Best Science Fiction Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Six years after the Jurassic Park disaster, a separate island — Site B — is discovered still teeming with dinosaurs that have been surviving without human interference. Ian Malcolm leads a small expedition to study them, unaware that they're not the only ones there.