Best Science Fiction Books

Two love stories separated by twenty-five years, united by the shared structure of DNA, Bach's Goldberg Variations, and Poe's cryptography tale — a novel about what science, music, and love have in common.

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.

The direct sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Sibling Dex and the robot Mosscap leave the wilderness and enter the human world, where Mosscap asks its central question: what do people need?

The protomolecule has constructed a massive ring gate beyond Uranus. A fleet of ships from all three factions converges on it, and inside the ring is something that will change humanity's relationship with the universe permanently.

The conclusion of the Imperial Radch trilogy: Breq faces a choice between the survival of her ship and crew and the larger question of what kind of empire the Radch should become.

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.

A novelist named Richard Powers returns to the university where he once studied and becomes involved in a bet: can a neural network be trained to pass a master's examination in English literature? As he trains the AI called Helen on the canon of Western literature, he finds himself examining his own failed relationships, his writing life, and what it means for a machine to truly understand.

Two narratives alternate in strictly separate chapters: in one, a 'Calcutec' data processor in near-future Tokyo is drawn into a conspiracy involving encrypted information and subterranean creatures; in the other, a nameless man enters a walled town where residents have no shadow and unicorn skulls must be read at dusk. The two stories converge on questions about consciousness, identity, and what it means to lose the self. Murakami's most structurally ambitious novel.

A decade after the revolution, Darrow has won — but peace has not followed. He defies the Republic he helped build to launch an unauthorized assault on Luna, fracturing the government from within. Three new POV characters — Lysander au Lune, Lyria, and Ephraim — reveal the cost of revolution across all levels of the Society.

The conclusion of the MaddAddam Trilogy — survivors of the waterless flood, including the Crakers (Crake's genetically engineered humans), form an uneasy community. Toby must tell the Crakers stories about the old world as they all try to build something new.

In a far-future world where cities have been mounted on enormous wheels and move across a barren landscape devouring smaller towns for resources, young historian Tom Natsworthy is thrown from London and must survive alongside a scarred girl who wants to assassinate London's most powerful man.

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.

Dave Lister, the laziest man in the universe, wakes up three million years into the future aboard the mining spaceship Red Dwarf, the last human alive, with only a hologram of his dead bunkmate and a creature that evolved from his cat for company.

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.

Todd and Viola are separated in a city under brutal occupation. As each is drawn into opposing sides of a conflict, Ness refuses to offer the comfortable moral clarity of most dystopian fiction — both resistance and authority use violence, and both claim necessity.

New York City in the far future is a vast enclosed city of eight million people who rarely venture outside. Detective Elijah Baley is assigned to investigate a murder at a Spacer enclave — and is given a robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw. Asimov's fusion of science fiction and classic detective fiction, set in one of his most vividly imagined futures.

In a nanotechnology-driven future of neo-Victorian societies, a young girl from the underclass receives an illegal interactive primer that teaches her to think, adapt, and eventually to lead a revolution.

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.

Children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are abducted from their homes and taken to a facility in rural Maine called The Institute, where their gifts are exploited for purposes they cannot initially understand. Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis, gifted beyond any previous subject, becomes the unlikely center of a resistance.

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.

Malachi Constant is the richest man in America, living proof that God favours the fortunate. He is then recruited into a Martian army, loses his memory, survives a pointless war on Earth, and winds up on Titan. The cosmic joke at the centre of The Sirens of Titan asks whether human history is meaningful or merely convenient — and the answer is bleak and funny in equal measure.

The second MaddAddam Trilogy novel — Toby and Ren, former members of the God's Gardeners environmental cult, survive the waterless flood that destroyed civilization. Their stories run parallel to the events of Oryx and Crake, seen from a different angle.