Sci-Fi Book Club
Welcome to the Cleary's Bookstore Sci-Fi Book Club! This year we will be tucking in to the best this genre has to offer. On our list are books in the subgenres: afrofuturism, space westerns, supervillains, time travel, alternate history, apocalyptic, and more!
Book picks are announced at the end of each meeting and then the following day on social media and our website. Below you will find this year's schedule, a link to this book club's Story Graph, and our current pick.
2025 Sci-Fi Book Club Schedule

The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.
A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.







He cannot look inside the box.
He cannot ask questions.
He cannot tell anyone.
They must leave immediately.
He must leave all trackable devices behind.
As the pair hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the mysterious woman was living in an apocalypse shack in the wilderness . . . and that her possessions are radioactive. Amateur sleuths, including a retired FBI agent, believe the box is part of a carefully-orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.
What ensues is a chaotic race against time across an angry and anxious nation, an ensemble of eccentric misfits desperately searching for the truth in a dark cloud of paranoia. It quickly becomes clear that regardless of what is or isn’t inside that box, this trip is destined to end in fire and screams.