Best Science Fiction Books

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.

Seven pilgrims journey to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion, each telling their story before facing the Shrike — a creature of blades that moves backward through time — in a far-future Canterbury Tales structured around one of science fiction's most enduring mysteries.

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.

In 2131, a massive cylindrical alien spacecraft enters the solar system, and Commander Norton leads a crew to explore it before it departs — discovering a perfect, silent, alien world inside with no clear purpose and no clear occupants.

A flu pandemic obliterates civilization, and twenty years later a traveling Shakespeare company moves through the Great Lakes region, their story woven together with the pre-collapse lives of an actor whose death on opening night becomes the novel's pivot point.

Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a Community where pain, conflict, and choice have been eradicated through Sameness — until the Ceremony of Twelve assigns him the singular role of Receiver of Memory, forcing him to carry the full weight of human history and exposing the quiet violence that keeps his world frictionless.

Two agents on opposite sides of a time war — Red from a technological future, Blue from an organic one — begin leaving letters for each other in the timelines they traverse. What begins as provocation becomes correspondence, and correspondence becomes something neither of them can afford and neither can stop.

The ninth and final Expanse novel. As the Laconian empire fractures and the unknowable enemy beyond the gates moves to erase humanity, the crew of the Rocinante make their last stand to save not a nation but the survival of consciousness itself.

Women develop the ability to electrocute at will, and within a generation the global order inverts — a speculative inversion that asks not whether women would govern better but whether power itself is the problem.

In 17th-century West Africa, Doro — an immortal being who inhabits the bodies of his victims — encounters Anyanwu, a healer with the ability to reshape her own body. Their struggle across centuries is one of the most compelling power dynamics in American literature: desire, domination, and the complicated love between two beings who are only human in the loosest sense.

Lilith Iyapo awakens from suspended animation on an alien ship to find that two hundred and fifty years have passed, that humanity has nearly destroyed itself in nuclear war, and that the aliens who rescued Earth's survivors want something from humanity in return — something that Lilith will have to help them get.

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.

The fifth Expanse novel. For the first time the crew of the Rocinante splits up, each returning to their own past, just as a catastrophic attack on the inner planets remakes the balance of power across the solar system.

In a galaxy divided into zones of thought where intelligence itself is limited by proximity to the galactic core, a human ship accidentally releases an ancient evil and two children are stranded on a world of pack-minded aliens while the fate of civilization is debated across an early proto-internet.

The last surviving fragment of a troop-carrier AI seeks revenge against the ruler of a vast interstellar empire, told through a narrator who was once thousands of bodies simultaneously and who perceives no gender distinctions.

A crew of cognitively modified humans — including a man with half his brain removed and a vampire revived from extinction — is sent to make first contact with an alien presence on the edge of the solar system, and finds something that profoundly challenges the assumption that consciousness is adaptive.

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.

The last remnants of humanity race across the stars toward a terraformed world, only to find it already claimed by a civilization of intelligent spiders uplifted across millennia by a nanovirus meant for monkeys.