speculative fiction

Lit Picks: 7 Haunting Spooky Season Reads

The following books don’t care if you survive. They tear through your head, leave you questioning what’s real and what isn’t, and they don’t let go. Fantasy hits with grit and blood, sci-fi scrambles your sense of everything, horror crawls under your skin and stays. You’ll find mirrors that lie,…

BookTribSeptember 11, 2025

Audiobooks Fiction Listicles

Voyage Into 5 Fascinating Worlds With These SFF Audiobooks

Put down your doomscrolling device and voyage with me out of earth’s orbit to different realms in five new fantasy and science fiction novels. A mix of stand-alone and series titles, they offer powerhouse female characters and the ultimate escape. There’s nothing like a trip out of time or into…

Aurelia C. ScottMay 4, 2022

Fiction Recommended

An Epic AI Apocalypse Thriller That Will Leave You Questioning Everything

“The world was becoming an increasingly frightening place.” James A. DeVita’s Apocalypse defies the usual tropes of an end-of-the-world thriller. While it delivers high-stakes action and global collapse, it’s ultimately a thought-provoking, deeply human story about technology, love and what happens when the line between creator and creation blurs. Set…

Monique SnymanApril 10, 2025

Fiction Miscellany

Debut Author Maggie Su Talks Identity, Insects, and the Evolution of “Blob”

“I’m interested in the kind of the strange and the weird — how to get at the reality of being human — in this kind of sideways way, because that’s kind of the way that I think about and experience the world.” Maggie Su, author of the upcoming speculative fiction…

Olivia WielandJanuary 23, 2025

Fiction Listicles

5 Speculative and Science Fiction Novels to Lose Your Body In

Do Androids really dream of any sheep at all? What do you think? What would you dream about, if your body never stopped changing (and trust me, your body really does never stop)? I am a deep lover of science fiction. I love vast and crazy worlds and impossible spaceships…

Ben Berman GhanAugust 22, 2024

Fiction Listicles Listicles - Featured

When AI Calls the Shots: A Glimpse at 5 Terrifying Futures

When we speculate about future technology, we hope that whatever advancements we make will be overwhelmingly positive: 3D-printing vital organs or light-speed transportation with net-negative carbon emissions. You might even envision a frivolous piece of tech two: hovercrafts and life-like holograms. What no one wants to imagine is constructing the…

BookTribApril 11, 2022

Fiction Fiction - Featured

Alternate History Gives Autonomy to Enslaved Young Man in America

What if? That’s the question the alternate history genre of speculative fiction poses as it weaves together real events and gives them a different outcome. One of the best-known examples is Philip K. Dick’s classic, The Man in the High Castle, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win WWII.…

Joanna PoncavageOctober 4, 2022

Fiction Listicles

Strange Justice: 6 Unusual Justice Systems in Speculative Fiction

The justice system is an aspect of worldbuilding we often take for granted in fiction. In the world of fantasy, we’re used to scenes of dungeons and burnings at the stake. In science fiction, we know to expect exile to the farthest corner of space. And in stories set in…

BookTribApril 25, 2024

Miscellany Thrillers Young Adult

Stacy Stokes Lets the Darkness of Reality Creep Into Her Fiction

I once read an article by Stephen King explaining how horror allows people to explore their darkest sensibilities. This resonated, because throughout my years as an author I’ve come to realize that writing speculative fiction gives me a similar freedom — it allows me to explore, and ultimately process, complex…

Stacy StokesApril 8, 2024

Listicles

Six Thought-Provoking Speculative Fiction Novels for Fans of Octavia Butler

Speculative fiction is a dazzling supergenre that blends multiple literary galaxies into one cosmic whole, from sci-fi and futuristic fantasy to magical realism and twisted literary fiction. Some of these narratives present a dark-humored vision of the not-too-distant future while others offer a haunting reflection of our all-too-familiar present. If you’re eager to…

Wyatt SemenukFebruary 5, 2024

Podcasts

Writers, Ink Podcast: Victor Manibo Explains How He Uses the Story Engine Card Deck to Help Shape His Novels

BookTrib is proud to present to our readers the Writers, Ink podcast, a show about the business of writing. J.K. Rowling was nearly homeless when she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Stephen King penned Carrie on a small desk wedged between a washer and dryer. James Patterson worked in advertising and…

Writers, InkMay 1, 2023

Fiction Romance Romance - Featured

One Young Woman’s Rebellion Against a Society Divided by Race

The Great Peony: Safina Cameron (Pretty Publications) flips the script on racism and discrimination, imagining a world where dark-skinned people thrive in High Society, while light-skinned people make up the lower class with less access to resources and education. Jannah Bayyan has crafted a fascinating piece of speculative literary fiction…

Megan BeauregardSeptember 15, 2022

Fiction Thrillers Thrillers - Featured

A Reunion, Jealousy and Murder – And an Exclusive Interview with Ann Cleeves

Feisty and Disheveled DCI Vera Stanhope returns for her eleventh North Umberland investigation in Ann Cleeves’ chilling new novel, The Rising Tide (Minotaur Books). Set on a tiny tidal island off the mainland, a group of friends gather to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a school holiday retreat called “Only…

Jodé MillmanSeptember 6, 2022

Fiction Fiction - Featured

“The Last White Man” Speculates About Racism and Prejudice

The central theme of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (Riverhead Books) is straightforward: race is a construct. In this highly anticipated novel from the author of the bestselling Exit West, the main character Anders is distressed when his skin suddenly changes to a deep, unmistakable shade of brown. He…

Michael FerryAugust 9, 2022

Thrillers

“Spychip Armageddon:” NOW May Be the End of the World

"Captivation from the initial capital letter in Chapter One to the final period. A fictional journey that begs the question, 'could this be real?' Ray Perkins has a visual way with words like no other.” — Wayne Warner, Nashville recording artist and author of Backstage Nashville —∞— “The Spychip protocol…

Chelsea CicconeJune 17, 2020

Fiction

Daughter Answers Father’s War Letters with a Novel

I was standing at my desk in front of a lamp, and when I tipped the envelope to slide out its contents, one of the first things that came out was a color slide photograph. I held it to the light. A young shirtless man, on a beach with the…

Siobhan AdcockJune 14, 2019