The Galactic Guru Recommendations
Winter Book Releases 2025-2026
Discover the most anticipated sci-fi and dystopian releases of the season that bring bold new worlds for the Galactic Guru reader type to enjoy.
February Picks
Operation Bounce House
by Matt Dinniman
A man must fight for his planet against impossible odds when gamers from Earth attempt to remotely annihilate it in this epic, fast-paced novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit Dungeon Crawler Carl.
All colonist Oliver Lewis ever wanted to do was run the family ranch with his sister, maybe play a gig or two with his band, and keep his family's aging fleet of intelligent agriculture bots ticking as long as possible. He figures it will be a good thing when the transfer gate finally opens all the way and restores instant travel and full communication between Earth and his planet, New Sonora. But there's a complication.
Even though the settlers were promised they'd be left in peace, Earth's government now has other plans. The colossal Apex Industries is hired to commence an "eviction action." But maximizing profits will always be Apex's number one priority. Why spend money printing and deploying AI soldiers when they can turn it into a game? Why not charge bored Earthers for the opportunity to design their own war machines and remotely pilot them from the comfort of their homes?
The game is called Operation Bounce House.
Oliver and his friends soon find themselves fighting for their lives against machines piloted by gamers who've paid a premium for the privilege. With the help of an old book from his grandfather and a bucket of rusty parts, Oliver is determined to defend the only home he's ever known.
The People's Library
by Veronica G Henry
From critically acclaimed author Veronica G. Henry comes a thought-provoking science fiction fantasy set in near-future Cleveland that follows a reluctant curator of digital human consciousness who must uncover twisted secrets and navigate ethical quandaries and dangers when anti-technology rebels attack the futuristic library.
Echo London never wanted to be the curator of the People's Library, a digital collection of human consciousness. But when she's assigned as its head librarian, Echo is entrusted with humanity's greatest minds and historical figures, all of whom have been recreated through controversial consciousness-capturing technology that lets visitors interact with the dead.
But an anti-tech rebellion is stirring. When a rebel attack results in tragedy, a mysterious woman wearing an ancient death mask leaves behind cryptic final words for Echo: It all begins with nothing. Caught between the resistance and a potentially virtual evolution, Echo begins to fear that there's more to her job than meets the eye and the mind. There are secrets here. And the People's Library may be less of a promise of things to come than a warning of the danger that lurks beneath the surface. Now the fate of humanity lies in uncovering the truth.
Eradication: A Fable
by Jonathan Miles
From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles ("a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"--Los Angeles Times) comes a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island.
"Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected -- a story for our times." --Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter and Night Boat to Tangier
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that's gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren't exactly what his employers said they were--and, complicating things further, he discovers he's not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies--and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude, as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, "a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer" (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.
Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur
by Ian McDonald
A FanFiAddict Most Anticipated Title!
How to Train Your Dragon meets Mad Max in this story of an orphan in a fractured Southwest who just wants to ride a dinosaur under the lights.
Come one, come all to the dinosaur rodeo!
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big-top.
To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly-American west to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone's eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnotaur.
The Universe Box
by Michael Swanwick
Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction's most prestigious award five times in six years. In his dazzling new collection, the master of speculative short stories returns with new tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend.
[STARRED REVIEW] "All of Swanwick's stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers."
--Publishers Weekly
In engaging stories, Mischling the thief races through time to defeat three trolls before the sun rises for the first time and turns the inhabitants of her city into stone. A scientist is on the run from assassins, because her research in merging human intelligence with sentient AI is too dangerous. An aging veteran obtains a military weapon from his past: a VR robotic leopard in which he rediscovers the consequences of the hunt. In the biggest heist in the history of the universe, a loser Trickster (and the girlfriend who is better than he deserves) sets out to violate every trope and expectation of fiction possible.
With two stories original to this collection, Michael Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
The Iron Garden Sutra
by A D Sui
Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes's Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui's darkly philosophical, locked room murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding...
Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the meaning he finds in his work and the comfort of AI companionship, his relationships with the living leave him longing for deeper connection.
The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years, its passengers reduced to dust and bone. A relic of Earth's dying past, its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew's long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. Iris's religious rituals are met with bemusement by the scientists--and outright hostility by engineer Yan Fukui.
But the plant life isn't the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival. . .
IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS
january picks
Detour
by Jeff Rake - Rob Hart
A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they've returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.
"If The Martian and The Twilight Zone had a baby, it would be Detour--a thriller that messes with your head as you scramble to piece together what's really going on."--Steve Netter, Best Thriller Books
Ryan Crane wasn't looking for trouble--just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.
As thanks for Ryan's quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn's moon Titan.
A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife--and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son--he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.
Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief
by T Kingfisher
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Nine Goblins, a tale of low fantasy and high mischief.
No one knows exactly how the Goblin War began, but folks will tell you that goblins are stinking, slinking, filthy, sheep-stealing, henhouse-raiding, obnoxious, rude, and violent. Goblins would actually agree with all this, and might throw in "cowardly" and "lazy" too for good measure.
The Age of Calamities: Stories
by Senaa Ahmad
Written by an inimitable new voice, The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories.
In this bold debut collection, Senaa Ahmad pushes the boundaries of history and its figures, sending the reader on a thrilling ride. In "Let's Play Dead," Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn gone, but there's a tiny problem--she keeps coming back to life no matter what he does. "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" hurls readers back to 1945, where they assume the role of a technician for the Manhattan Project, confronted with labyrinthine paths and harrowing outcomes. And "Inside the House of the Historian" invites us to a dinner party turned murder mystery full of figures like Nefertiti, Queen Victoria, John Adams, and Marilyn Monroe. These stories and others entice readers to confront the past, the present, and themselves all at once. Zany and haunting, inviting and brilliant, each poignant tale delves into the surreal and tragicomic nature of the present through the lens of yesterday.
They Could Be Saviors
by Diana Colleen
What if the only way to save the planet is to kidnap the billionaires destroying it?
For readers who grew up on The Hunger Games and are ready for a quieter but no less daring confrontation of power, THEY COULD BE SAVIORS turns the rebellion on its head. Instead of youth rising against authority, the world's most powerful men are the ones taken captive. But they're not fighting each other. They're fighting their own consciences.
It imagines what happens when those at the very top are stripped of control and made to face the future they've helped endanger.
Five billionaires awaken in captivity, cut off from their empires and stripped of control. Among them is Josh Latham, CEO of the world's largest corporation, who built his fortune on exploitation while the planet burned. Their captors are not soldiers but healers: a collective of women determined to break through their defenses using psychedelic therapy.
December Picks:
Tailored Realities
by Brandon Sanderson
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson―creator of the Stormlight Archive, the Mistborn saga, and numerous smash-hit works of science fiction and fantasy―comes Tailored Realities, a new short fiction collection including the never-before-published novella "Moment Zero."
Spanning the genres of fantasy and science fiction, Tailored Realities includes ten works of short fiction from the ingenious mind of one of the genre's most beloved bestselling authors.
From futuristic detective thrillers to inventive space opera, superhero action, high-tech fantasy, and beyond, these gripping standalone reads have never before been gathered into one volume, with many available here in print for the first time.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
by Matt Dinniman
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series--now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.
You know what's worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what's worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That's what.
Ashes of the Imperium
by Chris Wraight
The Traitor Legions flee Terra in disarray, hounded by the remaining Loyalists, both sides hungry for every scrap of vengeance they can extract. This is a time of change; humanity has witnessed the dream of the Emperor's Great Crusade unravel, and from their perspective, it's all the fault of the Legions.
The Traitor Warmaster is dead. Terra lies in ruins. The Emperor is silent. Amid the rubble of the Palace, shell-shocked survivors emerge into the light of an uncertain dawn. New powers are present now, ones that have travelled the length of the galaxy to bring salvation to the Imperium, though they are as readily cast as usurpers as redeemers. The survivors of Horus' Grand Armada, now scattered and desperate to escape vengeance, are riven with doubt and dissension, and their gods too are silent.
The City of Brass Deluxe Collector's Edition
by S A Chakraborty
Now available in a gorgeous hardcover Deluxe Collector's Edition, The City of Brass, the spellbinding debut from New York Times bestselling author S. A. Chakraborty, featuring a reversible jacket, stamped book case, designed endpapers, and stenciled edges.
On the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, Nahri is a con woman of unsurpassed skill. She makes her living swindling Ottoman nobles, hoping to one day earn enough to change her fortunes. But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, during one of her cons, she learns that even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.