Here’s the full list of sci-fi titles coming out in July.
Keep track of all new SFF releases here. All title synopses are excerpted and/or condensed from copies provided by the publishers. Release dates are subject to change.
July 2
Down Deep — Catherine Asaro (Baen)
A City Divided: For centuries, one of the most popular places in the Skoria Empire, the city of Kryze, has survived by a very thin thread. In the dying world of Raylicon, the “haves” live in luxury in Kryze, while the “have-nots” barely survive in the notorious Undercity beneath the desert. Major Bajan, a former member of the Pharaoh’s army, knows both worlds. Despite being born in the Undercity, she has made a name for herself in the Empire. And now she has a chance to help her people. Hope for Reconciliation: For the first time, a member of royalty wants to extend a hand of reconciliation to the Undercity. Hoping to build a bridge, Colonel Lavinda Magida recruits Bajan and Dustnight as guides and bodyguards on her mission of goodwill to those living beneath the parched world. Down Deep: But the problems of the Undercity run deeper than anyone knows. To find peace, the Dust Knights must reach the most hidden staircase of the mysterious underworld known only as the Down Deep, where the scars of centuries of mistrust run deepest. There they will come face to face with an unseen enemy that could claim the lives of everyone they know and threaten interstellar civilization.
Icarus Changeling (Icarus #4) — Timothy Zahn (Baen)
Gregory Roark, former bounty hunter, former trailblazer, and current agent of the secret Icarus Group, has been given a new mission: to locate a suspected but as yet undiscovered teleportation portal on the remote colony planet Aran. His rival, Pathos, is also searching for the device, and has significantly more resources at his disposal. Luckily, Roark has Selene and her highly sensitive Kadrian nose. On paper, it should be a pretty easy job. But that’s before a murder occurs in the small town of Bilswift… and then another… and then it’s discovered that Pathos is already on the scene, narrowing his search to a heavily forested area in the hills and mountains east of the town. Most disturbing of all, one of Selene’s associates, a Kadrian teenage boy named Tyranno, has been discovered working at Bilswift’s fish market. A boy who may have lost his parents before he was fully socialized. A boy who may be connected to both the murders and the Path. A boy who Kadrian calls a Changeling, a potentially dangerous wild card.
July 9
Towards eternity — Anton Herr, HarperVia
In a near-future world, a new technological cure is rapidly eradicating cancer. All of the cells in the body are replaced with nanomachines, robot or android cells that not only cure cancer but also make them virtually immortal. Young-hoon, a literary researcher, teaches an AI how to understand poetry, creating a living, thinking machine that he names Panit, meaning “beloved one,” after his husband. Young-hoon himself is a nanotherapy patient, but he mysteriously disappears and then suddenly reappears. This event raises disturbing questions: what happened to Young-hoon, and even though he has returned, is he still his old self? When Dr. Biko, a scientist who holds a patent for nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit’s existence, he transfers his consciousness from the machine to an android body, giving him freedom and life. As Young-hoon, Panit, and the other nanohumans grow and begin to replicate, their development brings them to a crossroads, forcing them to make a choice that will have existential consequences. It explores the nature of intelligence and the unexpected consequences of progress, humanity and the meaning of life, and what we should really fear from technology and the future. Towards eternity is a beautiful, thought-provoking novel that challenges notions of what it means to be human and why love survives when humanity disappears.
Family Experiment — John Marrs (Hanover Square)
Some families are almost perfect… The world’s population is booming, cities are overcrowded and we’re in economic crisis. And in the UK, a breaking point has been reached: more and more people cannot afford to have a family, much less raise one. But for those who aspire to become parents, there is another option: for a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch and access it through the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality TV show called “The 1000”. SubstituteIn just nine short months, ten couples will follow each other as they raise a virtual child from birth to age 18. The prize is the right to raise a virtual child, or risk everything and have a real baby…
July 16
of Backtrack — Erin La Rosa (Canary Street Press)
Nearly 20 years ago, Sam Leto left his small hometown of Tybee Island, Georgia to pursue his dream of becoming a pilot. Though he wanted to pursue flying away from painful childhood memories, his beloved grandmother Pearl decided it was time to sell the family home. Sam is reluctantly called back to help pack up the house. Sam’s old bedroom instantly exudes 2000s nostalgia, from the Fall Out Boy posters, to the drawer of roll-on body glitter, to his favorite CD player loaded with mixtapes by his best friend Damon Rocha. Damon was always his safe place, Sam thinks often. If Back then, as a teenager, she confessed her feelings for him… Strangely enough, the CD player is still working after all these years. And somehow, it has the power to show Sam another version of her life. With each song, Sam has a flashback to the past: her high school graduation party, her graduation ceremony, leaving home, and more. But the memories are different from the ones she remembers. What happened. Suddenly Sam saw exactly what would have happened if he’d given Damon a chance, and he couldn’t help but feel that leaving Tybee all those years ago had been a huge mistake.
