The opening page of Malka Older's new book says simply, "There are other ways to live." That idea carries through so many of this year's best science-fiction books, which are full of questions about how we might live differently with one another, on our troubled planet or in the farthest reaches of space. Science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, is not predictive but descriptive, and what contemporary science-fiction authors are so often describing is a world that seems to be less and less built for humans to thrive in. We are still close enough to 2020 that we're reading books that have their roots in that particularly tumultuous year—roots that dig deep into surveillance, capitalism, protest, inequity, and failures to learn from the past.
But there are other worlds, other ways to thrive—and other ways to replicate humanity's worst failings, too. This year's best books don't shy away from who we've been and who we are, but they also brim with a fierce curiosity...
