Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

Published by Tordotcom on April 8, 2025

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is marketed as a companion to Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, a book that allows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Jordan Baker to provide a woman’s perspective on The Great Gatsby. Before I read Don’t Sleep with the Dead, I was unaware of its companionship with The Chosen and the Beautiful, a novel I didn’t read. That’s what I get for paying little attention to marketing materials when I choose books. I’m certain that a familiarity with the earlier work would have enhanced my incomplete understanding of this novella.

Nick Carraway is on “the wrong side of forty.” He’s living in New York City, working as a columnist at the Herald Tribune, and trying to put 1922 behind him. Jay Gatsby died that year but when Nick finds himself in an alley where gay men congregate, about to be stomped by the police, he believes he is rescued by Gatsby.

When Nick calls Jordan in Paris to tell her that he saw Gatsby, she’s not surprised. She tells him that the dead are coming back in France. “Old soldiers, mostly.” They can’t speak because their throats are blistered by mustard gas.

And then, as if Gatsby’s reincarnation isn’t sufficient, the story becomes strange. Nick tells a story about his grandfather’s brother, who came to America and was drafted into the Civil War. “In the two-room shack with the river roaring in the spring flood, Leith Carraway used his old Sheffield razor to loosen his face from his head and traded it for another.” Nick’s mother gives him a less glamorous explanation for his granduncle’s slashed face, but Nick believes “that was where it started, the Carraway belief that duty could be put off on someone else, and that if you only made the right sacrifice, spilled the right blood using the right name, that fate might be delayed or even distracted.”

We then learn that this Nick is also an imposter. Nick went to Canada when he was conscripted to fight in the first World War. A talented relative cut out a paper doll and turned it into a replacement Nick. The paper doll Nick went to war in Nick’s place. The original Nick died in a car accident shortly after the war ended and the paper Nick took over his life.

Strangeness abounds in the novella. Nick bargains with the devil because he wants to learn what happened to Gatsby in Hell. The devil sends him to a woman made of wax. And so on.

The devil alters its appearance at will and Nick’s granduncle is not the only character who swaps faces. “One night, drunk, I’d met March at the Morocco and he’d put on Gatsby’s face for me.” All this was a bit much for me, although I appreciated the imaginative take on Fitzgerald’s novel and the urgency with which the story is told. Still, unless wielded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I’m not a fan of magical realism.

I credit Vo for her creative and elegant prose style. Unfortunately, the novel makes so many references to events and characters in The Chosen and the Beautiful that I became quite lost. I can’t judge the story fairly as a companion to the earlier novel because I lack the necessary context. I'm reviewing it as a standalone work, perhaps unfairly, because that is how it is marketed. My guess is that readers who enjoyed The Chosen and the Beautiful will enjoy the companion novella. For other readers, I can only recommend reading The Chosen and the Beautiful first (if you’re a fan of magical realism) and, if you enjoy it, moving on to Don’t Sleep with the Dead to learn the rest of the story.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on March 25, 2025

John Scalzi usually displays his sense of humor in his science fiction novels. He’s churned out a bunch of science fiction comedies, the most successful being Redshirts. The stories tend to be amusing and Scalzi typically uses comedy to make a serious point. Even when he writes more serious novels (like Old Man’s War), he adds generous doses of humor. And he always remembers that the word “science” is in “science fiction” for a reason. Well, nearly always.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is another sf comedy. It has sufficient merit to earn a recommendation, but it’s also disappointing. I had the impression that Scalzi wrote himself into a corner as he milked laughs from his premise and couldn’t come up with a credible way to ground the story in science.

The premise is ridiculous. One day, the moon turns into cheese — or at least into an organic matter that has the characteristics of cheese. Not only does the moon transform, but so do space rocks displayed in museums and kept in NASA’s vaults.

Scalzi brings a fair amount of science to the project, explaining that the cheese moon needs to be physically larger than the old moon to retain the same amount of mass. Mess around with the moon’s mass and tides get thrown out of whack. But a larger-than-moon-size cheese must compress as it orbits the Earth, so Scalzi imagines the cheese moon erupting as it squirts water from its innards. This is all very sciency, as a reader would expect from Scalzi, but it dances around the question of how the moon changed into a sphere of cheese.

