Can you feel it? Summer is upon us! You know what that means: Plenty of time to soak up the sun, go to barbecues, and watch sports! Or, if you're a bookworm like your friends at WIRED, spend those long, lazy weekends with your nose in a book. Now is the perfect time to start plowing your way through an ambitious summer reading list, and we couldn't be more ready to help. Below are WIRED's picks for some of the best tomes coming out in the next few months. There's a little bit of sci-fi, a little bit of internet culture, and a lot of smarts on this list, so fire up the Kindle and get cracking.

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Buy on Amazon. Hardie Grant

Fair warning: Troll Hunting is not a light beach read. It begins with journalist Ginger Gorman getting a skin-prickling Twitter message about a recent double murder and ends with her admission that writing the book has left her "in shreds." But the intervening pages are the best researched, most comprehensive work on trolling I've seen in years. Despite its darkness, the book is a peculiar sort of balm for people who have experienced online harassment: When your world is on fire and nobody seems to notice, it's a relief to have someone acknowledge the flames. You needn't take my word for it. In the weeks since the book's publication, Gorman has been inundated with supportive #trollhuntingselfies from readers all over the world. "The images were a kind of medicine to me," Gorman says. "The selfie senders want the internet to be a safer place where we all can have a voice—and differing opinions—without being hunted online." Most of us do, though it doesn't always feel that way. In Troll Hunting, Gorman has ideas about how to get us there. —Emma Grey Ellis

Release date: April 16

Buy on Amazon Flatiron Books

Most people know one thing about Melinda Gates: She's Bill's wife. Maybe they also know she's a philanthropist through the charitable foundation that bears both their names. Partially, this ignorance is because Gates has been a very private person throughout her years at Microsoft and half of one of the richest couples in the world. In her new memoir, The Moment of Lift, Gates finally opens up, and what we get is an intimate look at her career, her marriage, and her slow embrace of feminism. The point of the book is to explain how Gates came to the conclusion that helping women rise up around the world is the best way to lift up all of humanity. It's a noble idea and one many people share, but what makes the book so fascinating is how honest Gates is about how long it took her to understand and embrace the idea. She writes about her privilege and class, religious beliefs, and parenting struggles, and she takes you around the world to meet the people that opened her eyes. It's a story about a change—and a blueprint for getting people and organizations to embrace progress. —Emily Dreyfuss

Release date: April 23

Say what you will about the current state of technology—the Alexa that knows all your favorite songs, the algorithms that tidy up daily life. Ian McEwan wants to

Buy on Amazon Nan A. Talese

understand what comes next. In Machines Like Me, McEwan confronts an alternate reality where Alan Turing is still alive, machine intelligence beats a human at Go back in 1968, and people are lining up to buy the next great thing: the first commercially available AI humans, appropriately named "Adam" and "Eve." The novel follows two Londoners as they explore this uncertain future with their new Adam. Can a robot, even a very good one, have consciousness? Should we program AI in our likeness, or should we give our machines stronger morals? Part love story, part alternative history, part theory of mind, Machines Like Me brings readers face to (artificial) face with the questions that will define the near-future of AI. Whether you're into sentiment machines, fearful of technology, or just down with a good love story (which, yes, includes human-machine sexual relations), it's a book you'll be thinking about all summer. —Arielle Pardes

Release date: April 23

Buy on Amazon Penguin Press

First Emily Oster came for pregnancy. Now she's here to disrupt the mega-industry of bad parenting advice. Her first book, Expecting Better, armed women with the data we needed to decide whether a cup of coffee was really going to hurt our unborn babies. An economist who lives and breathes data analysis, Oster wrote that book when she was pregnant for the first time and realized that the advice she was getting was full of junk science, old wives tales, and lazy, sweeping conclusions. Not one to just accept Google's results, she delved into the literature on pregnancy risk herself, took stock of what's known and not, and presented the facts in a no-nonsense way. Now she's turned her systematic approach to parenting young kids and all the myths surrounding that fraught human endeavor. Will spanking ruin your toddler? Is screen time melting your kid's brain? If you stop breastfeeding, are you a bad mother? Oster presents the scientific data on the big questions facing parents today. A humorous writer, Oster's book is an easy read that you could sit down and enjoy in one sitting. Or use it as a reference when you have a question like, Can I let my baby sleep next to me just this once so that I don't go insane from sleep deprivation? (Answer: Probably, yes!) —Emily Dreyfuss

Release date: April 23

I always read a book's Acknowledgments section first, even when it's hiding at the back. Raw, unedited, vulnerable—puts me in the author's head and off we go.

