Best Science Fiction Books

The third Wayfarers novel — set in the Exodus Fleet, a convoy of generation ships that left Earth centuries ago. A meditation on tradition, mortality, and what communities do when they are no longer necessary.

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 sequel to Ancillary Justice: Breq, now a Ship Captain, is sent to a remote station to maintain order while the Radch empire tears itself apart over its ruler's divided consciousness.

The conclusion of Robinson's Mars trilogy — Mars is now green and blue, the terraforming essentially complete. The political, ecological, and personal questions opened by Red Mars and Green Mars are resolved, as the original colonists age and the generation they created comes into its own.

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.

The spiders of Kern's World encounter an alien civilization of uplifted cephalopods — octopuses who have evolved sapience along entirely different lines. Tchaikovsky's sequel to Children of Time raises the stakes and deepens the alien cognition that made its predecessor so extraordinary.

The first human colony on an exoplanet beyond the ring gates faces a conflict between Belter settlers who arrived first and a corporate expedition claiming legal authority — while the planet itself wakes up.

SETI researcher Ellie Arroway detects a signal from the star Vega containing construction plans for a mysterious machine. Sagan's only novel is a rigorous and emotionally powerful exploration of first contact, faith versus science, and what humanity might say about itself to the universe.

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.

In a world where humans have nearly vanished, a young man named Vic lives in a forest with his found family of robots. When Vic's mechanical father is taken by the Authority — the machine system that controls what remains of civilisation — Vic and his companions must venture into a world of metal and memory to bring him home. Klune's retelling of Pinocchio.

Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter with a pathological sensitivity to corporate branding, is hired to trace the source of mysterious film footage appearing anonymously online — footage that obsesses millions of people worldwide.

A time-travel investigator in the twenty-fifth century investigates an anomaly that appears across centuries: 1912 British Columbia, 2020 New York, 2203 on the moon. Mandel's most formally ambitious novel braids pandemic themes with time-travel structure into a meditation on art, simulation, and what human beings owe each other across time.

When a colonisation vessel suffers critical damage to its deceleration system, its crew of fifty find themselves unable to slow down — accelerating ever closer to the speed of light, watching millennia pass outside while they age normally within. A masterpiece of hard science fiction that takes Einstein's equations to their most terrifying logical conclusion.

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.

The Special Forces soldiers of the Colonial Defense Forces are the Ghost Brigades — created from the DNA of the dead, with no memories of previous lives. When a traitor's consciousness is inserted into one of them, Scalzi explores identity and loyalty in a worthy sequel to Old Man's War.

Dick Young, staying at his friend's house in Cornwall, takes an experimental drug that sends him back to fourteenth-century Cornwall — where he becomes obsessed with the lives of a long-dead woman and her circle.

On an island that is the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic fog killed the rest of the world, someone has murdered the scientist maintaining the barrier that keeps the fog at bay. If the murderer isn't found in 107 hours, the barrier falls and everyone dies. Turton's most structurally inventive mystery: a closed-room that is an entire civilisation.

Arthur Dent and his improbable companions dine at Milliways — the restaurant at the literal end of the universe — while continuing to flee Vogons, encounter the man who rules the universe, and discover the deeply unsatisfying truth about the planet Earth.

In an overcrowded future Earth, colonists escape their misery through illegal hallucinations mediated by a corporate drug called Can-D. When the magnate Palmer Eldritch returns from Proxima Centauri with a new drug called Chew-Z, reality itself becomes uncertain — because Chew-Z hallucinations may not be hallucinations at all. Dick's most theologically disturbing novel.

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.

On a far-future moon where humanity has retreated to let nature reclaim the continent, a tea monk named Dex leaves their comfortable life seeking something they can't name. In the wilderness, they encounter Mosscap — a robot who wants to understand what humans need. A Hugo Award-winning novella of gentle philosophy.

Charles Wallace, now fifteen, travels through time on the back of the unicorn Gaudior to change the course of history and prevent a nuclear war, while Meg participates from a distance through kything — a form of telepathic sharing.