Five top spine-chilling space books

Jenny Hamilton reads the end before she reads the middle. She reviews for Strange Horizons and Lady Business. At Tor.com she tagged five "books set in space that might or might not be very, very, very full of ghosts," including:

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji

Adam Oyebanji’s debut SF novel combines two of my favorite things: ghosts in space, and biting depictions of the many ills that arise from the unjust distribution of resources. Our protagonist, Ravi Macleod, is slated to be the first member of his family to attain respectability, just on the eve of what his generation ship calls Braking Day: their arrival at the ship’s final destination of Tau Ceti. To become an officer, all Ravi has to do is keep his nose clean for one more semester—except that he starts to see visions of a girl with unbound blonde hair floating helmetless outside the ship. Nobody who spends any time in zero-g keeps their hair loose around their shoulders, and more importantly, space will for sure kill you if you’re not wearing a helmet. [Unless you are General Leia Organa.]

Ravi’s haunted not only by the impossible floating girl, but by the specter of the all-powerful AIs the Archimedes fled Earth to avoid. AIs are super illegal on board the Archimedes, and the ruling class have no plans to change that when they reach Tau Ceti. Except that if Ravi wants to find out what’s going on with his ghost girl, he’ll have to make use of his cousin Boz’s illegally created AI. Braking Day has some debut novel–typical pacing problems, but it’s a fun read that left me eager for more books by this author.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue