To help bookstores and libraries share books published by independent literary presses, we’ve put together this roundup of 15 books with speculative and science-fictional elements.
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard
Milkweed Editions | January 28, 2025
Distributer: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781571311481
This novel “tackles the most pressing issues of our time—from AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions.”
Love & Murder by Katie Christine Bishop
Black Heron Press | August 5, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9781936364466
This animal fable is “a treatise on nature of humanity (as portrayed by cats) under the stress of environmental degradation.”
American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive Press | May 7, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781628975185
American Abductions “opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship.”
Translated from the Korean by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar
Kaya Press | July 15, 2025
Distributor: Distributed Art Publishers
ISBN: 9781935717119
In this novel told as a series of interlinked stories, “an ordinary South Korean high school classroom becomes ground zero for the discovery of a radical new source of energy: children capable of conducting and amplifying the telepathic and telekinetic powers of those around them.”
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
Akashic Books | April 18, 2023
Distributor: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9781636141794
In these fourteen stories, “Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism.”
Translated from the French by Pablo Strauss
Coach House Books | May 20, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781552454992
Horsefly is “a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.”
Raven Chronicles Press | September 5, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9798991403214
According to Charles Tung, “FUTURE X explores a mash-up of genres best suited to engage realistically and speculatively the challenges of storytelling at a time of species-level existential danger.”
The Glass Garden by Jessica Lévai
Lanternfish Press | May 13, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781941360873
According to Charlie Allison, this novella about two sisters exploring a discovery on a distant exoplanet is “lush botanic space horror.”
SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ayin Press/Aora | September 2, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781961814264
This series of interrelated works “seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.”
Acre Books | April 19, 2024
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781946724717
In this debut novel, “It’s 1984, and the invisible mists are falling, mists that cause people to slip into dreamless slumber—sleeps from which most, but not all, awaken.”
Quantum Nightmares: A Collection of Short Stories by Jose M. Rodriguez
Catalyst Press/Flare Books | October 7, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781963511215
This collection of dystopian short stories “contains the nuggets of bizarre psychological truth that help explain today’s divisive United States, where myth collides with belief and fact is hard to find.”
The Third Temple by Yishai Sarid
Translated from the by Yardenne Greenspan
Restless Books | November 26, 2024
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781632063892
Set in a near-future Jerusalem, this novel “raises both theological and political questions, and offers an increasingly realistic vision of the future of the Middle East.”
Tupelo Press | June 1, 2025
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961209268
This novel “enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism.”
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher
Neon Hemlock Press | August 20, 2024
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9781952086427
In these linked stories set on the planet Nakharat, “stability depends on giving each machine a human conscience—but the humans are not volunteers.”
Tick… Tick… Tick… by Steve Zettler
Vine Leaves Press | March 25, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9783988321398
“The Earth is spiraling toward catastrophic ruin” in this novel, “and Harlan is the one person capable of preserving humanity.”