Scalzi explores how the moon’s transformation is greeted by politicians, the media, scientists, wealthy business leaders, members of the clergy, the movie industry, and others. In fact, each chapter tends to focus on new characters who are caught up in the moon crisis. A cheese-related sex scandal involving a congressman and a retired sex worker might be the strangest response.

A chunk of the cheese moon breaks off during an eruption and is projected to smack into the Earth in about two years, causing an extinction event. Some people decide it’s time to start executing their bucket list. Scalzi imagines that bankers will use AI to keep their banks running after all the tellers decide they don’t want to be working during their final days of existence.

The funniest bit involves a company that designed a moon lander for NASA. The company’s CEO is jealous of, and in competition with, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He makes an unlikely plan to take the lander on an unsanctioned mission to visit the cheese moon.

But back to the science. I wondered how Scalzi was going to pull this off, given the lack of any credible explanation for the moon’s sudden transformation into a cheesy mass. While at least one of his books flirts with Intelligent Design as a rational explanation of life on Earth, Scalzi is a scientist at heart. He nevertheless includes a preacher in the plot and gives the preacher a chance to encourage his parishioners to cling to their faith in times of trouble.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it disappointed me by failing to provide a definitive resolution of the mystery. Scalzi presents (but does not endorse) a theory, popularized on conspiracy websites, but the theory doesn’t explain how the moon rocks on Earth transformed. The silly premise and the absence of a legitimate (even if farfetched) explanation to support it undermines the novel as a work of science fiction, so maybe the book is best seen as a comedy fantasy sprinkled with bits of science. As a funny look at how people might respond to end times that are still a couple years distant, the story generates enough chuckles to make it a good beach read.

RECOMMENDED

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 8, 2025

Joe Mungo Reed brings a new perspective to post-apocalyptic fiction in Terrestrial History, a chilling story of global warming. There are elements of science fiction and of a technothriller in the plot, but Reed takes a broader look at the ways in which self-interest and egalitarian drives clash, often in very personal ways, as people work to cope with (or escape) an existential crisis.

The story jumps around in time to focus on family members in different generations. The novel begins in Scotland in 2025, when Hannah sees a boy in a spacesuit walking out of the sea. Hannah has been trying to solve the mystery of fusion but can’t quite design a reactor that works.

In the middle of the century, Hannah’s son Andrew runs for Parliament and then for the position of Scotland’s First Minister. By that point, climate change is making life difficult. A corporation called Tevat, founded by the billionaire Axel Faulk, is planning an excursion to Mars, where — assuming the planet can be terraformed — humanity may have a chance of survival after Earth becomes uninhabitable. Naturally, the passengers who sign up for the voyage are wealthy and powerful, although Tevat allows a couple of its employees to join the crew. Andrew’s opposition to Tevat is the key ideological driver of his decision to enter politics.

Andrew’s daughter Kedzie has taken up her grandmother’s hope of building a fusion reactor to provide clean energy. Lacking other options to fund her ideas, Kedzie goes to work for Tevat. There is tension between Andrew and Kedzie, since Andrew’s political career demands that he oppose Tevat and its unpopular plan to save only the rich and powerful. Some of the book’s strongest moments come when Andrew must decide whether to denounce his daughter after she agrees to join the mission to Mars. The pivotal scene could have been played for melodrama, but Reed lets the characters speak or repress their feelings in a way that feels natural and moving.

Later in the century, Kedzie is on Mars. Kedzie and her wife are the mothers of Roban. The Terrestrial Collapse has occurred. The colonists and the first generation of Mars-born children wonder whether anything remains of the Earth. The kids have pictures and videos so they know about oceans and birds and all the things their parents miss, but their knowledge is abstract. More than most post-apocalyptic stories of global warming, Mungo drives home the magnitude of the climate crisis by viewing it through the eyes of kids who — trapped inside buildings on a desolate planet — don’t understand the richness of their parents’ former life on Earth.

Roban has a sense of duty. “We are not just any children, but those living in the middle of the hourglass, some of the few thousands alive after the loss of so much humanity, amongst the few custodians of our species preparing the way for the Great Repopulation when this place is terraformed and when other habitable planets have been located.” Yet his sense of duty makes him wonder whether he might be able to change history and save the Earth.

