Veronica Roth returns to the ‘Divergent’ universe with ‘The Sixth Faction.’
Audrey Niffenegger revisits ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ world after two decades.
Becky Chambers launches a new sci-fi duology with ‘As You Wake, Break the Shell.’
October is shaping up to be a surprisingly intriguing month for sci-fi books, with familiar worlds being reinvented, acclaimed authors launching something completely new and time travel getting more than a little complicated. And two of the month’s biggest releases come with built-in histories.
Veronica Roth returns to the world of Divergent with The Sixth Faction, an alternate-universe story that asks what might have happened had Beatrice Prior made a different choice; while Audrey Niffenegger goes back even further, revisiting the world of The Time Traveler’s Wife more than two decades after that novel became a phenomenon. Her Life Out of Order shifts the spotlight to Henry and Clare’s daughter, Alba, who inherited her father’s uncontrollable ability to travel through time.
But October isn’t entirely about looking backward. Becky Chambers launches a new science fiction duology with the deeply personal As You Wake, Break the Shell, while Claire North bends history and causality in As We Fall Through Time; and Annalee Newitz turns first contact upside down in A Wall Is Also a Road, in which humanity is the strange alien civilization being discovered.
Loading answers
From alternate realities and fractured timelines to alien slime molds and, yes, space whales, here are five new science fiction novels worth checking out this October.
‘A Wall Is Also a Road’ (October 6, 2026)
Tor Books
Author: Annalee Newitz Publisher: Tor Books
What it’s about: We’ve seen plenty of stories about humans making first contact with alien life, but Annalee Newitz turns that familiar scenario on its head by making us the aliens. Gardenpath is a graduate student—and an amoeba, specifically a slime mold—from an ancient civilization that exists between the stars. While researching an obscure corner of the galaxy, Gardenpath discovers a planet filled with far more life, language and culture than anyone expected.
That planet is Earth, and among the strange creatures Gardenpath encounters is Murtis, a woman living in Pompeii who works at a brothel known as the lupanar. From there, A Wall Is Also a Road becomes a first-contact story about two radically different forms of life attempting to communicate and, eventually, understand each other. Newitz uses that relationship to explore the assumptions we make about unfamiliar cultures and what happens when something—or someone—completely alien begins to feel familiar. Macmillan positions the novel for readers of Project Hail Mary and The Mountain in the Sea.
Fall is almost here and no one is as excited as BookTok. Over the past few weeks several book influencers have shared the books they’re most excited to read this season from their favorite bestselling authors, and they are just as cozy, magical and fun as you would hope! To learn more about the new […]
Annalee Newitz says: “This story has been in the back of my mind, slowly evolving into something deeply weird, ever since I researched and visited Pompeii for my book Four Lost Cities. I was reading Sarah Levin-Richardson’s superlative archaeological investigation, The Brothel of Pompeii, where she goes through all the material evidence from the lupanar, or brothel, including graffiti. Some of the graffiti was written by women who worked there, and Levin-Richardson talked briefly about one piece of graffiti which read ‘Murtis * Felatris,, which she translates as ‘Murtis, f**ktress.’ Another, more poetic, translation might be something like “Murtis, queen of the c*******ers.’ Either way, the sex worker Murtis was boasting about her powers. [But] this is a book that is very profoundly about university politics.” (Transfer Orbit)
What it’s about: More than 20 years after The Time Traveler’s Wife introduced readers to Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, Audrey Niffenegger returns to their world with a novel centered on their daughter, Alba. Like her father, Alba has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, which means she involuntarily slips through time. That leaves her carrying an extraordinary burden: she can witness pieces of the future without necessarily being able to change them.
Now a gifted violinist attempting to build a life with Zach, Alba finds support among a community of artists and activists struggling through an increasingly unstable world. Her travels take the story from the riot-torn streets of a dystopian Chicago to a virtual museum devoted to lost memories and artifacts, where Alba’s mysterious stepsister Isadora may have a much greater connection to her fate than she realizes. Niffenegger has designed Life Out of Order to work both as a companion to The Time Traveler’s Wife and as a novel that can stand on its own.
Woman's World books editor (and book lover!) shares 11 enchanting time travel books — enjoy them all!
Audrey Niffenegger says: “I started working on Life Out of Order in 2012. I hadn’t intended to write a sequel, but I eventually realized that if Alba had a sanctuary of some sort, a refuge she could travel to, that she would be more likely to survive a childhood of time travel. I created the Yellow House and everything else in the story evolved from that.”
