In science fiction, what counts as plausible or as serious? What comes across as silly—and what is just outlandish enough to be believable? Your views on these questions depend on your ideas about the future. We live in an era of prestige sci-fi, in which many writers aim for seriousness, and yet seriousness can be a kind of constraint, since the world is so often absurd. “This Month in History” is from an earlier, looser, raunchier, zanier sci-fi era. The genre’s longest-running joke, it raises an unsettling possibility: What if pulpy absurdity is a good way to predict the future?
Francis Spufford’s fabulous third novel is a piece of pulp fiction disguised as speculative history, or possibly vice versa: the tale plays both sides and switches lanes in a blur. It is set in an alternative 1920s America that is recognisable at the edges and unfamiliar at its core, centred on a First Nations people who have avoided the worst effects of manifest destiny to maintain a toehold of power in the febrile midwest. Where Golden Hill, Spufford’s riotous 2016 bestseller, took its lead from the writings of Henry and Sarah Fielding to paint a portrait of nascent 18th-century New York, Cahokia Jazz nods to the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It rattles through the urban jungle in the manner of a fast-paced dimestore thriller.
Can you return to the person you once were? Can any of us ever truly go home again? The Motherthing author Ainslie Hogarth’s second novel, “Normal Women,” roots around this trope of going back — to your old town and your old self — and how geography, psychology and maternity can alter your very identity.