Roban is assigned to an asteroid mining crew. He encounters a phenomenon that appears to change the nature of time. Later he takes advantage of the phenomenon to send himself back to 2025. The reader meets him in the first chapter when his great-grandmother sees him walking out of the sea. Roban wants to teach her how to build the reactor that her granddaughter will later create, and in so doing avoid the Terrestrial Collapse.

The possibility of undoing the harm to the Earth, of preventing the Terrestrial Collapse, sets up a moral conflict. If it can be done, what would happen to the Mars colony? Would it never be established? Would its inhabitants be willing to sacrifice themselves to save the larger mass of humanity that they left behind? One member of the colony applies corporate logic — the corporation has a duty to benefit its shareholders, so any larger duty to humanity is irrelevant — an attitude that explains why it is so difficult to make fossil fuel companies admit that they contribute to global warming. If nations move to clean energy, after all, shareholders in fossil fuel companies lose. The companies believe they would be derelict in their corporate duty if they put the existence of all planetary life ahead of short-term profits.

Will Roban succeed? The question is almost unimportant. Like most post-apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t involve zombies, the novel is a cautionary tale.  Reed again eschews melodrama by reporting the planet’s destruction from the viewpoint of children on Mars. The reader doesn’t see people die in floods and fires and hurricanes. The fact that people on Mars don’t know if any life remains on Earth makes the story of the planet’s fate even more powerful.

Terrestrial History is also a multi-generational saga of family members who, sometimes in conflict with each other, try to do what they think is right. The depth of the characters and their relationships with each other are the story’s strength. Reed always writes with literary flair. While Terrestrial History didn’t grip me in the same way as Mungo’s debut novel, it is a strong addition to the subgenre of apocalyptic fiction.

RECOMMENDED

"Trap Line" by Timothy Zahn

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025

“Trap Line” is a short science fiction story. Nearly every sf story of any merit is eventually anthologized, so readers might soon find it in a larger volume if they decide not to invest their money in a relatively short story.

Toby Collier is an engineer. He is employed to send his consciousness (or “astral”) from his body to a clone (or “replicate”) of his body. His current mission is to send his astral to a replicate on a ship that is many light years from Earth. The ship’s transmitter isn’t working. Toby’s job is to fix it, using the replicate’s body, before sending his astral home.

Toby’s astral is captured on his way to the ship. He joins captives belonging to an alien race who call themselves Hyfisk. Despite being nothing more than a disembodied consciousness, Toby can see the alien astrals if he squints just right. They communicate in a common language, or perhaps Toby somehow translates their thoughts into English. Timothy Zahn offers no real explanations for these convenient facts but at least makes clear that they puzzle Toby. In any event, there would be no story if Toby couldn’t chat with the Hyfisk.

Toby learns that members of a third alien species — a family that includes a young daughter — work for the Overmasters. They set trap lines to capture astrals. Their best pay comes from catching Hyfisk. Why the Overmasters want to capture astrals is far from clear (they’ve already learned all they want to know about the Hyfisk), but the family is worried that their standard of living is in decline because they are capturing fewer astrals. The family also worries that a human astral might not be worth much of anything to anyone. Toby sympathizes with his captors, perhaps because worrying about money and trying to shield children from that concern is a very human trait — at least for humans who aren’t born into wealth.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, humans (especially human engineers) are smarter than aliens, so when Toby sets out to escape, the reader knows he has a pretty good chance of success. He does so in a reasonably entertaining way that involves an alien version of a cat. He even takes into account his desire to keep his captors from filing bankruptcy (or whatever aliens do when they go broke).

The story sets up a moral dilemma when Toby has to decide whether to free the Hyfisk. He sets up a test to decide whether they are morally worthy of being rescued. I didn’t buy the test. Neither did I buy Toby’s sympathy for a family that, like human slave traders, think it is okay to earn an income by capturing and imprisoning astrals, but perhaps I am less forgiving than Toby.

The story earns points for its originality. It moves quickly but raises more questions than it answers. Still, it does just enough to provide a measure of entertainment.

