These sci-fi books are good gifts to put under the tree, to please your loved ones who are eager for more or less positive possible futures.
It is quite normal to put books under the tree. To please those who like to explore the near and distant future, it is even more necessary to include science fiction. Here is a selection of works published in 2024. You can also draw from our fantasy guide.
Recovery trails (Émilie Querbalec)
It's not for nothing that Émilie Querbalec's third novel was one of our favorites for winter 2024, when it was released. Recovery Trails begins as a travel story, in 2030, where we meet two teenagers who grew up in a world devastated by climate change.
Their trajectories converge towards an island. But what is its true nature? The second half of the book takes us by surprise, so much so that no summary can really evoke the keystone of the story. In any case, this is a work that is certainly very melancholic, but brings hope, which will appeal to fans of SF incorporated into environmental settings.
Recovery TrailsÉmilie Querbalec, Albin Michel, 240 pages, €17.90
The Fields of the Moon (Catherine Dufour)
Rather than heading to the other end of the galaxy, this humanity envisaged by Catherine Dufour begins by fleeing to the nearest: the Moon, where the inhabitants live underground, in ancient lava tunnels. But this is not the case for our heroine, accompanied by her cat, a farmer on the lunar surface, sheltered behind a dome. She witnesses, from afar, the ills of humans, until the day she finds herself watching over a little girl, all the more surprising because she has a green thumb.
A story quite different from Catherine Dufour's usual stories, but we find there a salient point of her writing: very strong emotions. As for the plot… it will gradually grip readers in a twists and turns that just needs to be resolved.
The Fields of the MoonCatherine Dufour, Denoël, 288 pages, €20.50
Fragile/s (Nicolas Martin)
A dystopian France a little too close to us. The country is under the control of a far-right regime which attacks immigrant populations as much as reproductive rights. All this in a context of declining birth rates, where, in addition, the genetic disease Fragile X is developing. Typhaine joins an experimental government pregnancy control program; and learns that she is expecting a boy described as “healthy”. But something is wrong.
Fragile/s is an unusual novel. A political science fiction which, while being part of the dystopian tradition of The Scarlet Handmaidhowever, offers its own approach: restorative.
Fragile/sNicolas Martin, To the Devil Vauvert, 432 pages, €21
Souls of Fire (Annie Francé-Harrar)
It is a visionary work that has been found. Do you know Annie Francé-Harrar? Probably not. However, it is to this Austrian biologist born in 1886 that we owe, during the 20th century, the first scientific bases of compost cultivation.
And from this position as a biologist specializing in the environment, she wrote a science fiction novel: Souls of Fire. This one will take you by surprise with its lucidity on the current crisis of life, since it is the story of a collapse. Of course, we will detect anachronisms. But the bottom line remains striking: for a biologist as competent and a novelist as imaginative as this author, in 1920, the present was partly predictable.
Souls of FireAnnie Francé-Harrar, Translated by Erwann Perchoc, Belfond, 224 pages, €21
The Women's Shore (Pamela Sargent)
Here's another avant-garde: this feminist sci-fi fresco by Pamela Sargent was originally published in 1986. We are set in a future after a nuclear war, after which women have reduced men to the state of pariahs. They live in the wild outside the city, protected by walls, while the society of women inside is peaceful and abundant.
As men know nothing about this city, they have developed a religious belief of adoration towards women (they worship a goddess, the “Lady”). Thanks to a virtual reality system, men are immersed in virtual visions during which women can recover their semen for procreation. It all works until a young woman, Laissa, questions the traditions.
An essential piece of feminist SF, finally reissued.
The Women's ShorePamela Sargent, Translated by Nathalie Gouyé-Guilbert, 560 pages, €25
Survival Guide for the Amateur Time Traveler (Charles Yu)
A little humor won't hurt. Charles Yu is best known for Chinatown Interior (adapted this year as a series on Disney+). In this funny story, the author portrays himself as the protagonist. When you have a plumbing problem, you call a plumber. When you have a problem with your time machine, you call Charles Yu. Accompanied by a dog and an AI, he saves users trapped in dysfunctional time loops. But when he finds himself in the dirt, the story takes a more personal turn.
Note that the Aux forges de Vulcain editions also translated this year (for the first time in France) the small collection Alone on Earth.
Survival Guide for the Amateur Time TravelerCharles Yu, Translated by Aude Monnoyer de Galland, Aux Forges de Vulcain, 319 pages, €22
The Star Odyssey (Kim Bo-Young)
Ah, love! Ah, the future! The Star Odyssey is the first Korean SF translated in France. Kim Bo-Young puts to the test a couple who, determined to get married, are faced with a slight setback: he is on Earth, she, on Alpha Centauri. And it's not enough to come together: space travel is also temporal. Will their couple survive such a separation across space-time, as the history of our planet advances (and worsens)?
A beautiful odyssey, ultimately, which we rank among the best love stories in SF. The work is now out in paperback.
Star OdysseyKim Bo-Young, Translated by Choi Kyungran, 336 pages, €9.70
Brown soil (Michael Roch)
A Caribbean, decolonial, ecological science fiction, written in Creole? This is Michael Roch's bet in Brown soilwhich is the story of a monstrous city, Lanville, an absolute megalopolis which artificially eats all the earth in its path.
But where exactly is the land of origins, under all this concrete? It is the quest for the heroines and heroes of history, which, in the form of a choral novel – in several voices therefore -, above all creates the fresco of a political insurrection.
Brown soilMichael Roch, Paperback, 256 pages, €8.70
Valley of Carnage (Romain Lucazeau)
What if Antiquity had never ended? It is on this postulate that Romain Lucazeau begins his new work, which therefore concerns uchrony – what would have happened if what happened hadn't happened the way it happened. Clearly, a rewriting of History, but the author, here, projects himself into the futuristic consequences of such a turnaround.
We find in Valley of Carnage the motives that Lucazeau mobilized in Broadhis successful diptych where he imagined a space opera inspired by Greco-Roman figures. In this new novel, this re-imagined world is thrown into war, and the title does not lie to you: it is carnage, the author does not skimp on the violence, nor on the assumed cynicism for that matter. A novel between philosophy, civilizational fresco and military SF.
Valley of CarnageRomain Lucazeau, Verso, 448 pages, 22,90 €
