Many, All These Worlds, Heaven's River, and Not Till We Are Lost), in which Bob – a digitized human mind who was sent out into space and has been replicating, now has to figure out who constructed a massive wormhole network, why, investigate an abandoned alien ship, figure out how to travel faster than light, shepherd some refugees to a new planet, and confront a new threat from an old enemy. All in a day's work.
Fold Catastrophes by Peter Watts (September 22nd)
Peter Watts brings together his latest batch of short stories in a new collection. This one includes yarns about people weaponizing water supplies, hive minds, sentient spaceships, things colonizing the sun, and quite a bit more. This one includes an introduction by Richard K. Morgan.
Here's an interview with Watts over on Clarkesworld Magazine about the collection.
As always, thanks for reading. Let me know what's on your TBR and what caught your eye from this list.