The City We Became

By N. K. Jemisin

Orbit, 448 pages, $35.00

N. K. Jemisin, author of the award-winning Broken Earth novels, gets another series started in this fantasy tale of a New York City that is coming to life in a strange new way.

In some parallel reality, of which most of us are unaware, cities have individual human avatars or champions, with names that reflect this status. So Paulo is (not “is from”) Sao Paulo and the boroughs of NYC are represented by Manny (Manhattan), Bronca (the Bronx), and friends.

These avatars and their hometowns are in turn threatened by an Enemy (capitalized) torn from the pages of H. P. Lovecraft. Which means you can expect a lot of CGI-style action that whips along at breakneck speed, flavoured throughout with Jemisin’s aggressive politics. But even as a standard-bearer for woke SF (this novel is an outgrowth of a story that appeared in her collection “How Long ’til Black Future Month?”), Jemisin can lay the preaching on pretty thick. The chief Enemy here is even a monstrous Woman in White (or Dr. White), who has plans for gentrifying the Big Apple. Not if you love New York!

Repo Virtual

By Corey J. White

Tor, 352 pages, $36.50

The hacker first became a staple of science fiction with the advent of cyberpunk and William Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer.” Since then he’s gone on to become a figure as familiar to the genre as spaceship captains and mad scientists and in recent years has been enjoying an increasing popularity.

Julius Dax (JD) is one such damaged anti-hero, a veteran gamer in a world where the line between reality and VR has become more than a little blurred. JD lives in Neo Songdo, a company town run by the tech giant Zero Corporation, and he is a man with a particular set of skills that are in demand when it comes to stealing a package of software from Zero. Though it might not have been wise to trust an off-the-grid cult leader with a name like Kali.

As it turns out, the software in question is the world’s first sentient AI, and both Zero and Kali want to get their hands on it, with JD stuck in the middle. What follows is an action-driven plot that, perhaps not surprisingly, bears some resemblance to William Gibson’s latest novel, “Agency.” It seems as though cyberpunk is not only back but may have come full circle.

The Eyelid

By S. D. Chrostowska

Coach House, 144 pages, $22.95

There’s a moment in Don DeLillo’s classic black-comedy novel “White Noise” when the main character hears one of his children reciting fragments of commercial advertising in their sleep. We realize from this that things have gotten really bad.

“The Eyelid” spins a rich and rewarding political fantasy out of this anxiety over the colonization of dreams and the subconscious by corporate power. As it begins the narrator is introduced to the dreamland of Onirica by an erudite and romantic ambassador named Chevauchet who plays the role of Virgil to the narrator’s Dante, leading him through “the dark wood of nocturnal imaginings” while explaining the meaning and revolutionary role that dreams play in the global economy.

The situation is dire, as the surveillance state and big business have placed dreams, the last bastion of our freedom, creativity, and imagination, under siege, even getting us to drug ourselves into insomnia in the drive for ever greater worker productivity. Hope resides in the unconscious underground, a rebel community of dreamers running from the big sleep.

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Vagabonds

By Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu)

Saga Press, 602 pages, $36.99

At the beginning of the twenty-third century humanity finds itself in the middle of a new Cold War. Only this time the conflict has gone off-planet, pitting Earth against its colony on Mars. Standing somewhere in between the two great rivals is Luoying, who is returning to Mars after spending five years as part of a mission abroad (that is, on Earth).

Though Martian by birth, Luoying is actually a bit of a nomad, not feeling at home anywhere. Which makes her a perfect proxy for the reader as Hao Jingfang explores a number of big philosophical questions about the well-ordered society.

It’s an easy game to translate the novel into contemporary political terms and see “Vagabonds” as an allegory of competing economic and cultural systems — broadly Earth as the West and the Red Planet as a socialist experiment. And to be sure there’s a lot of that going on. But what “Vagabonds” really feels like is a return to the grand SF of an earlier era, along the lines of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. Good company to keep.