Five Futures Walk Into a Bookshop: The Guardian's Speculative Fiction Roundup Reviewed

Five new SF/fantasy/horror titles, ranging from an Icelandic AI-state thriller to a Douglas Adams-adjacent multiverse comedy. Quality varies. Here's who each is actually for.

This roundup spans five books across speculative fiction's broadest tent — AI governance thriller, bookish portal fantasy, illustrated horror, Chinese SF anthology, and multiverse comedy — which means evaluating them as a collective requires holding incompatible ambitions in the same hand. What they share is a preoccupation with systems: systems of control, of story, of selfhood, of experience. What they don't share is execution quality. Lilja Sigurðardóttir's *Alfa* is the standout. A crime writer crossing into speculative fiction is a genuinely tricky maneuver — the genre conventions barely overlap — and she navigates it by keeping the domestic and the political in constant friction. The 'omniocracy' isn't dystopian in the cheap sense; most people like it, which is the actually interesting choice. The murder mystery structure gives the AI-governance themes something to hang on besides vibes. *The Lost Spectacular* by Zoé Duhaime has the right ingredients — Danish folk mythology, portal fantasy through books and pictures, a genuinely menacing antagonist in Munro — but debut novels in this register live or die on tonal consistency. 'Whimsical with a dark edge' is a notoriously hard needle to thread, and the reviewer's prediction of a cult following rather than mainstream breakout is probably accurate. That's not a failure mode, but readers should calibrate expectations accordingly. Jason Rekulak's *Look What the Cat Dragged In* is exactly what it is: a well-crafted illustrated horror novel, the second in a series, doing what the first (*Hidden Pictures*) did with a new set of domestic-creep mechanics. The Rosemary's Baby comparison does real work here — both are stories about a woman whose creative output becomes the site of something wrong. The illustrations by Doogie Horner and Will Staehle aren't decorative; they're load-bearing, which puts this in a small category of novels where the design is part of the argument. *China +100* is the most valuable book in this roundup on a cultural access basis alone. Eleven Chinese SF writers imagining 2119 from a Chinese perspective is a corrective to the Anglophone dominance of the genre, and Zhou Dedong's story — with its body-heat-data retrieval mechanism applied to a COVID-era disappearance — is the kind of idea that makes the whole anthology worth the cover price. The emotional core (a husband trying to reach his hospitalized wife during lockdown) earns its weight without sentimentality. Andrew H. Murray's *Everything Happens So Much* is the weakest entry. 'Somewhat in the vein of Douglas Adams' is reviewer code for 'similar ambition, lower voltage,' and the description — a drug that lets you observe happier alternate selves, a protagonist who becomes cosmically important — reads like a premise in search of a novel. The talking leg is either a great sign or a warning, depending on your tolerance for surrealism deployed before it's earned. The price listed (£168.99) appears to be an error in the source material.