Best Science Fiction Books

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.

A generation ship carrying over two thousand colonists departs Earth for Tau Ceti, seven generations and 160 years away. Told partly from the perspective of the ship's evolving artificial intelligence, Aurora is a rigorous, moving exploration of what interstellar travel would actually cost.

In a ruined city dominated by a giant flying bear named Mord, a scavenger named Rachel finds a strange creature she calls Borne attached to Mord's fur — and raises it in secret as it grows and changes beyond anything she expected.

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.

Set in the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy but following different characters, Ingray Aughskold steals a prisoner from a secure facility as part of a scheme to impress her mother, and finds herself in the middle of a diplomatic crisis involving the authenticity of her people's historical artefacts.

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.

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.

In 2043, American soldiers fight a distant war by remotely operating robotic killing machines called soldierboys — linked neurally in teams of ten — while a physicist discovers a plot to recreate the Big Bang that would destroy the universe.

In a Nevada desert facility, a cloud of self-replicating nanobots has escaped containment, evolved predatory behavior, and begun hunting the humans outside. Jack Forman — a software engineer and stay-at-home dad — must enter the facility to stop the experiment before the swarm becomes something that cannot be stopped at all.

Ragle Gumm wins a newspaper contest called Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? every single day. He lives in a pleasant 1950s suburb. He begins to notice that things in his world are slightly wrong — objects dissolve, structures fail to match their descriptions, reality seems to have seams. His comfortable suburban life may be an elaborate construction.

Two shapeshifting alien entities — one benign, one predatory — have lived on Earth for millions of years, each gradually learning to pass as human. A mysterious artifact discovered on the ocean floor draws them both toward the same location.

A giant squid specimen disappears from the Natural History Museum, and Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is drawn into London's hidden world of apocalyptic cults, squid-worshippers, and magical London underbelly.

An alternative 1980s London where Alan Turing survived and the first synthetic humans have just been manufactured. Charlie buys one — Adam — and shares custody of it with Miranda, his upstairs neighbour. A love triangle and the questions it raises about consciousness and moral status.

Three storylines converge around a mysterious shipping container in post-9/11 America: a journalist investigating locative art, a drug-addicted translator working for a shadowy operative, and a Cuban-Chinese crime family tracking the same cargo.

Thomas finally has the answers he's been seeking — who WICKED is, what the Trials were for, and what the Flare does to its victims. But the cure may cost more than anyone imagined, and WICKED's final phase has only just begun.

Six years after the catastrophe at Jurassic Park, mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm joins a covert expedition to Isla Sorna — Site B — where InGen's dinosaurs have been breeding and evolving without human interference. What they find there is far more dangerous than anyone anticipated.

Mark Spitz is a sweeper — part of a civilian unit tasked with clearing zombies from lower Manhattan after a plague. The novel covers three days of his work, interspersed with flashbacks to the collapse and his survival of it. A literary zombie novel about grief, memory, and the texture of the American city in ruins.

The Southern Reach trilogy concludes with three parallel timelines: Control and Ghost Bird inside Area X, the former Director on the last expedition she ever launched, and the original lighthouse keeper in the years before Area X appeared.

A MIT graduate student accidentally builds a time machine that can only travel forward — each jump taking him exponentially further into the future — and must find a way back or keep jumping into an ever more distant Earth.

The new director of the Southern Reach — the agency that monitors Area X — inherits a dysfunctional organisation, a returned Biologist who cannot remember her expedition, and the dawning realisation that the border between Area X and the outside world may not be where anyone thought.

In a near-future America where women are restricted to 100 words per day by government-issued wrist counters, neurolinguist Dr. Jean McClellan must rediscover her voice when the regime suddenly needs her expertise.