Best Science Fiction Books

New York City in the far future is a vast enclosed city of eight million people who rarely venture outside. Detective Elijah Baley is assigned to investigate a murder at a Spacer enclave — and is given a robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw. Asimov's fusion of science fiction and classic detective fiction, set in one of his most vividly imagined futures.

In a nanotechnology-driven future of neo-Victorian societies, a young girl from the underclass receives an illegal interactive primer that teaches her to think, adapt, and eventually to lead a revolution.

A soldier fighting an interstellar war discovers that time dilation means each tour of duty lasts years, while centuries pass at home — making Earth progressively unrecognisable.

Children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities are abducted from their homes and taken to a facility in rural Maine called The Institute, where their gifts are exploited for purposes they cannot initially understand. Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis, gifted beyond any previous subject, becomes the unlikely center of a resistance.

Luna's penal colony population, assisted by a self-aware computer, organises a revolution against Earth's authority in this Hugo Award-winning political science fiction novel.

Malachi Constant is the richest man in America, living proof that God favours the fortunate. He is then recruited into a Martian army, loses his memory, survives a pointless war on Earth, and winds up on Titan. The cosmic joke at the centre of The Sirens of Titan asks whether human history is meaningful or merely convenient — and the answer is bleak and funny in equal measure.

The second MaddAddam Trilogy novel — Toby and Ren, former members of the God's Gardeners environmental cult, survive the waterless flood that destroyed civilization. Their stories run parallel to the events of Oryx and Crake, seen from a different angle.

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.

In a world inspired by Tang Dynasty China, giant mechas called Chrysalises are piloted by male pilots who drain the life force of their female co-pilots — until Wu Zetian engineers her own revenge from the inside.

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.