The best new science fiction books of April 2025

When the sun is out, it's just about warm enough here in north-east London to read outside – which means it's time to crack out the best new science fiction and find a sheltered spot. I love the way the genre continues to tackle the biggest issues of our day, whether that's ageing or artificial intelligence. Top of my pile is Lucy Lapinska's look at how a robot might deal with being freed from human governance, but I'm also looking forward to Nick Harkaway's latest, set in a world where a drug can (for a huge price) stop you from ageing, but it will also make you grow very large. And I'm keen to try out Sayaka Murata's strange and disturbing vision of the future, Vanishing World. Amane lives in a society where children are conceived by artificial insemination and raised by parents in "clean", sexless marriages. When she and her husband hear about an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there.