If you like your noir pitch black, spend some time with the anti-hero Spademan, a killer for hire. It all sounds preposterous, but Mieveille makes it work, spinning it into a racial and cultural allegory that’s as fun as it is strange. The killer has somehow broken this rule, stepping from one city into the next to commit a politically tinged crime. You’re either a resident of Beszel or a resident of Qoma, and people from one aren’t supposed to interact with the other, even though they literally occupy the same space, like a double-exposed photo. Structured as a crime story in which the detective is investigating a murder, this brilliant novel is set in a world in which two cities are superimposed onto each other. Here are a few of my favorite books that combine these two genres: I wrote Blind Spots partly because it was a fun way to comment on how our tech addictions are altering the way we see the world and each other, and partly because this type of storytelling is a blast. When someone figures out how to hack it and commit murders without being seen, our down-at-the-heels detective needs to make some tough decisions and confront his own reliance on tech-which, like ours today, is getting out of control. My new novel, Blind Spots, is a detective story set in a world where all of mankind went blind and needs to rely on devices to see.

These stories have just enough familiarity to give us comfort (who doesn’t love a murder mystery?) while also blowing up our expectations with strange new worlds, bizarre customs, and brain-altering devices. It’s a way of imagining a fresh new world in which to envelope the reader while also asking tough questions about humanity. This is one of the many reasons I’m a fan of stories that combine crime/mystery tropes with some speculative element, futuristic setting, or crazy new technology. And our nature often leads us to do regrettable, unsavory, and illegal things. No matter what inventions we devise-what new technologies make it easier for us to order food from our phone or drive without driving or cheat on that history test-human nature remains a constant.

Wonderbook jeff vandermeer