Buy on Amazon Tor

Seanan McGuire starts hers, for her new fantasy novel Middlegame, with this: "The story at its core is something I've been considering for years: for a very long time, it was the book I didn't yet have the necessary skill to write." A perfect tease! If you know McGuire's work, you know she's very skillful—her Hugo-winning novella series, Wayward Children, imagines what happens to all the kids who get booted out of their Narnia-like otherworlds too soon. (The first one's called Every Heart a Doorway, a terrible title for an otherwise terrific time.) So her owning up to the scary and years-delayed ambition of Middlegame, the story of two extraordinary siblings, immediately makes me think, OK, this book's gonna be great. Then I flip back to the book's beginning, which is actually the end—Book VII: The End. Say what? Book VII? First line: "There is so much blood." Oh yes. Reading McGuire is like that—boldness that feels not rash but fastidiously thought through. Genius, in other words, earned through modesty, the best kind. —Jason Kehe

Release date: May 7

Buy on Amazon Harvard University Press

A thousand starry-eyed writers (myself included) have imagined the internet as the great leveler—the bringer of global digi-democracy, a place where grassroots activists can stand alongside traditional power brokers and have an equal chance of being heard. Even as the internet veered toward Russian-influenced dystopia, the optimistic view persisted unchallenged, probably because people like me really wanted it to be true. Then sociologist Jen Schradie delivered a swift kick to my cerebral cortex. "Not only is technology failing to erase the barriers toward organizing movements," she writes. "It may be making things worse." Ouch. No me gusta. Also: She might be right. In The Revolution That Wasn't, Schradie explains that, while Black Lives Matter and #MeToo capture headlines, it's traditionally powerful conservative groups who have used digital tools to create tangible change. Hers may not be the internet culture take you want this summer, but it's likely the one you need. —Emma Grey Ellis

Release date: May 13 [Amazon]

The "Dodge" in the speculative titan's latest doorstop, though this one's a relatively scant 880 pages, will be familiar to fans of 2011's Reamde. Middle-aged MMO

Buy on Amazon William Morrow

founder Richard Forthrast is indeed back, as is his niece Zula. (Fall only acknowledges its predecessor in passing, though, so it's by no means a prerequisite.) As a conventional present-day thriller, Reamde was perhaps a bit more accessible than much of Neal Stephenson's work, but here he returns to look ahead and behind in equal measure. When a fluke mishap renders Forthrast brain dead, his will dictates that he be cryogenically preserved—which ultimately leads to his entire connectome being digitized and uploaded. As technology in the real world continues to evolve, so too does the lone consciousness in "Bitworld"; over time, one mind is joined by others, and a civilization begins anew. Fall is at once science fiction and fantasy, with quantum computing enabling what amounts to magic, and while Stephenson spins out a pleasingly plausible vision of our near future, he carves out his most comfortable position in the uncertain nexus where that future becomes past and we rewrite our own apocrypha. Vintage Stephenson, which is to say it's like nothing he's ever written. —Peter Rubin

Release date: June 4

Nnedi Okorafor has never been shy about telling her story. She was a star college athlete who emerged from spine surgery partially paralyzed, an experience that

Buy on Amazon Simon & Schuster/TED

opened the door to a career as a writer of Africanfuturist (her preferred descriptor) science fiction. (New readers should start with her Binti novellas, in which a young Himba woman fuses with a jellyfish alien and saves the world.) In this TED Book—published extensions of certain talks given by TED speakers—Okorafor commits her personal journey to paper, an act that often results in startling observations and lovely commentary on humanity's imminent cyborgianism. Most memorable might be her retelling of the moment she first realizes she can't feel her legs. "I burst from my body," she writes—and I won't spoil the rest. It's visceral, pained writing, in the service of hope and resilience. The book's message is simple—setbacks can lead to breakthroughs—but no less valuable for it. —Jason Kehe

Release date: June 18

It's nearly impossible not to mention The Stand when describing the maddeningly prolific author's

