It's rare that a work of speculative fiction intersects with current social activism to create a story at once profoundly "of the moment" and a haunting indictment of a future yet to come.

Moyu Chen's astoundingly prescient To Murder Galatea combines the author's deep academic knowledge of art history with a master's eye for world building to create a future that's both eerily familiar and astoundingly alien.

To Murder Galatea tells the story of a familiar city in a recognizable world where iconoclasm has become a war between a shady secret society, a frenzied mob of destructive modernists and young Ignacio Liberstein, a museum employee torn between his instincts to preserve the artwork and the love he thought he lost forever. How far will Ignacio go to protect artwork that has been deemed 'functionless' by a society drowning in its own anxieties and insecurities?

With shades of Asimov's Foundation and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Moyu Chen's To Murder Galatea is the new high watermark of speculative fiction that will be discussed for decades to come.