August, in review: Empires, time-travel startups, and four ends of the world. Forty new releases. 14 worth your time.

Theme one: Empire and war. She signs the deed to a planet with a cheap stylus while the wall camera hums. Katherine Fuller inherits a fortune large enough to buy an unclaimed world and intends to found a democracy inside a fascist galaxy state that refuses to let anyone go. Tor Books released The Infinite State on August fourth, opening Richard Swan’s Decurion Saga. Her husband held senior rank in the party governing that fascist galaxy. He died wealthy enough to leave her an unclaimed planet, and she means to put a democracy on it in secret. Swan built his name on the Empire of the Wolf fantasy trilogy, and he carried a lawyer’s eye across. Administration is what binds this together. Ration rolls, transit permits, committee minutes that keep a galaxy obedient. Beside Katherine run two further threads. Fame curdles into fear for a hypersled celebrity, and a state investigator has stopped pretending. Grimdark Magazine called it a tour de force. Anybody wanting a single politically angry epic should choose this. Just keep in mind that this is the launching point for a larger series, so you are getting in on the ground floor of an unfolding saga.

Empires file their records in triplicate. Our next ship burns its logs and trusts nobody aboard. A scratched enamel mug rattles on the console of a refitted merchant hull. Miles Cameron’s Whalesong arrives from Saga Press on August fourth, third in his Arcana Imperii sequence. Marca Nbaro climbs the Directorate’s political ladder while the helm passes to Thor Stokel, retired, damaged, and captaining a trader. Suspicion is the engine here. Stokel doubts his crew, his sensors, and the erratic shipboard intelligence in his ear, so a port-to-port cargo route becomes sustained pressure. S-F-F World put both predecessors on its year-end lists and calls this installment tighter, ending on a cliffhanger. Begin at Artifact Space. Revelations fall flat without it.

Cameron’s crew guards a secret. Nadia Afifi’s historians publish theirs, then flee. What happens to you the day after you prove your own country was founded on a lie? Afifi answers in A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe, out from Flame Tree Press on August eleventh, following A Rebel’s History of Mars. Afifi’s historians travel into earlier eras to gather evidence. They publish what they find. Azad did exactly that, and Vitruvian Authorities have hunted him since. To push a placid society toward revolt, he throws in a space pirate running her own arithmetic. Everything written about this book comes round to Saadia. Mother of the man who founded this colony, proud of her son, she watches as she comes to understand what she raised. She fled a war fought over water and oil, and her compromises return in his face. Structure does the arguing, two eras cross-examining each other. Inheritance is the subject underneath, and how a founding legend hardens into a government.

Theme two, first contact at the threshold. Nothing on this list moves faster. Blackstone Publishing brings D. J. Molles and The Peace Child on August eleventh. Five years after the invasion, half of humanity has been killed, and the remainder is penned. Master Sergeant Sol Winters leads raids in a losing fight until a crash drops the alien Empress's daughter into his care. Officially, she is a peace hostage. Rival alien factions, collaborating humans, and old comrades all need her gone, leaving the hardest soldier alive on babysitting duty. Narration comes in snarky first person, often breaking the fourth wall. Your tolerance decides much. Critics single out the room Molles leaves for grief between the firefights. Listeners who like propulsion with a pulse beneath it should begin here.

Theme three, time travel for hire. And here is the book that argues against everything said so far, because nothing in it believes itself permanent. Handwritten complaint slips sit between the chapters, each insisting this whole operation must be virtual reality. Berkley carries Jaclyn Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners on August fourth. An unmarked shopfront in Sydney sells visits to any era of history, with coffee and pastries on arrival, under a rule that the present cannot be altered. Anna, Teddy and Jade carry it. Anna is offered a job there and glimpses a shape for her own happiness. Teddy is a customer trying to make sense of a marriage that collapsed. Jade despises the agency for selling false hope. Moriarty works largely via email and text messages, and the complaint slips draw the most comments. Book’d Out named the real subject well: the choices we make, and the slow business of accepting that yesterday stays where it is. People, Goodreads, and BuzzFeed all tipped it for summer. Close the covers, and that handwriting is what stays with you.

Same product, colder showroom. Pan Macmillan releases Time to Burn on August fourth, written by the husband-and-wife duo Ellery Lloyd. Tempus Tours sells very rich clients a curated look at history, and its owner hires documentary maker Phoebe Hunt to film the operation. Day one, a party returns from London in nineteen forty-one, bloodied, missing a traveler Phoebe recognizes from her father’s burned commune. Glitchers is the idea most often quoted: people who carry a reality that no longer happened. Crimespree Magazine praised the ending and raised a fair caveat I will pass along: You cannot solve this ahead of it, because the page never hands you quite enough to play detective. Note that Harper publishes the US edition.

