The most anticipated science fiction and fantasy books to be released in October 2022 according to members of Goodreads

Goodreads recently revealed the most anticipated science fiction and fantasy books for October 2022 according to its members. What are you looking forward to reading this month?

• The paradox of the Atlas

  • By Olivie Blake

  • Publication date: October 25th

Six wizards had the opportunity of a lifetime.

Five are now members of the Society.

Two roads lay before them.

Everyone has to choose a side.

Alliances will be tested, hearts will be broken, and the Alexandrian Society will be revealed for what it is: a secret society with raw power that changes the world, led by a man whose plans to change life as we know it are already under control way.

• Girl Poster

  • By Veronica Roth

  • Release date: October 18

WHAT IS RIGHT IS RIGHT.

Sonya Kantor knows this slogan: she has lived with it for most of her life. For decades, everyone in the Seattle-Portland megacity lived under it, in addition to constant surveillance in the form of Insight, an eye implant that tracked every word and every action, rewarding or punishing with a rigid moral code set by the Delegation.

Then there was a revolution. The delegation fell. Its most valuable members were locked up in the Aperture, a prison on the outskirts of the city. And everyone else, now free from Insight monitoring, went on with their lives.

Sonya, the former Delegation poster girl, was jailed for ten years when an old enemy reached out to her with a deal: find a missing girl who has been stolen from her parents by the old regime and earn her freedom. The path Sonya takes to find the little girl will lead her through an unknown and twisted post-Delegation world, where she finds herself delving deeper into her past and the dark secrets of her family than she ever wanted.

With crisp prose, Poster Girl is a disturbing dystopian mystery that explores the expanding role of surveillance over society, an inevitable reality that we all too easily embrace.

• Eternity Station

  • By Mur Lafferty

  • Release date: 4th October

From small idyllic towns to claustrophobic cityscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly involved in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory has the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first, her new existence is peacefully quiet … and markedly homicide-free.

But when the station agrees to welcome additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives and the aliens and humans have started dying, the station is in danger. Stuck in the middle of an extraterrestrial mystery, and wondering how the hell keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory must solve the crime – and fast – or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board …

• In the Riverlands

  • By Nghi Vo

  • Publication date: October 25th

Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the Riverlands to record the stories of the infamous nearly immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the way to Betony Docks, they meet a couple of young women far from home and an elderly couple who are more than they seem. As Chih rushes headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves much more entangled in the history of the Riverlands than they expected to be.

Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih faces old legends and new dangers alike as she learns that every story – beautiful, ugly, kind or cruel – has more than one face.

• Self-portrait with nothing

  • By Aimee Pokwatka

  • Release date: October 18

If a picture paints a thousand worlds …

Abandoned as a child on the local vet’s porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers and is now married to stable and supportive Ike at 36. She has never told anyone that she at fifteen discovered the identity of her biological mother.

This is because his birth mother is Ula Frost, a lone painter famous for outrageous claims that her portraits evoke the doppelgangers of their subjects from parallel universes.

Researching the rumors, Pepper couldn’t help but wonder:

Was there a parallel universe in which she was more confident, more fulfilled, more able to accept love?

A universe where Ula decided she was worth keeping?

A universe where Ula’s rejection still didn’t hurt too much to share?

Sometimes living our best life means embracing the imperfect one we already have …

• Daughter of darkness

  • By Terry Brooks

  • Release date: 4th October

It’s been two years since Auris escaped from the sinister Goblin prison and learned of her legacy as a Fae. She is now happily associated with her lover Fae Harrow and deeply attached to her new family. Everything seems to be going perfectly until, somehow, the Goblin attacks start again. Someone, it seems, has not forgotten that Auris exists and seems determined to recover it … but who? And why?

As Auris begins to delve deeper into the mystery, old friends and new enemies appear, and Auris begins to realize that his still shrouded past must contain the answers he needs. But even she doesn’t suspect how far down the rabbit hole she is about to go until Harrow is caught and an impossible ransom note is issued. Then, with two new companions at her side, Auris must attempt to unravel the remaining secrets of her past. Because if she can’t, she’ll never see Harrow alive again.

• Through the sand

  • By Hugh Howey

  • Release date: 4th October

The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes, a land of howling wind and hellish sand.

In this sterile home, the Conner brothers, Rob, Palmer and Violet carve out a future every day. They live in the shadow of their father and older sister, Vic, two of the greatest sand divers who have ever scoured the depths of the desert. But these branches of their family tree have long since disappeared, disappeared into the wastelands beyond, leaving younger siblings scratching in the dust, hoping for a better life.

On the other side of No Man’s Land, Anya was born alongside the abundant mines knowing that her prospects would be to marry, have a family and work in the ore, in the service of the Eastern Empire. But when an atomic bomb dropped by a stranger destroys most of her city, killing all of her friends and her community, she follows her father into a strange land of dunes to avenge their enemies.

• The Oracle of Marracoor

  • By Gregorio Maguire

  • Release date: 11 October

The Oracle of Maracoor, the second in the trilogy titled Another Day, continues the story of Elphaba’s green-skinned niece, Rain. That strange land, Maracoor, across the ocean from Oz, is under siege by an invading army. In the chaos, Rain and Cossy, a criminal child, break out of prison. Aided by some flying monkeys, they struggle to escape the city before it falls under siege. Their arrest officer, Lucikles, also retreats with his family to a highland redoubt. But security eludes everyone. Chaos resonates over them in the form of warriors, refugees and brigands. The very fabric of reality loosens, freeing the creatures of myth and legend: huge blue wolves, harpies and giants made of the landscape itself.

Following secrets known only to the most influential members of the royal court, Rain and her companions hunt down the legendary Oracle of Maracoor for guidance and riddles. Rain must recover her forgotten past if she is to consider going home. Cossy, the ten-year-old boy convicted of murder, must go invisible to avoid being arrested again. Meanwhile, the Fist of Mara, an arcane artifact that renders everything around sterile, pounds against human lives. If the lonely Oracle were to pass down a prophecy, could the evil and desperate years promise another day, a less dangerous one?

• The escort man

  • By Mary Robinette Kowal

  • Release date: 11 October

Tesla Crane, a brilliant inventor and heiress, is on his honeymoon on an interplanetary spaceship, cruising between the Moon and Mars. He is traveling undercover and enjoying his anonymity of him. Then someone gets murdered and the purulent assholes running security have the audacity to arrest their spouse. Armed with jokes, martinis, and her little service dog, Tesla is determined to solve the crime so the newlyweds can joke back and stop the real killer from striking again.

• The mountain in the sea

  • By Ray Nayler

  • Release date: October

Humanity discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture and engages in a high-risk global competition to dominate the future.

Rumors begin to spread about a hyperintelligent and dangerous species of octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching the intelligence of cephalopods, will do whatever it takes to be able to study them.

The transnational tech company DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao archipelago, where octopuses have been discovered, far from the world. Doctor Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the islands: a battle-scarred security officer and the world’s first android.

Octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: Anyone who can take advantage of the octopuses’ advances has great fortunes, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces greater than DIANIMA approach to take over the octopuses.

But no one has asked the octopuses yet what they think. And what they could do about it.

A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humanity’s legacy.