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Sci-Fi books

Science fiction from the genre-defining classics to the newest award winners: ships, cities, robots, first contact and the futures we keep writing about. 536 books so far, across 143 series, plus 274 titles with no series listed. This is page 2 of the shelf.

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Cover of The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

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Showing 48 of 536 books

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This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone · 2019

Two agents are fighting a war across every version of history, one working for a technological Agency and one for a biological Garden, and they are both very good at it. Red razes worlds to keep the timeline her employers prefer; Blue prunes branches to keep hers. Then Red finds a letter left in the ash, written to her by name, and answers it. Each message is hidden somewhere only the other will think to look, and each one is a small act of treason that gets harder to hide as the correspondence goes on. The two of them write to each other in secret while their agencies continue to fight.

Time travelScience fantasy

Rating coming soon

World War Z

Max Brooks · 2006

A United Nations investigator collects interviews from people who lived through the zombie war, ten years after it ended. The book has no main character: it has a doctor who saw the first case in a Chinese village, officials who drew up the plans that saved some countries and doomed others, soldiers, and survivors who happened to be in the wrong place when the outbreak reached them. The accounts are told in their own voices, from Antarctica to the orbital stations, and they describe the same events from positions that do not agree. What the speakers describe is a collapse, a long recovery, and the political decisions that shaped both.

Post-apocalypticMilitary science fiction

Rating coming soon

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut · 1969

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. An American soldier in the Second World War, he is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden, where he survives the firebombing in a meat locker under a slaughterhouse. After the war he becomes an optometrist in Ilium, New York, and is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, aliens who see every moment of a life as existing at once and who teach him to think about death the way their books do. The novel moves between his life, the war and the planet Tralfamadore without warning and without apology.

Time travelClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Giver

Lois Lowry · 1993

Jonas lives in a community where everything has been arranged so that nobody is frightened or uncomfortable. Food arrives, families are assigned by committee, jobs are handed out at the Ceremony of Twelve, and the whole system is described by a word the community uses for it: Sameness. Jonas is given the assignment nobody else wants, the Receiver of Memory, and the old man who trains him begins passing on the memories of what the world was like before the community decided to stop feeling things. He is also given the rule that he may lie. The rest of the novel is about what he does with that permission.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Catching Fire

Suzanne Collins · 2009

Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark came out of the Hunger Games alive, which was not supposed to happen, and the Capitol is treating their survival as a political problem. Katniss is back in District 12 with a house, a stipend and a set of people who will not quite look at her, and the districts are beginning to move in ways the government notices. President Snow arrives in her mother's house to explain what she owes him. The second part of the trilogy turns on the Victory Tour, and on the decision the Capitol makes about how to deal with the girl who became a symbol it did not want.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Shatter Me

Tahereh Mafi · 2011

Juliette Ferrars has been locked in a cell for two hundred and sixty-four days, and she has not touched another person in that time. Her skin kills: the one time it happened, the government body that now runs everything called it murder and shut her away, and nobody has explained what she is. Around her institution the world is failing, with plagues, shortages and clouds the wrong colour, and the Reestablishment has declared that its method is the only way to repair any of it. A boy is put into her cell, and the book follows what he was sent to find out.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick · 1962

The Axis powers won the Second World War, and by 1962 the United States has been divided between Imperial Japan on the west coast and Nazi Germany in the east, with a thin buffer of mountains in between. The novel follows a handful of people living inside that arrangement: a dealer in American antiques in San Francisco who trades with Japanese officials, his ex-wife, a Swiss businessman travelling on German papers, and a young woman who works for a Japanese trade mission. They are all reading the same banned book, a novel that imagines a world where the Allies won.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Artemis

Andy Weir · 2017

Artemis is the first city on the Moon, built into a dome, and it runs on tourism, aluminium and the kind of municipal arrangements that grow up wherever people live in a confined space. Jasmine Bashara, known as Jazz, works as a porter and smuggles small items on the side, which pays for the one thing she actually wants, an apartment in a better part of the dome. A wealthy regular client offers her a job that would solve the money problem in a single night. The job is sabotage, it involves the city's oxygen supply, and she takes it.