Theme four: minds displaced. Who owns the description of a place, those living in it or those writing it down? Fairwood Press has Carolyn Ives Gilman’s Testament of Leaves on August 18. On the planet Hant, a linguist lies dead in a thicket, and Inscrutinator Shameesh Kulkarni draws the case in a settlement where nobody will speak to him. Not the prospectors chasing mineral wealth. Not the archaeologists rebuilding a ruined city. Certainly not the indigenous speakers whose language she was recording. Only two witnesses cooperate: a digital replica of the victim, and the octopod who kept her company. Gilman wanted to write a coral reef, so she moved an ocean onto dry land, and tubeworms and jellyfish now share air with human houses. By her own account, the reef is scenery and the argument is conquest and cultural memory. Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominated, at novella length. Readers with an appetite for anthropology should clear an evening.

One artificial witness settled that inquiry. Twelve of them wait here, spanning decades. Jacket copy promises a greatest-hits robot sampler. Arranged in order of publication, The Book of Bots becomes a record of a field changing its mind. Fairwood Press again, August 18, twelve stories drawn from thirty years of James Patrick Kelly. Michael Swanwick, reviewing for Locus, makes the case for reading front to back. In the first story, a caretaker bot impersonates a woman’s childhood self, and that machine serves purely as a device. By the closing piece, a robotics professor inspects models he is sure are empty, and the reader gets there long before he does. Framing essays bracket it. Locus magazine says: buy, read, admire. Moral standing is what the ordering exposes, and these bots acquired it fast.

Theme five, hushed endings of the world. C. A. Fletcher wrote A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, a word-of-mouth hit about loyalty in an emptied Britain. He has gone home to that ground. Orbit publishes The Two of Us at the End of the World on August 18, and states plainly that either volume serves as an entry, spoiling neither. Two centuries separate the strands. Cat is the only person Mouse has known, the girl who carried the boy inland from a sickness rising out of the sea. Strangers arrive with a choice attached. Earlier, a couple falling in love discover they are among the few able to conceive, which means the authorities discover it too. Fletcher’s version of the end is an unraveling of the future, no bomb and no impact, which is a harder thing to picture than either, pacing warning, honestly given. Readers report a middle that drags, and the same voices say the final tenth is where patience gets paid.

Another countdown, another mismatched pair, and this deadline is on the calendar. Cleanest question of the month, asked by the funniest entry on the list. An asteroid will arrive in a little over two months. Twenty-three-year-old Haru is still failing her driving test when she opens her boot and finds a stabbed woman inside. Her instructor turns out to be an ex-police officer with ferocious commitment to justice. Together they chase the killer. What is justice for, when there is no future left to protect, and no sentence outlasts the sky? Readers describe it as part puzzle, part road trip. Caveat, honestly flagged: no substantial English review exists yet, so this rests on publisher material and reader reports. Murder at the End of the World, by Akane Araki, Pushkin Vertigo, August fourth, translated by Jesse Kirkwood.

Haru has weeks. Haewon has a sealed perimeter and no deadline at all. Kim Bo-young is the most acclaimed science fiction writer working in Korea, and Bong Joon Ho has called her fiction a breathtaking piece of cinematic art. Tor Nightfire released A Plagued Sea on August eleventh, translated by Sophie Bowman. Mu-young is a bodyguard traveling to the seaside village of Haewon with her niece when a disaster alert appears on her phone. She boards the train anyway. Time passes. Earthquake damage has unsealed an ancient plague, government orders have sealed Haewon behind a rusted quarantine fence, and the infected are turning into something the water recognizes. The niece is dead. Hunting neighbors who try to flee is all that remains for her. Know your Lovecraft, and a fishing village already sounds the chord. Roughly a hundred pages, published in Korean in twenty twenty, and Grimdark Magazine finished it in two sittings. When wind returns to that fence, you feel what it holds out and what it holds in.

Theme six: the border where science fiction brushes horror. Two quick entries first. Soft Skull Press sends Peter Rock’s Makeshift out on August 25. Rock wrote My Abandonment, filmed as Leave No Trace. Three sisters on a rock-bound island fish their cove and retell half-remembered tales. You read this for mood and language, knowing the ending withholds tidy answers.

In Them, by W. H. Chizmar, classified matter transport works, and something living rides home. Then a container overturns on a New England highway, and lights go out for good. Long afterward an unnamed walker moves north by night. Absence does the work. Cemetery Dance praises the dread Chizmar wrings from empty ground. Gallery Books, August 11, filed as horror.

Chizmar chose that shelf deliberately. August’s biggest name chose the same aisle. Adrian Tchaikovsky on a spine promises spiders and starships. Preaching to the Choir gives you candles, corridors, and a guest-room door that will not latch. Tantor issues the United States audiobook on August twelfth, read by Emma Newman, with Solaris handling print at 176 pages. Elena Mendes knew her boyfriend’s family had old money. Ross is summoned to Enderby, a family seat built as a monastery centuries before his country existed, for a gathering held once a generation. Partners are excluded. Ross asks her along anyway, and there are things in that house and worse ones under the trees. Tar Vol On, the book review we referenced, used Get Out as its comparison, trading race for class, with the boyfriend genuinely blind to what he walks her into. Wealthy families protecting their grip is the real material, and Tchaikovsky buries all of it in the plot. That same critic rates this near the top of the Terrible Worlds stack, below Ogres, so start there.