Best Science Fiction Books

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to its capitalist twin planet in this dual-narrative exploration of two radically different societies and the meaning of freedom.

A series of linked stories following the colonisation of Mars by humans fleeing an increasingly troubled Earth — a work less concerned with the science of space travel than with what humanity brings with it, and what it destroys in the process.

Twelve years after his jihad swept across the known universe, Paul Muad'Dib sits on the throne of an empire built on ten billion dead. His prescience is a prison, his legend a weapon turned against him, and a conspiracy is forming to finally bring him down.

The Reckoners take their fight to Babylon Restored — the flooded ruins of Manhattan — pursuing the Epic known as Regalia while David confronts the possibility that not all Epics are irredeemably corrupt.

On his 75th birthday, John Perry enlists in an interstellar military that promises old soldiers a new young body — but at a cost he couldn't have imagined.

Spensa goes undercover among the alien Superiority to discover the truth behind their war against humanity, only to find that the conflict — and her own abilities — are far more complicated than she was told.

Ten years after a cosmic event granted ordinary people superhuman abilities, the Epics have taken over as tyrants rather than heroes. David Charleston joins the Reckoners — ordinary humans who hunt Epics — to kill Steelheart, the most powerful Epic alive.

A soldier fighting an interstellar war discovers that time dilation means each tour of duty lasts years, while centuries pass at home — making Earth progressively unrecognisable.

Luna's penal colony population, assisted by a self-aware computer, organises a revolution against Earth's authority in this Hugo Award-winning political science fiction novel.

An undercover narc in near-future California becomes addicted to the drug he's surveilling, losing his grip on his own identity in this partly autobiographical novel by Philip K. Dick.

The Reckoners track the source of Epic powers to Ildithia — the former Atlanta — and David confronts the cosmic force behind Calamity itself, with the future of both Epics and ordinary humans at stake.

A writer researching the life of the atomic bomb's inventor discovers ice-nine — a form of water that freezes solid at room temperature — in the hands of dangerous and careless people. Vonnegut's darkest comedy.

Alien Overlords arrive over Earth and usher in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity — but the price is humanity's future.

Spensa enters the Nowhere — a dimension outside normal space-time — to master her cytonic abilities and find a way to save humanity from the Superiority, encountering fragments of ancient civilizations and the truth about why cytonics are feared.

Two city-states occupy the same geography but citizens must 'unsee' the other city on pain of intervention by a mysterious force called Breach. A noir detective novel and a meditation on perception.

Joe Chip works for a psychic-shielding agency in a world of commercial telepaths, until a bomb blast sends his team into a reality that keeps regressing — a mind-bending exploration of reality, death, and consumerism.

Paul Atreides is gone. His twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, inherit both his bloodline and his terrifying prescience — while a crumbling empire and Alia's increasingly erratic regency threaten to consume everything Paul built and sacrificed.

One hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to begin humanity's first permanent settlement — and the political and philosophical fault lines that will define the planet's future immediately emerge.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

An alternate history set in an Axis-occupied America where the Allies lost WWII — Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning masterwork of speculative fiction.