Hard science fiction

Rating coming soon

Dune Messiah

Frank Herbert · 1969

Twelve years after Paul Atreides took control of the desert planet and the spice trade, his empire is run from the capital city and his name is used to justify a war that has killed billions of people across the galaxy. He is a prophet who does not want the future he can see, and he is married to a princess for political reasons while his concubine remains the person he actually lives with. A conspiracy made up of the guild of navigators, the sisterhood that trained him and a face from the first book's dead arrives in the city to end his rule. Paul lets it come.

Space operaClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Foundation and Empire

Isaac Asimov · 1952

The Foundation has survived the collapse of the Galactic Empire by being small, technical and useful to its neighbours, and it has done so for two hundred years on the strength of a plan laid out by the mathematician Hari Seldon. Now the fight changes: a general of the dying Empire decides to restore its glory by crushing the Foundation and turns the Imperial fleet toward it, and the traders who have been the Foundation's real strength are not sure that Seldon's plan accounts for him. Then a second figure appears, a mutant called the Mule, and the plan stops working.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Second Foundation

Isaac Asimov · 1953

The Mule has taken the Foundation apart and is now looking for the other one. Hari Seldon established a second colony of scholars at the opposite end of the galaxy, and it has been hidden for centuries, which is the only reason the plan still has a chance: the Mule's search for it becomes the whole plot of the first half of the book. The second half moves the question forward by some years and puts a young woman and her father at the centre of a hunt run from the other direction, where the people doing the looking are being looked at in turn. The novel closes the trilogy.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Boneshaker

Cherie Priest · 2009

In an alternate version of the 1860s, Russian prospectors bring in an inventor called Leviticus Blue to build a machine that can mine through the ice of Alaska, and the machine instead tears a path through Seattle, collapses the city's foundations and releases a gas that turns people into the walking dead. Sixteen years later the survivors live behind a wall, and Blue's widow Briar keeps her head down and works in the factory. Her son, who was a baby when the disaster happened, decides to find out what his father was doing, and goes over the wall.

Post-apocalypticScience fantasy

Rating coming soon

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut · 1963

A writer working on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped goes looking for the family of one of the scientists who made it, and finds a research laboratory, a Caribbean island and a religion invented by a calypso singer. The island is called San Lorenzo, its people are poor, its ruler is a tyrant, and the scientist's legacy includes a form of ice that freezes at room temperature. The novel is short, made of very short chapters, and it treats the end of the world as an administrative matter.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Robert C. O'Brien · 1971

Mrs Frisby is a widowed mouse with four small children, and she has a problem that cannot wait: the family has to move to its summer quarters or face almost certain death, but her youngest son Timothy is ill with pneumonia and cannot be moved. She encounters the rats of NIMH, an extraordinary colony of highly intelligent creatures, who find a solution to her dilemma, and she in turn does them a great service.

Science fantasyAdventure fiction

Rating coming soon

Dreamcatcher

Stephen King · 2001

Four lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip at an isolated lodge in the Jefferson Tract, and there they find themselves caught between an alien invasion and an insane retired Air Force colonel. The four men share something they have kept since childhood, when they saved an older boy from a group of bullies: telepathy, shared dreaming and the ability to see a trace left behind by human movement.

Body horrorModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Circle

Dave Eggers · 2013

Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at a powerful technology company called the Circle, mainly through the help of her college friend Annie, who is one of the most influential people in the firm. Mae is impressed by the campus with its housing, gyms and parties. Her initially rewarding experience turns darker as the company's reach expands.

DystopianLiterary fiction

Rating coming soon

Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer · 2014

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades, and nature has reclaimed the last traces of human civilisation there. The twelfth expedition crosses the border expecting the unexpected, and Area X provides it: a massive topographic anomaly and life forms beyond understanding. The surprises that matter most are the ones the members brought with them.

