Otherland Book Recommendations: Science Fiction Summer 2026

Otherland, 02.07.2026

Regularly we bring you book recommendations from the Otherland Bookshop Berlin. And this time we have once again recommendations in English. Since the English book market is so much bigger than the German, not every book can be translated. This article is for those of you who also read in English.

If you want to read more recommendations you can subscribe to the Otherland Newsletter or read it online here.

By the way, on Saturday, July the 4th the Otherland presents an evening with Alastair Reynolds und Peter F. Hamilton at the Wasserturm in Berlin. Here you will find more information about the location and time.

Robert Sheckley | Untouched By Human Hands

Penguin Books UK: €14.5

A world of very argumentative life forms debates the small bipedal creatures that arrive from the sky in a shiny metal tube. A clique of cultists get turned around in a backwater New Jersey town. Form-shifting invaders from the far reaches of space attempt to infiltrate Earth. Two cosmonauts search for something to eat on an abandoned designer planet. A space ship is crewed by body parts. Take off your boots, fasten the airlock and step in to the wonderfully bizarre mind of Robert Sheckley.

We often get asked for comedy-sci-fi crossovers, and these tales are the perfect mix of classic space opera and unexpected humour. There is also a dark comedy to Sheckley’s creations, and several fictional scenarios that hit close to home. “Cost of Living” is a brutal little fable about a future “utopia” where humans live lives of luxury by passing on debt to their children and their children’s children. “Watchbird” is about revolutionary new policing tech, and feels like a cautionary tale on the perils of AI weaponry, and the myriad ways for machines to read human desires. My favourite of the bunch, “Seventh Victim”, imagines a USA where the right to bear arms has evolved into a national sport: participants take it in turns to hunt and be hunted in state-sanctioned murder. (It is funnier than it sounds.) For anyone who is a Douglas Adams fan, or enjoys Ray Bradbury’s short stories, or has already read Sheckley’s 1968 classic Dimension of Miracles - worth it for the talking dinosaurs alone.

[Tom]

Cory Doctorow | Eastern Standard Tribe

Tor: €22 

“Would you rather be smart or happy?”

Art Berry was born to argue. As an interface designer, Art spends his days convincing folk on the best way to oversee data flow and coming up with enticing solutions for consumers. He lives in London, but operates in US east coast time as part of an online collective stretching around the world: the Eastern Standard Tribe. In the modern globalised cyberworld nations mean nothing, borders mean nothing - your family are those up at the same time as you, wherever they live. Art has a fine operation as an industrial saboteur for the EST, selling crummy ideas to other time zones packaged up as sound consultancy. His teammates are impressed. But in a world without borders your teammates are not always to be trusted. Nothing is as it seems: not happiness, not money, not even love.

Which might explain why Art is stuck on the roof of a Boston insane asylum with a pencil up his nose, arguing with himself about homebrew lobotomies.

For anyone who has read Enshittification and is wondering what the non-fiction works are like, Doctorow’s starter novels have aged remarkably well and his predictions about our cyberpunk present are subtly prescient. Eastern Standard Tribe sells itself as a comedy of errors - a mishmash of loyalty, sex, madness, and music swapping, but it reads like a narrative essay on the perils of global thinking and “smart” solutions: futuristic philosophies that make Franz Kafka’s castle seem like a reasonably run institution. Art is a pleasure to spend time with - lovingly flawed and too smart (and/or naive) for his own good. There is also a foreboding realism to the whole outfit; as Bruce Sterling wrote, there are plenty of writers who happily pen books on the cyberworld, but “Cory Doctorow is a native.” Can we make him Head Advisor of the Future, please? I can think of some arguments for.

