Best Science Fiction Books

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft millions of miles from Earth, with no memory of how he got there. As he pieces together the mission, he realises he may be humanity's last hope against a microscopic threat that is slowly extinguishing the Sun — and that he is not entirely alone.

On the desert planet Arrakis, young Paul Atreides must navigate political intrigue, ecological disaster, and prophetic destiny to avenge his family and fulfil a legend centuries in the making. The best-selling science fiction novel of all time.

Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin is humanity's most gifted military mind, trained from childhood in the zero-gravity Battle Room of a space station to fight the alien Formics. But the game and the war may not be as separate as Ender believes.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford Prefect — who turns out to be a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom in the universe. Their adventures take them to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a planet populated by telephone sanitisers, and a search for the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded alone on Mars after his crew evacuates, and must use science, engineering, and dark humour to survive until a rescue mission can reach him.

A billionaire's dinosaur theme park — built using ancient DNA extracted from prehistoric mosquitoes — collapses into chaos when the animals escape containment, in a gripping techno-thriller that is also a serious argument about the limits of human control over nature.

Charlie Gordon, a man with intellectual disabilities, undergoes experimental brain surgery that dramatically increases his intelligence — and must grapple with the emotional and social consequences.

The first book in Asimov's groundbreaking Foundation series, in which mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the fall of a galactic empire and sets in motion a thousand-year plan to preserve civilisation.

In the World State of 632 AF (After Ford), human beings are hatched in hatcheries, conditioned from birth for their social function, and kept content by the pleasure drug Soma. There is no disease, no war, no poverty — and no freedom, no art, no genuine love. Bernard Marx begins to question whether happiness without meaning is worth having.

Isaac Asimov's linked short story collection introducing the Three Laws of Robotics and exploring their logical implications in a series of increasingly complex scenarios.

Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece follows Billy Pilgrim, who has become 'unstuck in time' and moves non-linearly through his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden and his later suburban American life.

A pizza delivery driver who moonlights as a hacker navigates the Metaverse — Stephenson's invented virtual reality — to unravel a conspiracy involving a powerful new drug and ancient Sumerian linguistics.

Le Guin's landmark science fiction novel about an envoy from a galactic federation who visits a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual — neither male nor female — and the profound implications for society and consciousness.

William Gibson's groundbreaking cyberpunk novel coined the term 'cyberspace' and defined the aesthetic and concerns of an entire science fiction movement.

Six nested stories spanning centuries — from a 19th-century Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii — each one influencing the next in a meditation on power, predacity, and civilization.

In the sprawling city of New Crobuzon, scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore a garuda's flight — and inadvertently unleashes nightmare creatures on the city. A landmark of New Weird fiction.

A high school teacher travels back to 1958 through a time portal with a mission to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In a future where firemen burn books rather than extinguish fires, Guy Montag begins to question the society he enforces — and the books he has been trained to destroy.

Victor Frankenstein's obsessive creation of life — and his abandonment of the creature he brings into being — with consequences that pursue them both to the ends of the earth.

A Black woman in 1970s California is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must keep a white slaveholder alive to ensure her own existence.

A young miner from Mars's lowest caste disguises himself as one of the ruling class and infiltrates their elite military academy to bring down the society that enslaved his people.

In the dystopian future of Panem, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister's place in a televised death match between children.

After her defiant act in the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen finds herself the symbol of a brewing rebellion — and is forced back into the arena for an unprecedented Quarter Quell.

In 2024, a teenage girl in a walled California community watches civilization collapse and begins developing a new religion as she leads survivors north toward safety.