Weird fictionFirst contact

Rating coming soon

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Douglas Adams · 1984

The fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence, which its own publisher describes as a trilogy of four, follows Arthur Dent after his return to a version of Earth. Its title is the message the dolphins left when they departed the planet shortly before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the book treats that joke as the starting point for a much quieter story.

Science fantasy

Rating coming soon

Meg

Steve Alten · 1997

On a classified dive into the deepest canyon of the Pacific, Jonas Taylor comes face to face with the largest predator in the history of the animal kingdom. He survives, and is haunted by what he is certain he saw but cannot prove: a megalodon, twenty tons of prehistoric shark. Written off as a casualty of post-traumatic stress, he spends years arguing that it still exists.

Creature featureModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Road

Cormac McCarthy · 2006

Some unnamed catastrophe has scoured the world to a burnt-out cinder inhabited by the last remnants of humanity and a few surviving animals. The sky is perpetually shrouded in dust, and the seasons are only variations in cold and dampness. Through this landscape a father and his young son travel on foot towards the southern coast, avoiding the bands of cannibals who control the roads.

Post-apocalypticLiterary fiction

Rating coming soon

The Maze Runner

James Dashner · 2009

Thomas wakes up in a lift with no memory except his first name. When the doors open he finds himself among boys who welcome him to the Glade, an open expanse surrounded by stone walls. None of them knows why they are there. Every morning the doors to the surrounding maze open, every night they close, and every thirty days a new boy arrives. Then a girl is sent up, with a message.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Life, the Universe and Everything

Douglas Adams · 1982

The third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence continues the travels of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and the rest of the crew through a universe that keeps producing absurd explanations for itself. The title refers to the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, which the earlier books had already established as a number rather than a solution to anything.

Science fantasy

Rating coming soon

Cell

Stephen King · 2006

A mysterious signal broadcast over the global mobile phone network turns the majority of the people who hear it into mindless and vicious animals. The novel follows a New England artist who is in Boston when it happens and who has to make his way north to find his young son, through a country that is coming apart around him.

Post-apocalypticModern horror

Rating coming soon

How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu · 2022

Dr Cliff Miyashiro travels to the Arctic Circle to continue his late daughter's research and finds a virus newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague it releases reshapes life on earth for generations, and the novel follows the people adjusting to that new world, including an aspiring comedian employed at a theme park built for terminally ill children. Grief is the book's subject as much as the catastrophe.

Climate fictionLiterary fiction

Rating coming soon

The City of Ember

Jeanne DuPrau · 2003

The city of Ember was built as a last refuge for the human race, and two hundred years later the great lamps that light it are beginning to flicker. When Lina finds part of an ancient message she becomes sure it holds a secret that will save the city, and she and her friend Doon have to work out the clues before the lights go out for good.

DystopianYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Under the Dome

Stephen King · 2009

At 11.44 on the morning of 21 October, the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is separated from the outside world by an invisible, semipermeable barrier of unknown origin that appears out of the sky without warning. The novel follows the town's inhabitants over the eight days that follow, as the community becomes a domed city.

DystopianModern horror

Rating coming soon

Enslave Me Sweetly

Gena Showalter · 2006

Eden Black walks among humans, protecting them from other-worlders who abduct and enslave. She looks human but is an alien of a kind distinguished by golden hair and skin and gifted with the ability to kill without remorse and with total accuracy, until the night she has one shot at a human slaver and misses. Failure is not in her vocabulary, and neither is partner, but she is assigned one.

Science fantasyParanormal romance

Rating coming soon

Caliban's War

James S. A. Corey · 2012

The solar system stands on the brink of war, and on Ganymede a Martian marine watches her platoon slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth a politician tries to stop the fighting from restarting, and on Venus an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet and is making changes nobody understands. James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante agree to help search for a missing child.