[Tom]

Amal El-Mohtar | Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories

Quercus Publishing: €23.5

“I am a shape-shifter. Most people are. We change our shapes day on day, replace cells, grow muscles and fat, shed hair, grow it back lighter, darker. Some of us do it faster, is all—some of us have specialities…”

Hot off the back of The River Has Roots and her original sci-fi novel This is How You Lose The Time War (co-authored with Max Gladstone), Amal El-Mohtar returns with an electric set of short stories written between 2008 and 2023. This collection is a love letter to the unseen and unwanted in modern society—from the legendary women of Welsh myth to modern students disowned by their families for who they love, or displaced by relentless missile attacks against their homeland. Trans rights, queer culture, contemporary feminism, basically everything that the far-right hates. El-Mohtar’s collection rings with the will to stand up against racism, sexism, fascism and all the -isms in between.

There is such an artistic scope here. It is seriously impressive. Glaswegian cabarets made the emotional haunt of form-shifting polyamorous aliens. Primary school students fleeing Gaza to find meaning in a country owl sanctuary. Scientists addicted to interplanetary diamonds with the ability to teleport. Dream weavers. Benevolent witches. Fairy-tale-smashing romances. El-Mohtar slips from fantasy to science fiction, from magic realism to cold, hard realism, as easy as throwing on a new jacket. And she champions those in real need of a champion right now. Seasons of Glass and Iron has several tales worth reading and rereading.

[Tom]

Rebecca Thorne | Moss'd In Space

Pan Macmillan: €21

Torian has been saving up through tough jobs and hardships for 10 years now, and she's finally gathered the amount to buy her own spaceship.

Her sister's time is running out: she's been coughing blood and needs some clean planetside air if she wants to survive. Torian made it her personal quest. The sum might be astronomic to carry around, but it really isn't much when it comes to buying a ship. In fact, the only one she can afford is a tiny crappy alien one. Not the kind you'd consider reliable to keep you alive in space. It's so old it's now completely covered in moss... but wait, the moss is sentient?! Aaand it has serious abandonment issues. It will not tolerate being left by another owner, Torian better be loyal.

I had a lovely time following Moss, the (self-described) "delightful conversationalist" life support system of the Destiny Destitute (officially registered as the Traitor), and her security-engineer-almost-pilot human Torian. I have a special place in my heart for books that feel like comfy animated shows; the ones full of colourful characters with very distinct things going on about them which makes it easy and fun to follow. Now, a lot of them have a feature/problem that I call "cardboard decorum": our main focus is the relationship between the characters and their development, which is often to the detriment of the world building. In my opinion Becky Chambers managed a great balance: a character-driven story in a well-built, coherent and interesting world (and that's why she's one of my favourite authors). But in the new wave she gave birth to, most of her spiritual offspring struggle with that, and Moss'd in Space is no exception. Too many logical corners cut short and I'll absolutely get bored, but I can tolerate a few. Rebecca Thorne passed my bar, but with little margin.

This story will please anyone searching for a cosy story in the lines of the Wayfarer and Murderbot series. Nothing groundbreaking there, but sometimes one simply needs a comforting shot of alien friendships and things going alright.

[Maé]

Jonathan Miles | Eradication

Quercus Publishing: €21

“Do you have any mental conditions you feel you should disclose.”

Floored by a personal tragedy and untethered from work and friends, former teacher Adi answers an unusual job advertisement in the newspaper: “Save the world.”

The post needs someone who can travel to the remote island of Santa Flora, and eliminate the invasive population of goats, which has annihilated the local flora and fauna and threatens the complete extinction of numerous rare species of reptile, bird, and plant. Six weeks in the middle of the Pacific hunting farm animals. It should be the break Adi needs. But instead, he comes to question not only the simplicity and safety of his work, but whether he is even truly alone on the island.

They say you should never trust a book by its cover, but that is grade A rubbish. I always judge books by their cover and this was love at first sight. It is compact, poetic, funny, realistic, thrilling, touching, and intellectual - any of the above, whenever it wants to be. I had glimpses of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the epic confrontation of individual and nature, only with a radically different message at heart. It is a book that feels very human, is about humans, and about all the critters who have to exist alongside us. I have not come across Mr. Miles before, but clearly, I have to take a selection of his prose and retreat to an isolated island for a few weeks.

[Tom]