Best Science Fiction Books

Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect discover that the people of Krikkit — a planet that had never known there were other stars — have declared war on the entire universe, and it falls to an extremely unlikely group of heroes to stop them.

Sandy and Dennys Murry — the 'normal' twins — accidentally travel back to biblical times, to the era just before Noah's flood, where they encounter nephilim, seraphim, and Noah's family in a story about choice, mortality, and the nature of good and evil.

The concluding volume of the Sprawl trilogy follows four separate storylines — including a young girl called Mona, a simstim star's bodyguard, and Kumiko, the daughter of a Japanese crime lord — as they converge on the mystery of what Angie Mitchell's direct neural interface connects her to.

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.

A cloud of self-replicating nanobots escapes a remote Nevada research facility and begins evolving with terrifying speed, forcing a stay-at-home software engineer to confront a threat that is simultaneously invisible, intelligent, and multiplying. Michael Crichton's nanotechnology thriller melds evolutionary biology with edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Claire, a young Birthmother in Jonas's Community from The Giver, escapes after her son is taken as a Receiver, and spends years pursuing him across a vast geography in the fourth and final book of the Giver Quartet.

A team of scientists is assembled under the Pacific Ocean to investigate a mysterious spacecraft found on the ocean floor — a spacecraft that pre-dates any known human technology. Inside they find a perfect gold sphere. And then the sphere begins to respond to them, and the real terror begins.

An alien assumes the identity of a Cambridge mathematician who has just solved the Riemann hypothesis. As it learns what it means to be human — through peanut butter, Emily Dickinson, and a dog named Newton — the novel becomes an unexpected meditation on why life is worth living.

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.

An invisible, impenetrable dome descends without warning on the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine, sealing it off from the outside world. As resources dwindle and communication with the exterior becomes impossible, the town's worst political instincts emerge with terrifying speed.

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.

Three thousand five hundred years after the events of Children of Dune, Leto II — now half-human, half-sandworm — rules as God Emperor. He has seen all possible human futures and chosen the only path that ensures humanity's survival: a brutal peace that will ultimately shatter into the Scattering. The most philosophical and challenging book in the Dune series.

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.

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

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.

Polly O'Keefe — daughter of Meg Murry — discovers a time gate near her grandparents' New England farm that opens into the world of three thousand years ago, where she becomes entangled in a conflict between two ancient peoples and a druid named Karralys.

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

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 third Ender novel expands to three worlds simultaneously: Lusitania, where Ender and Valentine race to prevent a deadly descolada virus from spreading; Path, a Chinese-influenced planet whose most gifted citizens are afflicted with obsessive-compulsive rituals they believe are divine; and a Starways Congress determined to eliminate the threat by destroying an entire planet.