Space opera

Rating coming soon

Insurgent

Veronica Roth · 2012

One choice can transform a person or destroy them, and every choice has consequences. As unrest grows in the factions around her, Tris Prior tries to save the people she loves and herself while working through questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love. Her initiation day should have ended in celebration with her chosen faction, and instead it ended in horror.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury · 1950

The book chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, home to indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war. The stories progress chronologically, describing the first human colonisation of the planet while a handful of Martians remain, and then the colony left to fend for itself when Earth is destroyed.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Speaker for the Dead

Orson Scott Card · 1986

Ender Wiggin, the young military genius, discovers that a second alien war is inevitable and that he must put aside his fears in order to make peace with humanity's strange new brothers. The novel places a former commander in the position of explaining a dead people to the living rather than of fighting them.

First contactHard science fiction

Rating coming soon

Consider Phlebas

Iain M. Banks · 1987

The novel introduces the Culture, a ubiquitous utopia whose Minds control events, and sets it against its mortal sentient enemies. The plot follows an enemy of the Culture through the Idiran-Culture War, presenting various small versions of that conflict rather than one decisive campaign, and its title is taken from a line in a T. S. Eliot poem.

Space operaMilitary science fiction

Rating coming soon

Red Rising

Pierce Brown · 2014

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the colour-coded society of the future, and like his fellow Reds he works all day believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars habitable for future generations. Then he learns that humanity reached the surface generations ago, and that he and the other Reds are slaves to a decadent ruling class.

DystopianSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Flatland

Edwin Abbott Abbott · 1884

A square, who lives in the two-dimensional world of Flatland, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland and tries to convince its monarch that another dimension exists, which the monarch cannot see because everything he knows lies on a single line. The square is then visited by a sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland, who has to show him that world before he can conceive of it.

Classic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Ringworld

Larry Niven · 1970

The novel is part of Larry Niven's Known Space setting, and its backdrop is the Ringworld, a giant artifact six hundred million miles in circumference built around a sun. The story follows an expedition to the structure, and the book is the original award-winning title in a sequence of four novels. The remaining volumes followed in 1980, 1996 and 2004.

Hard science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Xenocide

Orson Scott Card · 1991

On Lusitania, Ender finds a world where humans, pequeninos and the Hive Queen could live together, but the planet also carries the descolada, a virus that kills every human it infects and that the pequeninos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress, fearing what would happen if the virus escaped, has ordered the destruction of the whole planet.

First contactHard science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson · 1995

The story of an engineer who creates a device for raising a girl capable of thinking for herself, and of what happens when a young girl from the poor underclass obtains that device. The novel is set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects every aspect of life, and it is to some extent a coming-of-age story focused on a girl named Nell.

CyberpunkComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Dark Matter

Blake Crouch · 2016

Jason Dessen, a forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. He wakes to a man he has never met welcoming him back, in a life that is not his: his wife is not his wife, his son was never born, and he is not an ordinary professor.

Time travelPsychological thriller

Rating coming soon

The Stand

Stephen King · 1978

One man escapes from a biological weapons facility after an accident, carrying with him a rapidly mutating influenza strain that kills most of the world's population within weeks. In the aftermath the survivors divide between those who follow an elderly woman to Boulder and those who follow Randall Flagg, who has established himself in Las Vegas, and the two factions prepare for a confrontation.

Post-apocalypticModern horror

Rating coming soon

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell · 2004

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer in Belgium between the wars; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing the family of his star author; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.

Experimental fictionDystopian

Rating coming soon

Airframe

Michael Crichton · 1996

Casey Singleton is a quality assurance vice president at the fictional aerospace manufacturer Norton Aircraft, and she is assigned to investigate an in-flight accident aboard one of the company's airliners that left three passengers dead and fifty-six injured. The inquiry has to establish what happened to the aircraft while the company's commercial interests are at stake.