“When I began to think about the future of Alba’s world, I knew that it would be shaped by climate change; this is a certainty in the real world. In 2012, the events of the book seemed absurdly dystopian to me. The party scene that opens the book was written in 2013 and neo-Nazis, curfews, and obvious, close government surveillance of American cities seemed like a remote possibility in the real world then. I was extrapolating from things I saw in the news, but during the years I worked on Life Out of Order, the outside world began to resemble my fictional world more closely than I could wish. I wanted to explore how keeping secrets erodes relationships; how a sense of individual freedom is essential to life, and how living a life that feels pre-determined, without choice, leads to despair. I wanted to show love in many forms, some quite unconventional, and to build a family of friends that evolves and finds ways to grow closer over time.” (Publishers Weekly)
‘The Sixth Faction’ (October 6, 2026)
Amazon
Author: Veronica Roth Publisher: HarperCollins
What it’s about: Veronica Roth is going back to the world that made her a bestselling phenomenon, but The Sixth Faction isn’t a conventional Divergent sequel. Instead, Roth returns to Beatrice Prior and the Choosing Ceremony that set the original story in motion—and changes what happens.
Beatrice enters the ceremony planning to make the brave choice of leaving Abnegation for Dauntless. Then tragedy strikes, derailing the future she thought she understood and sending her toward an underground rebellion. There she encounters a mysterious boy identified only by a number, whose secrets may be every bit as dangerous as her own. The book launches a new Divergent series and gives Roth the opportunity to explore how changing one crucial moment could reshape characters and relationships familiar to longtime readers. The original series has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and was translated into more than 40 languages before becoming a feature-film franchise.
Brimming with adventure, romance and magic, Outlander fans will love these book recommendations!
Veronica Roth says: For years, Roth had a complicated relationship with the series that made her famous, to the point that she preferred focusing on her newer work rather than Divergent. That began to change after attending Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and seeing the singer proudly embrace work from every stage of her career. Roth subsequently revisited her own earlier writing and found herself becoming protective of the young author she had been.
“It made me feel like, ‘I would love to find a way to experience joy associated with this series again. I think it would heal me in a deeper way, and I would like to give myself permission to appreciate the work I did when I was 24 years old.’ The way that I know to recapture joy is to make something new. What works about Divergent is some of the cheesiness. You need it to be fun and sexy and romantic; that’s part of what people love about it. So don’t be so critical that you suck the life out of it.”
‘As We Fall Through Time’ (October 13, 2026)
Amazon
Author: Claire North Publisher: Orbit
What it’s about: Claire North, author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, once again plays with time, but in this case the consequences stretch across history. Cal is a time traveler who meets a soldier during the French Revolution and knows the man he loves is destined to die. His solution seems reasonable enough: if you can travel through time, why not make a few little changes to history and save him?
Unfortunately, little changes have a habit of becoming big ones. As paradoxes accumulate and history begins to fracture, other travelers become entangled in the damage. Among them is Fadimatu, who arrives in a museum in 2018 only to make the decidedly disturbing discovery of her own mummified corpse. What follows brings together people separated by centuries as they confront a future that has already been broken and a paradox that somehow has to be solved. Orbit describes the novel as a mixture of time travel, betrayal and queer romance, recommending it to readers of This Is How You Lose the Time War and The Ministry of Time.
What it’s about: Hugo Award-winning author Becky Chambers launches a new science-fiction duology on Fortune, a resource-poor colony planet where survival is difficult and two women have very different reasons for questioning the society in which they live.
Signy is a reclusive botanist who uses bio-printing to create medicines in her plant shop, sometimes bending the rules to help people the colony’s medical system has left behind. Cora is a rorqual pilot, one of the rare people capable of forming the connection necessary to navigate the enormous living creatures that link settlements across the solar system. Her bond with her rorqual, Colibri, is both deeply personal and increasingly dangerous: Cora is developing “mindbleed,” a condition in which her brain begins losing its ability to distinguish her own experiences from those of the alien creature. Seeking Signy’s help brings the two women together, putting both of their lives at risk. Told across alternating timelines, the novel combines planetary SF, biological technology and a developing love story with Chambers’ recurring interest in community and what people owe one another.
Becky Chambers says: “It’s maybe the most personal thing I’ve written yet. As personal as you can get with giant spacefaring animals and bootleg botany hacks, anyway. Not to disappoint you right out of the gate, but I did make those parts up. Written through the eyes of two different characters across two different timelines and two very different worlds, As You Wake is in equal parts a space story and a love story. It was both challenging and liberating for me to write, and I hope you’ll enjoy coming along with me for the ride.”
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Woman's World does not endorse
the opinions and views shared by our readers in our comment sections. Our comments section is a place
where readers can engage in healthy, productive, lively, and respectful discussions. Offensive language,
hate speech, personal attacks, and/or defamatory statements are not permitted. Advertising or spam is
also prohibited.
Use left and right arrow keys to navigate between menu items.
Use right arrow key to move into submenus.
Use escape to exit the menu.
Use up and down arrow keys to explore.
Use left arrow key to move back to the parent list.
Create a free account to access exclusive content, play games, solve puzzles, test your pop-culture knowledge and receive special offers.Already have an account? Login
