Best Science Fiction Books

Gideon Nav is a swordswoman, a necromancer's servant, and — against every wish she possesses — about to become a detective. When nine noble houses compete in a death tournament, the body count rises and someone is killing necromancers.

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.

Todd, Viola, and the Spackle leader 1017 navigate three-way war on New World, with arrival of the Answer's ship adding a fourth power. The Carnegie Medal-winning conclusion to Chaos Walking is one of the great YA trilogy endings — costly, honest, and earned.

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.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown — a colony world where a germ has made everyone's thoughts audible as constant Noise — until he discovers a pocket of silence in the swamp and finds Viola, the first girl he has ever seen, whose ship crashed nearby.

The second Wayfarers novel — Sidra, the AI who used to run a starship, now lives inside a human body kit. Alongside her human companion Pepper, she must learn what it means to be one small, embodied person in a vast universe.

A marine biologist named Leigh discovers strange biological activity at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — then finds herself selected for a mission that will take her far further than any ocean. A novel about life, origin, and what it means to ascend toward something beyond human comprehension.

The crew of the Wayfarer, a tunnelling ship that builds wormholes through space, takes a contract that will carry them on a long journey to the dangerous heart of the galaxy — and deepens the bonds between its very different crew members along the way.

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.

Stanisław Lem's classic of philosophical science fiction. On a station orbiting the planet Solaris, scientists confront a vast, sentient ocean that resurrects their most painful memories in living form, forcing a reckoning with the limits of human understanding.

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.

Jernau Gurgeh, the Culture's greatest game player, is sent to the Empire of Azad to compete in the civilization-defining game that gives the empire its name. The game is a mirror of the empire's values — and Gurgeh's progress through it is a confrontation with everything the Culture stands against.

Set in the same world as Perdido Street Station — Bellis Coldwine flees New Crobuzon on a ship that is captured by pirates and brought to Armada, a city built on a raft of lashed-together ships on the open sea.

The eighth Expanse novel. Under the heel of the Laconian empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante wage a covert resistance while High Consul Duarte's experiments provoke the unknowable alien power that destroyed the protomolecule's makers.

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

In the months after a nuclear war has killed every living thing in the Northern Hemisphere, the survivors in Melbourne wait for the radioactive cloud to reach Australia. On the Beach follows a small group of men, women, and a US submarine commander as they face the end of all human life with quiet, heartbreaking dignity.

Alien visitors briefly landed on Earth, then departed, leaving behind six Zones filled with mysterious and lethal artifacts. Stalkers illegally enter the Zones to retrieve these artifacts for sale on the black market. A Soviet SF classic and the basis for Tarkovsky's film Stalker, exploring humanity's relationship with the incomprehensible.

Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is sent to a remote island in Vietnam where a species of octopus may have developed language and culture — while a corporate entity races to exploit the discovery, and questions about the nature of intelligence grow urgent.

The third Bas-Lag novel — as New Crobuzon convulses with revolution, a man named Cutter travels into the wilderness to find the Iron Council: a perpetual-motion train run by the workers who took it decades ago, still running through the badlands.

On the human-settled world of Anjiin, where humanity's origins are forgotten, a brilliant research team is captured when the alien Carryx empire conquers the planet and carries off useful humans as enslaved labor to compete for survival.

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.

On a distant planet, human colonists live in Embassytown, a city bordering an alien race whose language is unlike any other — they can only speak truth, and only through two voices speaking simultaneously. When a human learns to speak their language, it triggers a catastrophe that could destroy the alien civilization.

On a colonised Mars, a repairman named Jack Bohlen has schizophrenia, and an autistic boy named Manfred Steiner may be able to see the future. A corrupt water-union boss wants to exploit Manfred's ability for real estate speculation. The novel explores autism, time, capitalism, and the nature of reality with characteristic Dick intensity.

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.