Crime thriller

Rating coming soon

Foundation's Edge

Isaac Asimov · 1982

After the defeat of the Mule by the Second Foundation, Terminus enjoys a period of prosperity and stability attributed publicly to the Seldon Plan, though some believe the credit belongs to the Second Foundation. A search begins to establish whether that organisation still exists, while the Second Foundation itself investigates evidence of an independent force acting to protect the plan.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Redshirts

John Scalzi · 2012

Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union capital ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since 2456, a prestigious posting with the chance to serve on away missions alongside the ship's famous senior officers. Then he notices three things about those missions, and then he finds out something that changes what the crew understands the ship to be.

Space operaMilitary science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig · 2020

Between life and death there is a library whose shelves go on forever, and every book in it offers the chance to try another life that might have been lived. Nora Seed reaches a breaking point in her own life and finds herself in that library, where the clocks are frozen at midnight and where she can explore the infinite versions of her life.

Time travelLiterary fiction

Rating coming soon

Allegiant

Veronica Roth · 2013

The faction-based society Tris Prior once believed in has been shattered by violence, power struggles and loss. Offered a chance to explore the world beyond the limits she has known, she takes it, hoping that she and Tobias will find a simpler life free of lies and tangled loyalties. What they find is more alarming than what they left, and Tris has to face impossible choices.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

God Emperor of Dune

Frank Herbert · 1981

The fourth book of the Dune series takes place three thousand five hundred years after the events of the original trilogy and tells the story of Leto, the son of Paul Atreides, who has traded his humanity to become an immortal sandworm. Leto has ruled as a tyrant for that entire period, and his control rests on the spice and on the sandworms he has replaced.

Space operaHard science fiction

Rating coming soon

Recursion

Blake Crouch · 2019

New York City detective Barry Sutton investigates a phenomenon the media call False Memory Syndrome, an affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. The neuroscientist Helena Smith has dedicated her career to a technology that would let people preserve their most precious memories. When the two of them confront what is causing it, they find a force that attacks the past itself.

Time travelPsychological thriller

Rating coming soon

Ubik

Philip K. Dick · 1969

Glen Runciter runs a business deploying teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy from psychic spies. When he and his best team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in half-life, a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Then the surviving members of the team begin experiencing strange phenomena, including his face appearing on coins and a world running backwards.

Classic science fictionCyberpunk

What fits on this shelf

The science fiction shelf runs from the nineteenth-century novels that set the rules to books published this decade. Space opera and first contact sit beside cyberpunk, military science fiction, time travel, climate fiction, dystopia and stories about robots and minds that are not human.

A book qualifies when the science or the speculation shapes the story: a technology, a discovery or a world that could not exist here. Science fantasy that blends the two is welcome, and a couple of titles on this shelf also sit on the fantasy shelf because both descriptions are fair.

Tags on this shelf

Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.

Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

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Sci-Fi books

The sci-fi shelf

This Is How You Lose the Time War

World War Z

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Giver

Catching Fire

Shatter Me

The Man in the High Castle

Artemis

Dune Messiah

Foundation and Empire

Second Foundation

Boneshaker

Cat's Cradle

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Dreamcatcher

The Circle

Annihilation

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Meg

The Road

The Maze Runner

Life, the Universe and Everything

Cell

How High We Go in the Dark

The City of Ember

Under the Dome

Enslave Me Sweetly

Caliban's War

Insurgent

The Martian Chronicles

Speaker for the Dead

Consider Phlebas

Red Rising

Flatland

Ringworld

Xenocide

The Diamond Age

Dark Matter

The Stand

Cloud Atlas

Airframe

Foundation's Edge

Redshirts

The Midnight Library

Allegiant

God Emperor of Dune

Recursion

Ubik

What fits on this shelf

Tags on this shelf

Contemporary Romance

The other shelves

Romance

Fantasy

Horror

Mystery & Thriller

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Adventure

Who writes about these books

Baby Bat