Jason Heller

The British Columbian synth band conjures breathtaking vistas, exotic flora and meteorological phenomena on its new album.

In Mur Lafferty's latest, six crewmembers wake up to horror on a malfunctioning spaceship — the artificial gravity is gone, and blood floats in the air. It's up to them to find out what happened.

Many journeys and attempts to commune with nature compelled Mauro Remiddi to make Microclimate. If the album's hushed, lush grandeur is any indication, that connection was a profound one.

The prolific singer, songwriter and bandleader balances confined chaos and riotous pop hooks on his newest self-titled album.

Carrie Vaughn — known for her Kitty Norville urban fantasies — ventures offworld with Martians Abroad, a high-school adventure that pays fun, thoughtful homage to Robert Heinlein's "juveniles."

Katie Stelmanis' music questions, confronts and uplifts without scaremongering or sugarcoating. In an age of doom and gloom, it's a radical approach.

It's been 23 years since Tad Williams wrapped up his epic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series. Now, he returns to the land of Osten Ard in a brief gem of a story that sets up a fresh epic to follow.

Longtime Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli's new book lays out what he calls the "Key Evolutionary Stages" in the development of the medium — and the constant conversation we're having with it.

An unexpected Grammy nominee earlier this year, the Cape Cod band fine-tunes its retro-grunge attack into something far more dynamic, soulful and alluring.

Rachel Neumeier's novel is classic high fantasy: A prince and princess must work together to save their kingdom. It's not new territory, but it is a richly imagined world worth spending time in.

The duo's fourth album is a testament to the power of a celebration gone weird, with chopped-up and resequenced hooks working as the raw material for a scathing, fragmentary kind of pop.

Kurt Wagner's ambition has taken a hard left on the Nashville group's new album, which ditches Lambchop's typical organic feel for something far more progressive.

The My Morning Jacket frontman adopts the role of gravel-voiced doomsayer in a new solo album that takes grim foreboding and makes it funky.

T.C. Boyle's new novel is ripped from the headlines ... of 1993. It follows the misadventures of a group of scientists conducting experiments in a hermetically sealed, Biosphere 2-like environment.

Writer Benjamin Percy has been on both sides of the divide between literary and genre fiction, and Thrill Me is both a meditation on the writing life and a passionate argument against that divide.

The British band's third full-length is proof of just how vivid and inviting psychedelic music can be in the 21st century.

Jade Chang's debut novel follows former cosmetics magnate Charles Wang, whose business empire has collapsed, as he herds his fractious family on a cross-country roadtrip to their new home.

Chinese author Cixin Liu caps his Hugo Award-winning Remembrance of Earth's Past series with an intricately structured, immensely complex tale of a rocket scientist caught in a human-alien conflict.

The inspired Head Carrier reaffirms all the spark, wit and weirdness, tempered by the occasional burst of emotional rawness, that made people fall in love with the Pixies in the first place.

Alexander Weinstein's debut story collection is a harrowing vision of the near future as a place of both technological wonder and dysfunction — and a nuanced look at where humanity might be headed.