I’ve been looking forward to the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, since it was published in Japan early last year. It’s out in time for Christmas, and it sounds delightfully dreamy and speculative. November also offers us what sounds like a delicious treat: an intergalactic cooking competition, in Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. But this month is most notable for the short story riches on offer, whether it’s the long-awaited final sci-fi anthology captained by the late Harlan Ellison (Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” remains one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever read), or the debut collection from Eliza Clark. Lots of treats to dip into and out of, for all of us who may be feeling a little too hectic to settle down with a whole novel.

I am very excited about this one. Our previous sci-fi columnist, Sally Adee, tipped it as one to watch out for in 2024 – it’s an expansion of a story Murakami published back in 1980, and which he returned to during the pandemic. It follows a man whose girlfriend has vanished, who sets out to find the imaginary walled city where her true self lives – but she has no memory of their life in the other world. “In an age when society is going through rattling changes, whether to stay holed up inside the wall or to go to the other side of the wall has become a greater proposition than ever,” Murakami has said.

I missed this one last month, but I’m including it in our November round-up as I’m sure many of you will be keen to learn about it. The legendary Ellison published two seminal sci-fi anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. In 1973, he announced a third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions. It was never published, but now, six years after he died, it is finally released, with 32 never-before published stories, essays and poems by authors including Max Brooks, Dan Simmons, Adrian Tchaikovsky, James S. A. Corey and Cory Doctorow.

This is the second in a trilogy set in deep space, and it sounds tempting enough that I think I’m going to have to start at the beginning. It sees the crew of the Artemis investigating why Earth’s first deep space colony has fallen silent – and discovering what has become of the remaining colonists. Horror and adventure – that’s right up my street.

This is more a thriller than sci-fi, but it features some rather sci-fi medical treatment, and is rather fun if somewhat silly (I’ve read it). It follows troubled presenter Hollie, who exposes the dangers of extreme therapies in her Netflix series Bad Medicine. She’s out to get wellness guru Ariel Rose, who says her “ice rebirth” treatment can heal pain. Will Hollie survive her trip to Ariel’s luxury mountain retreat?

Set in a city populated by intelligent robots called Hums, this follows the story of May, who goes on a weekend away to the botanical garden at the city’s heart. But it turns out the green refuge isn’t the idyll she had expected, and when her children are threatened, she is forced to trust a Hum. “This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction,” said The New York Times.

This is described as a “genre-bending” short story collection, covering everything from a teenage UFO enthusiast who meets a famous painter when a mysterious orb appears in their desert town, to married ghost-hunters whose relationship starts to fail when one of them stops being able to see spirits. “Full of menace and delight,” says the excellent writer and editor, Kelly Link.

This is pitched as a slice of postmodern horror about day jobs and monsters, and follows Noah, who takes a job working for a newspaper and unknowingly signs his life away, and Malachia, the only human left in the City of Silence.

Described as The Expanse meets Game of Thrones’ Night’s Watch – a surefire way to entice me, at least – this is the conclusion to Dewes’s Divide series and sees her heroes out to save the universe from a horrifying genetic solution that is about to be unleashed on the outer colonies.

This Korean bestseller, a sequel, is set in a world where there is a “dream industry”, and sees Penny working for its Civil Complaint Center, where people file complaints about their dreams.

This sounds like a lot of fun. Saras Kaveri has been invited to compete in the galaxy’s most watched cooking show – she’s the first competitor from Earth, which is seen as having very primitive inhabitants, who still cook with fire. When she serendipitously meets Serenity Ko, they begin working on a new technology that could change the future of food forever.

The second in Broaddus’s Astra Black trilogy follows the story of the Muungano Empire, a coalition of city states stretching from Earth to beyond Titan, and the threats it faces.

This debut collection of speculative body horror stories ranges from the tale of a scientist working with fragile alien flora to a teenager longing for perfect skin. We’re promised that it will be unsettling, and “laced” with dark humour by its publisher.

Investigator Kembral is enjoying a little time away from her newborn at the year-turning ball when a mysterious clock begins to send the ballroom down through layers of reality each time it chimes. Can she save the world before it’s too late?

Another interesting-sounding anthology, this time promising treats from authors including Nicholas Sansbury Smith, whose story is set in the radioactive wasteland that is now Earth, and Brian Francis Slattery, who tells the tale of a couple whose relationship becomes strained in the aftermath of the arrival of an alien species.

This new Star Trek adventure, based on the TV series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, sees Una Chin-Riley and Christopher Pike working together on the USS Enterprise, years after they first became friends. When a terrorist attack occurs, Una is discovered to have a history with the suspect…

Scientists have discovered a technique whereby light can be bent around corners, inspired by the way clouds scatter sunlight. This type of light-bending could lead to advances in medical imaging, electronics cooling and even nuclear reactor design.

Daniele Faccio at the University of Glasgow, UK, and his colleagues say they are shocked this type of light scattering wasn’t noticed before. It works on the same basis as clouds, snow and other white materials that absorb light: once photons hit the surface of such a material, they are scattered in all directions, barely penetrating at all and getting reflected out the way they came. For instance, when sunlight hits a tall cumulonimbus cloud, it bounces off the top, making this part of the cloud appear bright white. But so little light reaches the bottom of the cloud that this part appears grey – despite being made up of the same water droplets.

“The light bounces around and sort of tries to get in, and it’s bouncing off all the molecules and the defects,” says Faccio. “And eventually what happens is it just gets reflected back because it can’t get in. This is this scattering.”

To replicate this process, the team 3D printed objects from opaque white material while leaving thin tunnels of clear resin within. When light is shone at the material, it travels into these tunnels and is scattered – just as light is on snow or clouds. However, instead of scattering randomly in every direction until they are evenly dispersed, the photons are directed to return to the resin tunnel by the opaque material. The team put this to use, creating a range of objects that steer light in an organised way.

These 3D-printed objects are functionally similar to fibre optic cables, which route light along their length, but they operate on fundamentally different principles. Fibre optic cables steer light by infinitely reflecting internally. When photons attempt to leave a cable’s inner core of plastic or glass, they hit another material with a lower refractive index and are reflected back inside. In this way, light can be carried for kilometres at a time, even around bends.

The researchers say their material boosts light transmission by more than two orders of magnitude compared with solid blocks without the same clear tunnels, and also allows it to be directed around curves. This is much less efficient than fibre optic, and will therefore struggle to achieve the great distances that it does, but it is also very simple and cheap.

This method of light-bending could make use of existing tunnels of translucent material, such as tendons and fluid in the spinal column, to provide new ways to carry out medical imaging. Faccio says the exact same principle also works to direct heat and neutrons, and could therefore also find use in a range of engineering applications such as cooling systems and nuclear reactors.

“It wasn’t obvious that this would work at all. We were shocked,” says Faccio, who believes the phenomenon could easily have been discovered decades or even centuries ago. “It’s not like we’ve created or found some really niche, weird equation with some weird properties.”