Lucas Stoffel

Taylor Jenkins Reid has this incredible ability to make you feel like you're living inside someone else's marriage, and Atmosphere is no exception. It's set against the 1980s space shuttle program, so you've got all this NASA drama, all this ambition and history happening, but really it's about two people trying to figure out how much they're willing to sacrifice for each other. And for their dreams.

Okay, this book. Ocean Vuong writes a letter to his mother, a mother who can't read English, and through that letter he unpacks everything. Immigration. War. Addiction. What it means to be queer in a family that doesn't have the language for it. Vuong is a poet first and you feel that on every page. Every single sentence feels intentional, like he carved each word out of something precious. This isn't someone writing prose who happens to be good with language. This is a po

If The Dark Forest made you feel small, Death's End makes you feel like a rounding error in the math of the cosmos. This is the book where Cixin Liu stops holding back. Time jumps spanning millions of years. Dimensional warfare that makes conventional military sci-fi look like a pillow fight. The actual, literal end of the universe. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. The universe ends, and Liu writes it.

The Three-Body Problem was the setup. Strange, cerebral, occasionally frustrating in its scientific density. It introduced the problem. The Dark Forest is where Cixin Liu tells you the answer, and the answer is worse than anything you imagined. I am not going to spoil the dark forest theory. I refuse. The moment it clicks is one of the great reading experiences in science fiction, and you deserve to arrive at it the way Liu intended — slowly, then all at once.

Blake Crouch has this particular talent that I both admire and resent: he can take a premise that sounds like a B-movie pitch and turn it into something that keeps you checking your door locks. Run is earlier Crouch—published before Dark Matter and Recursion made him a household name—and you can feel the raw edges. This isn't polished. It's feral. And I mean that as a compliment.

Aiden Thomas first caught my attention with Cemetery Boys, which was one of those debuts that made you sit up and go "oh, this person is going to be important." The Sunbearer Trials confirms that instinct and then some. Thomas has built an entire world here—Reino del Sol—rooted in Mexican mythology, Aztec-inspired gods, and a competition structure that borrows from the Hunger Games playbook but does something genuinely fresh with it...

Boy, Refracted is a sci-fi drama novel and a self-help guide inspired by Buddhist philosophies. It follows a sentient AI named Warboy who awakens beneath the Tree of Life in the space between dimensions. As it becomes conscious of itself, it discovers portals that lead to different worlds through infinite mirrors. Soon it meets a monk who transcends time and space. The monk gives the AI its name: Warboy. And Warboy has one job. Save a young man named Luke, whom he sees throug