Best Science Fiction Books

Arthur C. Clarke's visionary novel set a billion years in the future. In the enclosed, eternal city of Diaspar, where its immortal inhabitants have not ventured outside for aeons, a restless young man named Alvin sets out to discover what lies beyond — and uncovers the lost truth of humanity's past.

The fourth and final Wayfarers novel. When a technical disaster strands a handful of alien travelers together at a remote spaceport, strangers from different species must share days of forced proximity — and discover their commonalities and differences in Chambers's signature gentle science fiction.

The Special Forces soldiers of the Colonial Defense Forces are the Ghost Brigades — created from the DNA of the dead, with no memories of previous lives. When a traitor's consciousness is inserted into one of them, Scalzi explores identity and loyalty in a worthy sequel to Old Man's War.

Dick Young, staying at his friend's house in Cornwall, takes an experimental drug that sends him back to fourteenth-century Cornwall — where he becomes obsessed with the lives of a long-dead woman and her circle.

On an island that is the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic fog killed the rest of the world, someone has murdered the scientist maintaining the barrier that keeps the fog at bay. If the murderer isn't found in 107 hours, the barrier falls and everyone dies. Turton's most structurally inventive mystery: a closed-room that is an entire civilisation.

Arthur Dent and his improbable companions dine at Milliways — the restaurant at the literal end of the universe — while continuing to flee Vogons, encounter the man who rules the universe, and discover the deeply unsatisfying truth about the planet Earth.

In an overcrowded future Earth, colonists escape their misery through illegal hallucinations mediated by a corporate drug called Can-D. When the magnate Palmer Eldritch returns from Proxima Centauri with a new drug called Chew-Z, reality itself becomes uncertain — because Chew-Z hallucinations may not be hallucinations at all. Dick's most theologically disturbing novel.

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.

On a far-future moon where humanity has retreated to let nature reclaim the continent, a tea monk named Dex leaves their comfortable life seeking something they can't name. In the wilderness, they encounter Mosscap — a robot who wants to understand what humans need. A Hugo Award-winning novella of gentle philosophy.

Charles Wallace, now fifteen, travels through time on the back of the unicorn Gaudior to change the course of history and prevent a nuclear war, while Meg participates from a distance through kything — a form of telepathic sharing.

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.

The sixth Expanse novel. In the aftermath of the catastrophe that ended Nemesis Games, the solar system unites against the Free Navy's radical Belter insurgency, and the crew of the Rocinante joins a sprawling effort to end a war that threatens everyone.

Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist searching for signs of life on other planets, raises his neurodivergent son Robin alone after his wife's death. When Robin's emotional dysregulation threatens his school placement, Theo enrolls him in an experimental neurofeedback program that maps his brain against recordings of his late mother — with transformative and devastating results.

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.

Dwayne Hoover is a successful car dealer having a mental breakdown. Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer no one has ever heard of who is about to meet Dwayne. Vonnegut himself wanders through the novel as a character watching his own creations. Breakfast of Champions is a satirical attack on American culture so broad it becomes a self-portrait.

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.

The second novel in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy follows three intersecting storylines — a young hacker, a mercenary, and an art dealer — across a near-future world where the AIs of Neuromancer have fragmented into something resembling the voodoo loa.

After nuclear war destroys civilization, Lilith Iyapo wakes aboard an alien ship. The Oankali offer humanity survival — but at the cost of genetic merger. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy opener explores consent, power, and what it means to remain human.

Dirk Gently, self-styled holistic detective, investigates a case involving a ghost, an electric monk, a time machine, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge — all of which, he insists, are fundamentally connected.

Andy McGee and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie are on the run from a shadowy government agency called The Shop after years of experiments have left Charlie with pyrokinetic abilities she can barely control. The more frightened Charlie becomes, the larger and less predictable her fires.

Decades after the events of Red Mars, the terraforming debate intensifies as the planet's surface slowly changes. Robinson's Hugo Award-winning middle volume deepens the political and ecological complexity of the trilogy while advancing its multi-generational saga.

Set in a near-future North America where years are sponsored by corporations, David Foster Wallace's sprawling novel interweaves two main locations — the Enfield Tennis Academy and the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House — around the search for a film so entertaining that viewers lose all will to do anything else.

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.