The best new science fiction books from September 2025 by authors include Cixin Liu and John Scalzi

There are some sci-fi-heavy meetings with new novels this month, from Cixin Liu and Stephen Baxter to John Scalzi. I’m eager to check Ian McEwan’s venture for a flooded version of 2119-A Drowned-World Trope also taken up by Yume Kitsasei in the exciting sounding Salt crop. The deceased Mason Coil’s speech of disaster in the New Martian Colony, ExileAm also tempting me, like more time traveling black from the excellent Nicholas Binge.

We are smashing a more classic route in the New Scientist Book Club this month and checking Ursula K. Le Guins much admired novel from 1974 The event. Come and read with us and see how it is compared to the best of today’s science fiction. But back to September 2025 …

The literary author turns to science fiction – and not for the first time (which reads 2010’s Sun?). In his new novel, we move from 2014 when a large poem is read aloud and then lost, never to be heard again, to 2119, when Britain’s low -lying areas have been submerged. Fellow empty metcalfe looking back at the archives in the early 21^st Century, who was wondering about the opportunities that life offered at that time. Then he finds a clue that can lead to the “big lost poem” …

Here is a treat for fans of The problem of three body – Collection’s short stories from Cixin Liu, which touches first contact, the machine’s intelligences and cosmological horror. There are a total of 32, and we promised that everything from solar systems was consumed to planets being transformed into spaceships.

Hildden is the “heavenly birthplace” of millions of planets, and humanity arrived thousands of years ago and spread over these worlds. When an unknown enemy sees the wealth in the fireplace and wants to take it to himself, Commander Ulla Breen must come up with a plan to unite her various elements and fight back. Will she also learn why humanity came here in the first place?

In an almost future version of the Earth, coastal cities have been flooded by the sea filled with mutant fish. We follow Sailor Skipper, the youngest of three sisters who serve for life’s stay by foaming plastic from the sea and reselling it. When she receives a cryptic plea for help from her eldest sister Nora, who is looking for a cure for the world’s failing crop, she and her other sister Carmen traveled across the sea – and a dying world – to find her. KITASEI is the author of The deep sky and Stardust GrailAnd this sounds good.

During this time, the police procedural procedural, detective Julia Torgrims (good name!) Records to try again to examine the murder of a billionaire she worked with while she was undercover. But she finds two bodies-how is billionaire bruno donaldson … we loved Binge’s last sci-fi-thriller Resolution Here at New scientistSo I look at this one.

This is the seventh novel in Scalzi’s Old man‘S War series. There has been peace in the interstellar space for a decade, but now is the most advanced foreign nature that humanity is put on the brink of the war – and the earth is drawn into the conflict. Gretchen Trujillo, a middle -level bureaucrat, gets a secret mission that can change the future of people and foreigners.

Exiles of Mason Coile

I am very much taken by the cover and the prerequisite of this new novel from the author of William (As I enjoyed), which unfortunately died earlier this year. It is set in 2030 when a human crew arrives to prepare the first colony of Mars, only to find the new base half -drilled. The three robots sent four years earlier to set it up to be interrogated – but one of them is missing …

At a remote research station in the desert, Kinsey and her team discover a strange copy in the sand. When Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it in, it soon becomes clear that the thing is looking for a new host.

This sounds to me as if it is drawing the line between horror, science fiction and fantasy – and it’s a line I like to see the fuck. Set based on eco-anxiety, it follows archaeobotanist Nell as she excavates two ant body that were discovered in Somerset Fen, while her body begins to manifest “her own wildness”.