Best Science Fiction Books

Set in the near future, a UN agency called the Ministry for the Future works to implement the Paris Agreement and prevent civilizational collapse. Robinson's most urgent novel combines economic analysis, political thriller, and climate science into an argument for why the future might still be saved.

An engineer attempts to build the world's first space elevator from a mountain peak in Sri Lanka, while contending with religious opposition, engineering challenges, and the island's own ancient history. Won both Hugo and Nebula Awards.

The motley crew of the tunneling ship Wayfarer accepts a long job crossing the galaxy to build a wormhole, and the journey — not the destination — is the entire point.

Written in 1920–21, We follows D-503, a mathematician-engineer of the One State's Glass City where citizens are reduced to numbered ciphers under total surveillance — the novel that invented modern dystopia and quietly handed its blueprints to Orwell and Huxley.

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

The Republic is fracturing. Darrow is stranded on Mercury, his allies split between political factions tearing the Senate apart, and Lysander au Lune consolidates power with terrifying efficiency. The bloodiest, most brutal book in the saga — and the one that reveals what Pierce Brown is truly capable of.

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.

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.

In a colonised solar system on the edge of political collapse, a ship captain and a detective converge on a mystery that begins with a missing woman and ends with something that threatens all of humanity.

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 1945, a British combat nurse is mysteriously transported to eighteenth-century Scotland, where she becomes entangled with the Jacobite rising and a Highland warrior named Jamie Fraser.

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.

In a future dystopia, teenager Wade Watts escapes reality in the OASIS virtual reality world and joins a global competition to find a hidden treasure that will determine control of the internet.

A secret military project during China's Cultural Revolution makes contact with an alien civilization, setting in motion events that will determine the fate of humanity.

A monolith of alien origin guides humanity from its ape origins to a journey beyond Jupiter in this landmark novel written alongside Kubrick's film.

In post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts down rogue androids nearly indistinguishable from humans — the basis for the film Blade Runner.

Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, pursues the man in black across a vast desert in the first volume of Stephen King's magnum opus.

Meg Murry, her genius brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin travel through space and time using a tesseract to rescue Meg's father from an evil force controlling the universe.

Kathy H. narrates the story of her childhood at Hailsham boarding school and her adult relationships with Tommy and Ruth — as the nature of their existence as clones destined to donate their organs gradually becomes clear.

A neuroscientist builds a device that can record and restore memories, effectively allowing people to return to pivotal moments in their lives. But when her technology is weaponized, it threatens to destroy the very fabric of reality — and only a New York detective who has lived through multiple timelines can stop it.

In a future Chicago divided into five virtue-based factions, sixteen-year-old Tris Prior must choose where she belongs — and discovers she may not belong anywhere.

An Artificial Friend named Klara, powered by sunlight and possessed of extraordinary observational gifts, narrates her life alongside a sickly teenage girl and her mother in a near-future America.