Positive Obsession, by Susana M. Morris (Amistad). This nimble biography examines the life of the legendary science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose works, such as “Parable of the Sower,” often articulated unsettling visions of social collapse. Born in California in 1947 to a domestic worker and a veteran, Butler found escape in sci-fi books as a child. As Morris shows, Butler’s stories, which reckoned with chattel slavery, climate catastrophe, and fascism, were as deeply attuned to West African culture and myth as they were to the American civil-rights movement. Yet Morris contends that Butler’s stories “were not nihilistic predictions but a sort of love offering for readers to receive and be changed by.”
Everything Evolves, by Mark Vellend (Princeton). In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a “generalized evolutionary theory” to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding “how everything came to be.” Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which “new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around” and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living things, Vellend finds this dynamic at work in the development of violins and typewriters, in the technologies undergirding ChatGPT, and in the spread of cultural values like individualism.
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Pariah, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf). The protagonist of this audaciously spoofy spy novel is Hal Knight, a comedian who has resigned in disgrace from his other job, as a Democratic congressman, after a video depicting him insulting an actress went viral. Hal is hiding out on a Caribbean island when the C.I.A. asks him to accept an invitation for an official visit to Bolrovia, a fictional Eastern European country whose autocratic President is a fan of his. In exchange for gathering intel, Hal is promised a Stateside image rehabilitation—presuming that he makes it out alive. Baked into the novel’s high comedy is an awareness of the thin line between politics and show business; Hal sees his assignment as “24/7 improv, and with a less forgiving audience.”
Bonding, by Mariel Franklin (FSG Originals). In this stark, cynical début novel, an Englishwoman in her thirties becomes entangled with a man working in drug marketing just as her controlling ex-girlfriend—now the founder of a nominally “ethical” dating app—reënters her life. Despite the book’s thinly drawn cast and its heavy-handed staging of the compromises involved in social platforms and pharmaceutical companies, Franklin’s novel expresses a compelling ambivalence about twenty-first-century experience, in which freedom results in atomization. As the protagonist muses, the dissolution of “communally enforced” conservative values has left behind a sea of people “like me: floundering, mostly on my own, bombarded with ads” for goods, substances, and experiences that may “ward off the realization that no one had any idea how to live.”
