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7 New Sci-Fi Comedies You Don’t Want to Miss



Science fiction has always been a genre of escape, one that especially speaks to those of us eagerly waiting to be abducted by aliens or dreaming of robot armies battling on undiscovered planets. We want adventure, some intrigue, and the novelty of the never before seen.

While some readers may prefer a more dignified or even meticulous sci-fi, I tend to enjoy stories that have just as much a sense of humor as they do a sense of adventure. Comedy and science fiction go hand in hand—just ask Douglas Adams or William Shatner—because the absurd loves a partner in crime. The excitement of imaging aliens fits right in with the silliness of those aliens reciting bad poetry or being incredibly and conveniently attractive. Lucky for me, 2025 is a great year for novels that can offer some genuine laughs while planet hopping or robot building. Below are 7 new and upcoming sci-fi novels with particularly comedic twists to help you giggle your way through the rest of the year. 

Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

In classic rom-com fashion our female protagonist is a bit of a mess, a bit lonely, and could use a bit of adventure—except she wasn’t expecting the adventure to be with a sentient glob of hair gel. We meet the titular blob right away, tucked between dumpsters on a sidewalk in the rain, while our protagonist Vi suffers through having drinks with friends she doesn’t like. Things get sticky quickly when she takes the blob home where it begins blinking, smiling, and growing limbs. Su delivers exactly what readers and Vi need in a plot full of character development ups and downs, decisions good and bad, and figuring out what it means to be alive but only technically living. A silly, romantic plot involving a disturbingly relatable fail-ennial (aka a millennial who is a failure, like all of us millennials), Blob checks all the boxes of a rom-com and asks questions only safely answered in your diary or with a therapist.

I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming 

Lemming gained notoriety for their fantasy series, Mead Mishaps, but their latest spin on wet and wild science fiction will leave readers begging for more. In this book we meet Dory, a PhD student who dies by lion attack a split second before she is abducted by aliens (they heal her up, don’t worry), who then escapes her captures alongside her killer-turned-side-kick lion named Toto. From there the plot only escalates further, involving two horned aliens with surprisingly sexy tails, a bureaucracy involved in alien science experiments the size of planets, and more abducted women to be saved. As is on brand for Lemmings’ protagonists, Dory doesn’t want to deal with any of this and provides a lot of wit, trope awareness, and impatience with the absurdity of it all. The sex scenes may surprise newcomers to the romance and erotica genre, but are pleasantly as expected for dedicated Lemmings fans. 

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Scalzi is well known to sci-fi readers. He has a deep back catalog and his own brand of absurd humor, but his latest stand alone is funnier than meets the eye. When the moon suddenly turns to cheese, things on earth get funky fast: NASA has a lot of explaining to do, Reddit has a lot of questions, and the rest of us humans have a lot of problems that don’t feel very important anymore. To physics fans and Scalzi fans alike, the moon turning to cheese creates a cascade of problems to be dealt with, like: What about the other celestial bodies bumping around in space? What about the planned moon landings? Or worse yet, what about the billionaires with something to prove and access to spaceships? In polyphonic prose, we jump from the old guys at the diner planning the end of the world to NASA astronauts trying to answer questions in press conferences and interviews, though they can’t answer the one thing everyone is wondering: How did this happen and what kind of cheese is it exactly? Balancing the kind of existential crises the end of the world brings on, Scalzi does a fun job anticipating readers’ questions and answering them upside down and inside out while absolutely reeking of the cheesiest plot I’ve read in a long time.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

For a cozier read, Malka Older’s The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series is a delight of creative science fiction world building and Sherlockian detective work. In this latest installment, our two sapphic neurodivergent protagonists are split up: Plieti is the one going on a mission to help a friend in the midst of some academic espionage, and Mossa is stuck at home with a serious case of the blues. In this post-earth society, they live on space platforms and wear atmoscarves to breathe, and Plieti’s friend may have developed the most impressive breathing device this society has ever seen. The only problem is they have to defend their dissertation with a saboteur on the loose. Someone keeps disturbing their lab, spreading rumors of plagiarism, and possibly threatening their life. Readers will enjoy the science references and relatable academia woes, especially the profound impulse to make a good impression on your friends’ friends, making this overall an extremely relatable and beautiful breeze to read.

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

The only thing worse than watching someone else live your dreams might be watching them also make friends, get a girlfriend, and just be cool along the way. Our poor protagonist Michael is stuck watching his amazing, brilliant, awe-inspiring best friend Taras struggle through a science-fiction writing group Michael is obsessed with; and now Michael must watch as the group falls apart before their big break. An exceptional version of the classic “it’s a story about the story within the story”, Michel does a good job of not getting lost within the meta-plot. Instead, he helps readers focus on what’s important: This guy sucks. The writing group, Orb 4, may be onto something with a genre bending joy ride inspired by 1950s scientific fiction pulp classics, but their friend Michael isn’t doing them any favors by making fake fan accounts, harassing the indie publisher he’s an intern for, and hiding microphones in a plant under the guise of ‘archiving’ on their behalf . This one will leave you cringing, asking your friends if you’re the Annoying One, and laughing out loud at the outrageously bad life decisions only a guy with rich parents would ever make. 

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

I first fell in love with Newitz brand of comedic character building by falling for a flying talking moose, and am thrilled to see their latest take on the topic du jour: robots and artificial intelligence. In a brisk 163 pages, Newitz creates a gang of five robots who come to accept the rest of the world has left them behind. Even though technically speaking robots can’t own businesses, through some clever chatting with a sentient lease agreement, they come to own and operate a noodle shop. There’s Hands, the robot chef who is a stump with arms and no legs, adores biang biang noodles, and like all aspiring culinary geniuses is deeply worried about the freshness of the ingredients and 1 star reviews; Sweetie, a gorgeous femme on her top half with only a skeletal metal spider figure for her bottom half; Staybehind, the signature “I’m not interested but I’m tagging along anyway” friend; Cayenne, their ideas-bot; and Robels, their token human. With a cozy and savory plot, the store slowly opens, the noodles boil, and the fragrant hot oil fills the pages with comfort and questions on sentience: Can robots feel pride in their work even if they can’t taste the fruits of their labor? Can the fruits of our labor be the love, camaraderie, and community we created along the way? 

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle

On a beautiful day, we follow Vera, a buttoned up math-loving bisexual as she has the worst day of her life: things get awkward quick when she comes out to her mom—and then a bunch of fish fall from the sky, logic goes out the window, and her mom dies a gruesome death before her very eyes. After some time of unfathomable grief, a man barges into Vera’s home. He’s part of an elite and exclusive wing of the military: the Low Probability Event Task Force. Readers will get swept up by the adrenaline of it all, the endearing but guarded agent Agent Layne, and the unavoidable question at the center of all this nonsense: If the universe is just random and nothing matters, what’s the point in any of it? Having one bad day lead you down a path of questioning every life decision you’ve ever made is unfortunately extremely relatable, even if finding tears in the fabric of space time floating in an abandoned suburb isn’t. Tingle doesn’t hold anything back: The horror is horrifying, the comedy is side splitting and the heartfelt ending is earned. 



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