A cold war-set debut, plus a superhero satire turns savage — the best new science-fiction books

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"}],[{"start":9.95,"text":"Ironically, with northern hemisphere nights at their shortest and the sun blazing down, the best of the current crop of science fiction books sit firmly at the darker end of the genre’s spectrum. And things don’t get much darker than the depths of the north Atlantic, where most of the action in Benedict Anning’s impressive debut effort, Atomic Coffin (Bantam £20/Saga Press $18), takes place."}],[{"start":34.95,"text":"The year is 1984, and the cold war is in its final throes, although global tensions are still running high. A Soviet nuclear submarine lies submerged off the coast of Iceland, motionless, and a Royal Navy hunter-killer sub is dispatched to investigate. The Russians have unwisely been experimenting with unknown forces, and their vessel has become the host for a malignant presence with the power to take over human minds and compel them to commit brutal acts."}],[{"start":64.80000000000001,"text":"Atomic Coffin could have been just a bit of pulpy fun — and no shame in that — but Anning has chosen to elevate things by concentrating on the unravelling psyche of his main character, British spy Heidi Sperling, with the narrative becoming increasingly fragmented and hallucinatory as her grasp on reality slips. The icy claustrophobia of the deep-sea setting and the sense of a paranoid world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon are strongly conveyed."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":93.30000000000001,"text":"It was in the 1980s that Kim Newman began his dual career as cinema critic, specialising in horror movies, and author, celebrated for his Anno Dracula series. His latest novel, Model Actress Whatever (Titan £10.99), features ghosts and vampires, but its main focus is superheroes."}],[{"start":114.85000000000001,"text":"In an alternate present-day Britain that feels like the Swinging Sixties never ended, soap star Chrissie Chambers finds herself suddenly out of work and elects to take over as Lady Shade, the erstwhile superhero identity of her aunt Jasmine, who now works as a therapist at Devil’s Dyke, an asylum full of supervillains. Chrissie must grapple with the legacy she is inheriting and the plethora of ill-intentioned bad guys that comes with it."}],[{"start":140.15,"text":"The novel spirals giddily along amid a welter of puns, slang and pop-culture references, exuding all the brio of sci-Fi and fantasy grandmaster Michael Moorcock in his prime."}],[{"start":152.25,"text":"Like Newman, Mark Morris is a genre author who has been active since the 1980s. He now has a tally of more than 50 books to his credit, among them several Doctor Who tie-in novels. He’s also penned audio drama scripts featuring the Time Lord’s adventures."}],[{"start":167.6,"text":"In his Bad Things Happen Here (Flame Tree Press £20), six university students encounter a malicious supernatural force, the locus of which is a single room at their hall of residence. One of them is driven to suicide, and 20 years later the remaining five find themselves and their families haunted again by the same evil, which they reunite to exorcise."}],[{"start":190.79999999999998,"text":"Inspired by an episode of Uncanny, Danny Robins’s podcast about real-life spooky phenomena, Bad Things Happen Here is very effective as a metaphor for how the hope and positivity of early adulthood can curdle in middle age but still, with effort, be regained."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":207.6,"text":"Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife (Tor Nightfire £22/Atria $29) is likewise rooted in the past but with its claws sunk in the present. Journalist Jenny Kaplan sets out to write an exposé of social media sensation Mia Wright. Mia, from her idyllic farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, projects an image of serene motherhood and perfect domesticity. But there’s something sinister lurking behind the scenes, a demonic manifestation that seeps into Jenny’s life and threatens her sanity."}],[{"start":239.25,"text":"A novel by Saratoga Schaefer, also called Trad Wife and focusing on a trad wife influencer, came out a few months ago, and is a fusion of WW Jacobs’s classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale “The Monkey’s Paw” and David Cronenberg’s early, gruesome movies. Then there’s Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, yet another recent book centring around a tradwife influencer, although it, with its time travel premise, takes a satirical sci-fi approach to the material. Langan’s novel, by contrast with those two, draws on the Salem witch trials and Robert Chambers’s late-Victorian fantasy classic The King in Yellow, giving these elements a timely and chilling contemporary twist."}],[{"start":280.1,"text":"It’s high summer in Jonathan Sims’s The Burn Line (Gollancz £25/Poisoned Pen Press $18.99) and five assorted strangers travelling in a Central Line Tube carriage on one of London’s hottest days of the year share a horrific experience, which none of them is able to remember properly afterwards. Finding themselves stalked by something monstrous in the wake of that, they have to work together in order to survive."}],[{"start":306.90000000000003,"text":"Sims, as the originator of creepy drama podcast The Magnus Archives, is great at getting inside characters’ heads, and in this book each of his five main cast members is given a distinctive viewpoint, making for a pleasingly multi-layered read. There surely can’t be a more nightmarish place than the London Underground at its stifling, sweltering worst."}],[{"start":329.15000000000003,"text":"Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X"}],[{"start":347.30000000000007,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783091035_4803.mp3"}