Buy on Amazon Del Rey

newest novel, and for good reason: When people start walking away from their families, seemingly unaware of their surroundings, battle lines form around them. What follows is a long, winding road trip through today's hyperpartisan America, accompanied by the twin pandemics of uncertainty and curdled patriotism. Chuck Wendig doesn't have much time for metaphor (outside what proves to be the ultimate cause of the wandering), which at times makes Wanderers' satire of the Trump era feel facile and reflexive, but he's also a keen student of how to fashion a ripping yarn, and here he does. Story (a lot of it) and character (a lot of them) march hand in hand—so even if you don't know why they're doing it or where they're going, you're willing to follow them to the end. —Peter Rubin

Release date: July 2

A number of books have been termed "godpunk," but Suyi Davies Okungbowa's novel may be the subgenre's platonic deific ideal: From its title to its plot to its

Buy on Amazon Abaddon

terse but vivid prose, DMG blends Yoruba cosmology with the hard-noir sensibility of cyberpunk. Mogo is, yes, a godhunter, but that's because he himself is a demigod; even then, his powers are limited, so while a pantheon's worth of orishas has fallen to Earth in Lagos, he's best suited to scooping up troublesome low-level godlings for cash. Until, that is, he agrees to capture the twin Ibeji for a powerful wizard, and somehow succeeds enough to immediately regret his decision. What follows is assured and arch, unsettling and thoroughly enjoyable—an auspicious debut from one of the most promising new voices in the growing coterie of African SFF writers. Sorcery aplenty, but thankfully, no swords to be found. —Peter Rubin

Release date: July 9

Ever since Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman has proven that his ability to contextualize the current pop culture moment is second to none. With his

Buy on Amazon Penguin Press

latest, Klosterman trains his Gen X sights on the Trump-dominated present and millennial-driven future. Most of the "fictional nonfiction" stories here are very short, just a few pages or so, but the vignettes touch on everything from class, gender, and race to the anxieties that talking about those things can stir up. They are also delightfully unsettling; "Cat Person," for example, is a story about an assailant who is attacking people using a cat infected with a mutated form of Toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that makes rats unafraid of felines and has a nebulous link to schizophrenia in humans. (It's unclear if this story was given its title before or after the viral New Yorker piece of same name.) Raised in Captivity is as funny, thoughtful, and unhinged as it is slightly uncomfortable to read, and if that isn't the ethos of the current pop culture moment, what is? —Angela Watercutter

Release date: July 16

Language evolves, and for those who have been on the internet in the last two or three decades, it's evolved at an astronomical rate. With Because Internet, linguist

Buy on Amazon Riverhead Books

—and WIRED contributor—Gretchen McCulloch lays out the ways in which online lingo, from emojis to GIFs to acronyms like "lol" and "omg," has become a vital part of modern communication. It's also an analog window into how the evolution of digital communication mirrors the shifts in word usage that have happened over generations. "Internet linguistics isn't just a study of the latest cool memes," McCulloch writes, "it's a deeper look into day-to-day language than we've ever been able to see. It brings new insight into classic linguistic questions like, how do new words catch on? When did people start saying this? Where do people say that?" You'll be fascinated to see how she answers them. —Angela Watercutter

Release date: July 23

What do you do after you blow up the conventions? That's the challenge R. F. Kuang set for herself with her 2018 debut, The Poppy War. In that book,

Buy on Amazon Harper Voyager

Kuang lulled readers into a familiar fantasy narrative—young sad gifted orphan goes off to magic school and makes trouble—only to undo every expectation and trope midway through. The result was pure chaos, a supernatural rewriting of China's military history in which our main character does psychedelic drugs mid-battle and in the end commits mass genocide. With, say, the follow-up Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling could simply ship Harry back to Hogwarts again and again. With The Dragon Republic, Kuang doesn't get to send her hero, Rin, back to Sinegard. In fact, it's not even clear Rin's all that heroic after all (again: genocide). Her story's refreshing, shocking, and there's some sort of invisible phoenix fire god controlling everything. Behold the horizons of fantasy expand. —Jason Kehe

Release date: August 6

Space travel provides the setting for approximately 17 gazillion science fiction novels, and colonizing new planets an additional four gazillion, but Temi Oh's debut

Buy on Amazon Simon & Schuster

occupies the less-populated gap between the two: a ship on its way to an uncertain future. (Not a generation ship, either, a trope that itself gets a gazillion or so.) Six teens—and four adults—launch on a 23-year voyage to the nearest candidate for human settlement, setting up a YA-tinged, character-driven read that's rarely light, but always thoughtful. Published earlier this year in the UK, it forgoes propulsion until the latter third, instead opting for a slow drift through space, panning its passengers' pasts for psychological gold. —Peter Rubin

Release date: August 13

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