Best Science Fiction Books

When the moon inexplicably breaks apart, scientists calculate that Earth will become uninhabitable within two years. The surviving remnant of humanity must learn to live in space — and the seven women who survive a catastrophic orbital crisis become the mothers of all future humanity.

Rico joins the Terran Mobile Infantry to fight in an interstellar war against insectoid aliens. Heinlein's Hugo-winning novel is a passionate defence of civic virtue, military service, and the idea that citizenship must be earned — one of SF's most celebrated and most debated books.

A satellite crashes in rural Arizona, and everyone in the nearest town is dead within minutes. A team of scientists races to a secret underground lab to identify and contain an extraterrestrial microorganism before it escapes — and before the government's nuclear failsafe triggers and makes everything catastrophically worse.

A girl's impulsive act in 1984 draws her into a centuries-long conflict between two secret factions; the novel spans her entire life across six decades.

Set in a twenty-first century England that has adopted republican government, Mary Shelley's visionary 1826 novel follows Lionel Verney as a plague sweeps across the world, wiping out humanity one country at a time, until he walks the earth alone — the last human survivor. One of the earliest and most devastating pandemic novels ever written.

An alternate history set in an Axis-occupied America where the Allies lost WWII — Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning masterwork of speculative fiction.

The fourth and final Hyperion Cantos novel. As Aenea grows into her role as messiah and her teachings spread, the theocratic Pax moves to crush her, and the saga builds toward a revelation about love, faith, and the fate of human consciousness across the galaxy.

In a brutal near-future America, desperate man Ben Richards enters a televised game show where contestants are hunted across the country and killed for entertainment — and prize money his family cannot survive without.

Horselover Fat — a thinly veiled version of Philip K. Dick — receives a beam of pink light that reveals divine information to him in 1974. VALIS is Dick's attempt to rationalise this experience through science fiction, Gnostic theology, and painful self-examination. Part novel, part theological treatise, part mental breakdown.

Meg Murry must journey inside her brother Charles Wallace's cells to battle a cosmic evil called the Echthroi, accompanied by a Teacher named Blajeny and a strange creature called Proginoskes, in a quest that turns on the power of naming and love.

A tech consortium races into the Congo rainforest to find a lost city — and the deposits of industrial diamonds it holds. They are joined by a primatologist and her signing gorilla named Amy, who may hold the key to what killed the previous expedition. Crichton combines African adventure, corporate espionage, and animal intelligence research.

The first of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. Against the backdrop of a vast war between the post-scarcity, AI-run utopia of the Culture and the religious Idiran Empire, the shape-shifting mercenary Horza — who hates the Culture — hunts a fugitive Mind across the galaxy.

The third Hyperion Cantos novel, set 274 years after the fall of the Hegemony. Raul Endymion is charged with protecting a girl named Aenea, who may be humanity's messiah, from the theocratic Church that now rules the worlds — beginning a chase across the galaxy.

In 2043, American soldiers fight a distant war by remotely operating robotic killing machines called soldierboys — linked neurally in teams of ten — while a physicist discovers a plot to recreate the Big Bang that would destroy the universe.

Fifteen hundred years after the death of the God Emperor, the human race has scattered across the stars and is now returning. Heretics of Dune, the fifth Dune novel, follows the Bene Gesserit as they confront a new power that threatens to end them and a child who may be the key to survival.

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.

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.

The thrilling conclusion to Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogy. In a world where love is a disease to be cured, Lena has crossed fully into the resistance. Told in alternating voices by Lena and her former best friend Hana, Requiem brings the rebellion against the regime to its breaking point.

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.