Best Science Fiction Books

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

Blake Crouch's high-concept thriller about the next stage of human evolution. After being secretly infected with an engineered upgrade to his own genome, Logan Ramsay finds his mind and body transformed — and must decide what the human species should become as a reckoning approaches.

Two shapeshifting alien entities — one benign, one predatory — have lived on Earth for millions of years, each gradually learning to pass as human. A mysterious artifact discovered on the ocean floor draws them both toward the same location.

The sixth and final Dune novel Frank Herbert lived to write. With the Honored Matres burning worlds across the galaxy, the surviving Bene Gesserit retreat to their hidden homeworld of Chapterhouse and gamble everything on transforming a planet — and themselves — to endure.

Three thousand five hundred years after the events of Children of Dune, Leto II — now half-human, half-sandworm — rules as God Emperor. He has seen all possible human futures and chosen the only path that ensures humanity's survival: a brutal peace that will ultimately shatter into the Scattering. The most philosophical and challenging book in the Dune series.

A giant squid specimen disappears from the Natural History Museum, and Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is drawn into London's hidden world of apocalyptic cults, squid-worshippers, and magical London underbelly.

An alternative 1980s London where Alan Turing survived and the first synthetic humans have just been manufactured. Charlie buys one — Adam — and shares custody of it with Miranda, his upstairs neighbour. A love triangle and the questions it raises about consciousness and moral status.

The fourth Hitchhiker's Guide novel returns Arthur Dent to an Earth that should have been destroyed, where he finds something he never expected in this series: a love story, with a woman named Fenchurch and the mystery of why the dolphins vanished.

Three storylines converge around a mysterious shipping container in post-9/11 America: a journalist investigating locative art, a drug-addicted translator working for a shadowy operative, and a Cuban-Chinese crime family tracking the same cargo.

Thomas finally has the answers he's been seeking — who WICKED is, what the Trials were for, and what the Flare does to its victims. But the cure may cost more than anyone imagined, and WICKED's final phase has only just begun.

Six years after the catastrophe at Jurassic Park, mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm joins a covert expedition to Isla Sorna — Site B — where InGen's dinosaurs have been breeding and evolving without human interference. What they find there is far more dangerous than anyone anticipated.

Kate Mascarenhas's inventive debut. In 1967, four women invent time travel; decades later, one of them is found dead, and a locked-room murder unfolds across time. A genre-blending novel exploring how time travel would reshape the human mind, relationships, and a female-led institution.

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

Polly O'Keefe — daughter of Meg Murry — discovers a time gate near her grandparents' New England farm that opens into the world of three thousand years ago, where she becomes entangled in a conflict between two ancient peoples and a druid named Karralys.

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

A MIT graduate student accidentally builds a time machine that can only travel forward — each jump taking him exponentially further into the future — and must find a way back or keep jumping into an ever more distant Earth.

The third Ender novel expands to three worlds simultaneously: Lusitania, where Ender and Valentine race to prevent a deadly descolada virus from spreading; Path, a Chinese-influenced planet whose most gifted citizens are afflicted with obsessive-compulsive rituals they believe are divine; and a Starways Congress determined to eliminate the threat by destroying an entire planet.

The new director of the Southern Reach — the agency that monitors Area X — inherits a dysfunctional organisation, a returned Biologist who cannot remember her expedition, and the dawning realisation that the border between Area X and the outside world may not be where anyone thought.

The fourth book in the Ender saga, picking up immediately from Xenocide. As a fleet approaches to destroy Lusitania and the AI Jane faces deletion, Ender, his family, and the worlds' three sentient species race to prevent catastrophe — and to save Jane's life.

The fifth and final book Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker's Guide series — which he subtitled 'the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy.' Arthur Dent searches for a home across parallel Earths while a darker, more fatalistic comedy takes hold.

Michael Crichton's satirical thriller weaves together multiple storylines involving biotech corporations, genetic patents, talking transgenic animals, and the researchers, lawyers, and patients caught in the commercialization of the human genome. It is a darkly comedic indictment of an industry racing ahead of its own ethics.