October sci-fi gets weird

October 2026 brings five major sci-fi releases featuring alternate realities, time travel complications, and humanity as the aliens. Familiar worlds return alongside bold new directions from acclaimed authors.

Roth returns to Divergent

Veronica Roth launches a new Divergent series with The Sixth Faction, an alternate-universe story asking what happens if Beatrice Prior makes a different choice at the Choosing Ceremony.

Roth heals her relationship

After years of distance from Divergent, Roth attended Taylor Swift's Eras Tour and felt inspired to reclaim joy in her earlier work. She wanted to appreciate the 24-year-old author she had been.

“I would love to find a way to experience joy associated with this series again.”

Niffenegger revisits Time Traveler

More than 20 years after The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger returns with Life Out of Order, centering on Alba, the daughter who inherited her father's uncontrollable time-travel ability.

Alba navigates dystopian future

Alba is a gifted violinist building a life with Zach while witnessing pieces of the future she cannot change. Her travels span riot-torn Chicago and a virtual museum of lost memories.

Niffenegger drew from real fears

Niffenegger began writing Life Out of Order in 2012, when dystopian elements seemed remote. By the time she finished, the real world had begun resembling her fictional one more closely than she wished.

Newitz flips first contact

In A Wall Is Also a Road, Annalee Newitz makes humanity the aliens. Gardenpath, a slime mold from an ancient civilization, discovers Earth and encounters Murtis, a woman in ancient Pompeii.

Pompeii inspired Newitz's vision

Newitz researched Pompeii's lupanar, or brothel, including graffiti written by sex workers. One inscription about Murtis boasting of her powers sparked the idea for this first-contact story.

North tangles with time

Claire North's As We Fall Through Time follows Cal, a time traveler who tries to save a soldier he loves during the French Revolution, only to create cascading paradoxes across history.

Paradoxes fracture reality

As paradoxes accumulate, Fadimatu arrives in a 2018 museum only to discover her own mummified corpse. People separated by centuries must solve a paradox that has already shattered the future.

Chambers launches new duology

Hugo Award winner Becky Chambers debuts As You Wake, Break the Shell, a new sci-fi duology set on Fortune, a resource-poor colony planet where survival is difficult.

Signy bends medical rules

Signy is a reclusive botanist who uses bio-printing to create medicines in her plant shop, sometimes breaking rules to help people the colony's medical system has abandoned.

Cora bonds with rorqual

Cora is a rorqual pilot, one of the rare people who can navigate enormous living creatures linking settlements. Her bond with Colibri deepens as she develops mindbleed, losing the line between her mind and the alien's.

Two women, two timelines

Told across alternating timelines, the novel follows Signy and Cora as they seek each other out, putting both lives at risk while exploring what people owe one another.

Chambers' most personal work

Chambers calls As You Wake her most personal novel yet, written through two characters across two timelines and two different worlds, balancing space adventure with intimate romance.

“It's maybe the most personal thing I've written yet.”