RECOMMENDED

The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

Published by Orbit on March 18, 2025

Time travel stories can be fun but doing them right can be tricky. Authors usually take note of the paradox — kill your grandfather in the past and you never come into existence and thus can’t travel to the past to kill your grandfather — but they don’t always address it effectively. One approach is to avoid the paradox by traveling to the future. Another is to travel observationally, watching the past through a lens without interacting with it and thus avoiding changes. Another is to travel to the past with the intent to change nothing, usually followed by a mishap that changes everything. Another is to have the traveler change something that doesn’t prevent her birth and then returning to the past to undo the change. Another is to assume the existence of multiple time streams, so that changing the past either shifts the observed reality into a different stream or begins a new one. Perhaps because The Third Rule of Time Travel incorporates all these approaches to varying degrees, it fails to tell a convincing story.

Beth Darlow and her husband Colson invented a time travel machine. The device opens a wormhole that transports the traveler’s mind into her body at an earlier time. The two minds cohabit in the traveler’s past body although (for reasons left unexplained) the past mind doesn’t seem to recall the visit from future self after the experience ends. The mind transported from the present, on the other hand, is aware of the past mind and recalls what she observed through her past self’s eyes. The only physical evidence that two minds are sharing a body is a whitening of the eyes in the traveler’s body while it’s inhabited.

The travel ends after ninety seconds. A skeptic might think that the machine is merely stimulating memories and not transporting the traveler, but evidence (other than the temporary change of eye color) eventually emerges to suggest that a mostly useless form of time travel has actually occurred.

Colson died in a car crash, leaving Beth to further the research and to replace him as the time traveler. Beth is trying to understand how the time machine chooses arrival points. She thinks that directing time travel to a specific date will make the machine more useful, but the traveler will still observe only the things she has already seen. I can imagine some scenarios where that might be helpful (a crime victim who can’t identify an assailant might notice more details when revisiting the assault), but a lot of money is being invested in technology that hardly seems to justify the cost.

The research is funded by a creep who wants profitable results. His efforts to attract new investors cause Beth to take risks. This leads to an inevitable confrontation between the investor, who believes he has exclusive rights to the invention, and Beth, who is one of the few people who understand how the contraption works. It turns out that her understanding is less than complete.

When Beth begins traveling, she notices that the machine always sends her back to traumatic moments in her life, including identifying her husband’s body in the morgue. Beth eventually realizes why that’s happening, but the explanation [spoiler alert] amounts to “the universe doesn’t like to be messed with.” Nonsense of that sort bleeds the science out of science fiction.

Beth begins to see the ghost of her dead husband. Then she changes the past in a way I won’t spoil. How she does that is never made clear, a startling omission since one of the titular rules is that travelers can’t interact with the past and thus can’t change it. I guess we’re supposed to accept the theory that observing a quantum system causes it to change, but the application of that theory to the plot is disappointingly fuzzy.

Beth only knows the past was changed because, before she travels, she sends answers to certain questions to an off-planet location where they won’t be affected by any changes to Earth history. (This has something to do with the inverse square law and the assumption that the machine’s energy pulse will lose its energy as it travels away from the Earth, leaving the pre-recorded answers invulnerable to change.) The story’s tense moments result from Beth’s desire to undo the changes she made and the owner’s desire to stop her from revealing the harm that his useless but expensive technology might cause.

The setup is interesting even if Beth isn’t. The story’s resolution combines metaphysical gibberish with simplistic pseudoscience. Now, there’s so much we don’t understand about the universe that maybe Philip Fracassi got it right, but other writers have made a more convincing case [second spoiler alert] that time is an illusion, that there is only the now, and that the now encompasses all possible pasts and futures. This convenient theory empowers Beth to construct the reality she wants and thus enables a happy ending, but science fiction’s demand that readers suspend their disbelief needs to be supported by a plausible reason to do so. Metaphysical gibberish about an angry universe and simplistic pseudoscience didn’t get me there, particularly when the ending doesn’t address the many ramifications of the story’s underlying theory.

That leaves us with a conventional thriller — a race to save the present by undoing changes to the past — surrounded by the trappings of science fiction. This science fiction thriller is more effective as a thriller than as science fiction, but the thriller aspects are unoriginal. Thriller fans might nevertheless enjoy it. Hardcore sf fans, not so much.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS