Time Travel Romance and Haunted TV Channels: October’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy

It being spooky season, there’s some undeniable horror crossover in these books: haunted dolls, angels that drive you mad, impossible pregnancies as invasive body horror, a nostalgic television dimension that may trap you forever. But there’s also the paradoxes of love across timelines, first contact in parts of the world (and our history) that we rarely see, and a sweeping new space opera built on mathematics and language. And let’s not forget, from our 2026 SFF preview, Nghi Vo’s demonic historical dark fantasy The Scarlet Ball and Becky Chambers’s cozy sci-fi As You Wake, Break the Shell.

Audrey Niffenegger, Life Out of Order (Hanover Square Press, October 6) Audrey Niffenegger has long teased the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, featuring Clare and Henry’s Chrono-Displaced daughter Alba and her two husbands—Oliver, a time traveler like her, and Zach, existing in linear time. The stakes and scope are bigger this time around, encompassing an uncomfortably familiar dystopian present and a much more disturbing far-future, with Alba carrying the burden of future knowledge like her father, except in her case it’s about the fate of the world in addition to the outcomes of her various relationships. But she’s just one narrator, as readers will get to hear from Clare, Zach, Oliver, Alba’s mysterious stepsister Isadora, and a few more surprise viewpoints.

Samantha Josephs, Carrying (Putnam, October 6) One of the year’s most unhinged premises comes from this trans body horror debut, as perfect housewife Martha begins to suffer the strain of performing impeccable femininity as a stealth trans woman. Keeping her husband happy yet oblivious—managing his baby fever with staged fake miscarriages—only goes so far when Martha begins suffering an inexplicable illness that culminates in an impossible pregnancy. Part The Substance, part Rosemary’s Baby, part something entirely original, Martha’s journey takes her into entirely new territory with her body she’s so carefully controlled.

What’s more, it brings her closer to people who give her what she never thought she’d find: someone who has been through the same thing. Annalee Newitz, A Wall is Also a Road (Tor Books, October 6) If I were to consistently trust any author with the perspective of a non-human protagonist, it would be Annalee Newitz. In their latest, Gardenpath is a genderless slime mold graduate student writing their dissertation on multicellular life and where it thrives.

Their fieldwork just so happens to take them to Pompeii, circa 79 AD. Taking the form of a human, Gardenpath befriends a sex worker named Murtis, while trying to warn her about the impending eruption of Vesuvius, yet also gathering enough research to please their corrupt professor. It’s a mind-expanding premise and a fascinating vision of intelligent life in space beyond our little planet, especially taking place in what we consider ancient history.

Claire North, As We Fall Through Time (Orbit Books, October 13) If you were a time traveler, would you let a pesky little thing like the canonical timeline stop you from being with your soulmate? Not so for Cal, who meets soldier Olivier during the Napoleonic Wars and creates a paradox to keep him from dying on the battlefield… only for Olivier to disappear from the timeline entirely. And then Cal’s time traveler colleague Fadimatu encounters her own mummified corpse in a museum in 2018—another paradox.