Best Science Fiction Books

Cylinders from Mars crash into the English countryside and open to reveal tentacled Martians who begin methodically annihilating human civilization with heat-rays and tripod war machines. Wells's 1898 novel invented the alien invasion genre and used it to turn the logic of British imperial power inside out, placing England in the position of the colonised.

Five characters across three time periods — fifteenth-century Constantinople, contemporary Idaho, and a generation ship in the distant future — are connected by a single ancient Greek manuscript. A meditation on why stories matter.

Professor Otto Lidenbrock finds a runic message revealing a route to the centre of the earth through an Icelandic volcano. He drags his reluctant nephew Axel and a taciturn Icelandic guide into the depths — through vast underground seas, prehistoric forests, and geological wonders — in Verne's most rapturously imaginative novel.

In the aftermath of the Dark Age, the survivors must rebuild or die. Darrow fights to hold what remains of the Republic. Lysander takes the final steps toward the destiny he was born into. And revelations about the origins of the Society recast everything that has come before.

Darrow must rebuild the revolution from almost nothing, rallying allies across the solar system for a final war to dismantle the Society and free the color castes from oppression.

Humanity discovers that the Trisolarans can monitor all electronic communication — except what is kept inside a single human mind. Four Wallfacers are given unlimited resources to develop secret strategies for Earth's defence, while Liu Cixin introduces the dark forest theory of cosmic sociology.

An unnamed Victorian inventor builds a machine that carries him to the year 802,701, where he discovers humanity has diverged into two degenerate species: the frail, childlike Eloi who live in crumbling palaces, and the subterranean Morlocks who tend the machines below ground. Wells's slim, ferocious novella invented time travel as a literary device and deployed it as a savage critique of Victorian class divisions.

Marine biologist Professor Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land are captured by the enigmatic Captain Nemo and taken aboard the technologically miraculous submarine Nautilus for an involuntary voyage across the world's oceans. Verne's 1870 novel imagined submarine travel decades before it existed and created in Nemo one of fiction's great compelling anti-heroes.

A Martian marine survives an impossible attack on Ganymede; a UN politician navigates Earth's political response to the expanding protomolecule crisis. Both storylines converge on the Rocinante crew as the solar system inches toward full-scale war.

Two interweaving storylines — one set during World War II, one in the late 1990s tech boom — converge on a buried treasure, a data haven, and the mathematics of cryptography.

The conclusion of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy follows Cheng Xin across centuries of Earth's future as she makes two decisions that determine the fate of humanity — while Liu Cixin expands the scale to cosmological: dimensions collapse, the universe degrades, and survival is asked at the level of the laws of physics themselves.

Darrow has risen within Gold society as a decorated student, but his mission to dismantle the Society from within deepens as he navigates treacherous political and military warfare across the solar system.

Griffin, a scientist who has discovered how to render himself invisible, arrives at a village inn in bandages and dark glasses — and rapidly descends from scientific triumph into paranoia and violence. Wells's dark comedy is simultaneously a thriller, a satire of scientific hubris, and a warning that power without accountability corrupts absolutely.

Edward Prendick, shipwrecked and rescued, finds himself on a remote Pacific island where the reclusive Dr Moreau performs surgical experiments that transform animals into humanoid creatures who speak and live by a recited Law. Wells's most disturbing novel is a horror story, a philosophical fable about evolution and ethics, and one of science fiction's most sustained meditations on what separates humans from animals.

Cheradenine Zakalwe is a man the Culture's covert operations division Special Circumstances keeps pulling out of retirement for impossible missions. Told in two interlocking timelines — one moving forward, one backward — Use of Weapons is a devastating character study disguised as space opera.

On the world of Arbre, scholars called avout live cloistered in mathic communities called concents, their contact with the outside world restricted to once every year, decade, century, or millennium — until an alien object enters orbit and changes everything.

Spensa returns from the Nowhere with new understanding of her cytonic abilities as humanity makes its final stand against the Superiority, and the truth about the Delvers and the nature of consciousness itself must be resolved.

The Foundation has survived its first two centuries through Hari Seldon's psychohistory — until the Mule arrives. A mutant of immeasurable mental power, the Mule is the one event psychohistory could not predict, and his conquest of the Foundation threatens to collapse thousands of years of carefully planned history into chaos.

Lauren Olamina's Earthseed community faces its greatest threat when a theocratic demagogue rises to power — mirroring America's darkest impulses. Butler's Nebula Award-winning sequel to Parable of the Sower is even more prophetic and more devastating than its predecessor.

After the Mule's defeat, the galaxy is preoccupied with finding the mysterious Second Foundation — whose existence could either save or undermine the First Foundation's plan. Two storylines unfold: the Mule's search, and then the First Foundation's own search years later. The location of the Second Foundation is the central mystery of the original trilogy.

Spensa dreams of becoming a pilot in humanity's fight against the alien Krell, but her father's disgrace as a supposed coward has barred her from flight school. When she discovers a crashed, ancient starfighter with an unlikely AI, she finds a path to the sky — and to truths about the war her society would rather keep buried.

Three thousand years after Ender's Game, the now-ancient Ender Wiggin becomes a Speaker for the Dead on a world where a second contact with aliens threatens to become the second genocide.

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.

The seven pilgrims' fates converge as the Ousters invade and the Time Tombs open. Simmons resolves the mysteries of its predecessor while expanding the stakes to civilizational scale — a Hugo Award-winning conclusion to what many consider SF's greatest duology.