Best Science Fiction Books

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.

Cara can travel to parallel Earths — but only to those where her alternate selves are already dead. She's valuable precisely because she has died in so many other realities, and the wealthy corporation that employs her uses this to harvest resources from parallel worlds. Until she visits a world where she discovers why so many of her other selves have died young — and who is responsible.

Will Parry crosses into a world with a city called Cittagazze and encounters Lyra Belacqua. He finds the Subtle Knife — a blade that can cut windows between worlds. The middle volume of His Dark Materials expands the multiverse and introduces the concept of Dust as a contested force between science and religion.

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 second book of the Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis) trilogy. Akin, the first male human-Oankali construct, is born into a transformed Earth and kidnapped by human resisters, growing up between two species and forced to decide what humanity deserves.

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.

In linked short stories set across centuries, Sequoia Nagamatsu explores the aftermath of a plague released from the Siberian permafrost — following diverse characters across generations as humanity grieves, adapts, and ultimately reaches toward the stars in search of new beginnings.

The conclusion of the Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis) trilogy. Jodahs, the first human-Oankali construct to develop into an ooloi — the alien third sex — must master terrifying new powers and find acceptance, completing Butler's meditation on humanity, transformation, and the making of a new species.

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.

Nona wakes up with no memory and a body she doesn't know — and she is living an ordinary life in a city at war while the people around her treat her with an intensity she doesn't understand. She loves dogs and has six weeks.

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.

The seventh Expanse novel. Thirty years on, an older Rocinante crew faces a transformed galaxy as the militarized breakaway colony of Laconia returns through the gates with overwhelming technology and a plan to rule all of humanity.

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.

The conclusion of His Dark Materials — Lyra and Will descend into the land of the dead, the war against the Authority reaches its climax, and the full theological argument of the trilogy is made explicit. The first children's book to win the Whitbread Prize.

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.