A building that didn’t exist — Abigail Miles (CamCat)
When Everly Tertium encounters a strange man in the park who claims to be her grandfather, she is invited into a mysterious apartment building. There, she finds herself in a constant state of deja vu. She is incredibly certain that she has already experienced these moments, already been introduced to these people, already visited all these rooms and floors. So why does she have no idea what is happening to her? The longer she stays in the building, Everly becomes convinced that there is more going on than meets the eye. Something is wrong, time seems to flow differently, and the people who live there seem to be trapped. Gradually, Everly begins to wonder if she is trapped too. But even if she could, would she ever want to get out?
July 23
Grand Theft AI — James Cox (Blackstone)
San Francisco, 2051. A labyrinth of quantum accelerators, holographic dreams, and heavily regulated androids that towers like a new Shanghai across the bay. Forget powders, pills, and marijuana. Kids get high with data wafers under their ears, and pay high cryptocurrency for the best. The hottest nightclub in town… Fang. Buzz Kovarn is a battle-scarred thief with an obsession for tiny bots. Leah Rose is an underworld “fixer” with so much money that it could easily get them both killed. Because Fang’s psychopathic boss, Otto Rex, has a safe with more security than a fusion reactor. And the glass inside is priceless, enough to send Buzz, Leah, and their elite team of cyber misfits to live forever on the white sands of Tahiti. But this crime doesn’t just mean endless time in a VR prison; it also represents Buzz and Leah’s final chance at redemption. Forced to confess all their neural network secrets, they must trust each other completely to have a chance to infiltrate Otto’s hideout, raid the spiraling rings of physical and virtual firewalls, and finally hack into his mind and breach the innermost layer of security before the Blackhawks arrive with a federal warrant to bring in the AI theft charges.
Somewhere Elsewhere Book — Keanu Reeves and China Miéville (Del Rey)
The rumors have always been there. The legends. The unkillable warrior. The one who has seen thousands of civilizations rise and fall. He’s had many names. Unut, the Son of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.” And he’s longing to die. Now a secret US force has promised to help him, and all he has to do is help them in return. But when the soldier so close to death returns to life, this unlikely event ultimately points to a force even more mysterious than B himself. A force at least as powerful as B. And a force with its own plans.
Gravity Lost (Ambit’s Run #2) — LM Saga (Tor Books)
After preventing a space station disaster and the destruction of the planet, Ambit The crew thought that turning Isaiah Drestine over to the Union would end their troubles. But that was only the beginning. Drestine is a walking encyclopedia of dirty secrets and everyone wants nothing to do with him – the Trust, the Union, even the Guild. Some want him dead. And their lives are in danger. Ambit The crew must break the man they helped capture and expose some of the secrets he’s been hiding before it’s too late. In Spiral, everything has a price. In their fight to protect what they love, Eoin, Nash, Saint and Jal face some ugly truths about their enemies, and even uglier truths about their friends. But nothing compares to the truth they learn about themselves. You can’t always repair what’s broken… and sometimes, that’s better.
July 30
Nautical Entanglements — Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom Publishing)
Bet Ni isn’t good with people. He isn’t good with politics. And that becomes a problem. When Ni is sent to the Rooster Clan against her will to work with mismatched, warring teammates from rival clans, some of whom she can’t avoid or want to avoid. Hak Kuk of the Snake Clan, better at poisoning and stabbing than making friends, is drawn to Ni’s insight and indifference to social conventions, including ones that make him think twice about spending time with Ni. But when an Imperial emissary and titular leader is poisoned, this disposable team of apprentices must quickly learn to work together before an unseen Tangler wreaks havoc on a civilian city and ruins their clan’s fragile reputation. Along the way, Ni and Hak Kuk must learn the hardest lesson of all: learning to move past their own misunderstandings and trust their growing feelings for each other.
All That Is Good Dies Here: Tales from the Rinker Universe and Beyond — Translated by Adrien Thiérette (Kaya Press)
The stories in this collection offer the first English introduction to the dizzying, speculative imagination of Junha, one of Korea’s most provocative science fiction writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, the stories conjure up universes that are both familiar and decidedly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are six stories set in the Rinker universe, where a mutating virus sends humans hurtling across the galaxy and into a dizzying succession of splitting realities. The stories range from genre fiction (zombies, vampires, sci-fi, etc.) to Golden Age cinema and Conrad’s Heart of DarknessJuna’s stories form a brilliantly intertextual and scathingly funny critique of the human condition, a human being who is changing and becoming less than he once was.
Saturation Point — Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)
The Hygromammal Zone, or “The Zone”, is an expanding area of tropical rainforest on the equator where heat and humidity make it impossible for warm-blooded animals to survive. Any unprotected human in the Zone would die within minutes. Twenty years ago, Marks entered the rainforest with a research group led by Dr. Elaine Fell to study the unusual climate and see if it could be used for agriculture. The only thing she learned was that the Zone was no place for humans to live. Fatalities occurred, and the program was stopped. Now they’re sending her back into the Zone again: plane crashes, rescue missions, and a race against time and the environment to rescue survivors. But there’s something Marks’s company boss hasn’t told her. The Zone keeps secrets, and so does Dr. Fell…
