The year is 1985. Britain is silent. Only one woman remains alive, survivor of a pandemic carried by poisonous gas. That novel was written in 1936.
Woman Alive by Susan Ertz, introduced by TV presenter Graham Norton, is among the March 2026 releases arriving alongside seven other science fiction titles — a forgotten piece of speculative fiction returning to shelves nearly nine decades after it first appeared.
The month’s most anticipated release, according to the report, is likely Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the latest entry in his Children of Time series. Scientist Alis and a human-sized mantis shrimp named Cato must investigate a distant planet where a terraforming team, centuries prior, created something terrible. Missing crew members are the immediate problem. Whatever caused them to go missing is presumably worse.
Space leviathans and the void
Alexis Hall takes Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and moves it off Earth entirely. In Hell’s Heart, Earth is dead. Humanity survives under domes on deadly planets, and those domes are fuelled by cerebrospinal fluid harvested from gargantuan space monsters. The protagonist hunts the greatest of them. Hall commits fully to the premise.
Damien Ober, one of the writers behind the Netflix series The OA, builds his own cosmology in Voidverse. His void is not empty — it contains vertically stacked floating rocks, some magnetic, some burning with eternal flame, some defying physical laws entirely. A character known only as The Sinker fled into that void as a child when a machine called The Construct destroyed her home. Half a lifetime later, The Construct is closing in again.
Memory, maggots, and Europa
Film director Neil Jordan — known for Interview with the Vampire and The Company of Wolves — makes his science fiction debut with The Library of Traumatic Memory, set in 2084. Librarian Christian Cartwright archives the world’s most painful memories. After his lover Isolde dies in a car crash, he resurrects her as a digital consciousness and uncovers a conspiracy with deep roots.
T. Kingfisher‘s Wolf Worm is positioned by its publisher as a title for fans of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Set in 1899 in the woods of North Carolina, scientific illustrator Sonia Wilson takes a job cataloguing insects for the reclusive Dr Halder — and finds he has been conducting entomological experiments involving parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh.
The month closes with Cecile Pin, whose debut Wandering Souls was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Celestial Lights, follows Ollie, born at the exact moment the Challenger shuttle fell in 1986, who grows up to become a renowned astronaut and departs on a 10-year mission to Europa. What waits for him on return, the announcement does not say.
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
