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 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonMalachi Constant is the richest man in America and believes he is the luckiest, and a message from a chrono-synclastic infundibulum tells him that his future has been arranged. He ends up on Mars, then on Mercury, then on Titan, and everything that happens to him turns out to be part of a chain of events he was never meant to understand.
Rating coming soonNona lives with her family, works at a local school, and loves the beach and other people's dogs, and her city is under siege while the dead come back and a monstrous blue sphere hangs above the horizon waiting to tear the planet apart. Six months ago she woke up in somebody else's body, and she is afraid she may have to give it back.
Rating coming soonFifteen years after the regime that took over the United States established Gilead, the republic is still standing and the story is told by three women. One is a girl being raised inside the system, one is a young woman living on the outside in Canada, and one is a woman who has been part of the regime from the beginning and has kept a record of it.
Rating coming soonMaximum Ride is fourteen and she and the rest of the flock, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel, look like ordinary children except that they have wings and can fly. When Angel, the youngest of them, is taken back to the laboratory where the group was created, the others set out across Death Valley to get her home again.
Rating coming soonWarner is recovering from the bullet Juliette put in his shoulder, and he is still in charge of a sector that is beginning to talk about rebellion. His superiors want the girl found and the two traitors who helped her escape dealt with, and his own obsession with Juliette is not something he can explain to the men he commands.
Rating coming soonMatty has come to live in a village that takes in people who have nowhere else to go, and he works as the messenger who carries news between the settlements. He also has a gift that he has been told not to use carelessly, and the community that sheltered him is beginning to close its borders to strangers.
Rating coming soonDanny has a problem at school and wants to borrow the equipment his friends' professor is working with in order to solve it. Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are developing new scientific methods of fighting crime, and Danny ends up using their bloodhound robot and their instruments to investigate the disappearance of the manager of the local department store.
Rating coming soonAt a dinner in 2014 a well-known poet reads a new poem dedicated to his wife, and the guests drink and listen and mostly do not pay attention. A century later, in a partially submerged Britain, a scholar is chasing the text of that poem, which nobody has ever been able to find.
Rating coming soonAster Gray is a healer in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a generation ship whose society is organised along the lines of the antebellum South, with dark-skinned passengers confined to the lower decks. The ship's leaders say it is carrying the last of humanity to a promised land. When the Sovereign dies, Aster looks into the connection between that death and her mother's suicide decades before.
Rating coming soonMars has been made habitable, and the long work of terraforming has split its people between those who want the planet green and those who want the old desert back. Meanwhile Earth struggles with too many people and a collapsing ecology, its governments look to Mars for room, and the settlers have to decide what their world is for.
Rating coming soonAn insomniac in 1890s England falls into a trance and sleeps for more than two hundred years. He wakes as the richest man on Earth, the nominal owner of everything his money has been invested in, and finds that his wealth has been used to hold up a society in which most people are poor and more than a third of them are enslaved.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Cyril Gordon has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia and has no idea what to do next. Answering a newspaper advertisement that asks whether he is a coward takes him to a woman called Star, to a quest for the Egg of the Phoenix, and to a road that leaves this universe behind.
Rating coming soonMax Jones works his family's farm in the Ozark Mountains until his stepmother's remarriage drives him away from home. With his late uncle's astrogation manuals in his bag he hitchhikes towards Earthport, hoping to be recognised as an astrogator's heir in a world where most trades are closed guilds and space travel belongs to the wealthy. He falls in with a hobo who can get him aboard a starship, but only under another man's name.
Rating coming soonIn 2075 a teenager from Iowa applies to join the Interplanetary Patrol, sits through its physical, mental and ethics tests, and is accepted as a cadet. Training takes him to an orbiting school ship and then to a patrol vessel, where the search for a missing research ship in the asteroid belt turns up evidence of a civilisation that is no longer there.
Rating coming soonPell's World is the transit point between Earth's sector of space and the breakaway colonies of Union, and whoever holds it controls the road between them. The stationers of Downbelow have kept to their neutrality while ships, refugees and politics arrive, and the war fought far away finally reaches their docks. Earth's corporation still governs what it can from a distance, and the fleets it sends out to hold the colonies together come to Pell.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is returned to Mars after ten years away and lands in the Valley Dor, the Barsoomian afterlife from which nobody is supposed to leave. With his friend Tars Tarkas he discovers that the white-skinned Therns have built their power on a lie about the pilgrimage, and that Dejah Thoris has vanished. Together they save Thuvia, a slave girl held by the Therns, and are caught up in an attack on the Therns by the Black Pirates of Barsoom.
Rating coming soonLionel Verney, the orphaned son of an impoverished nobleman, is befriended by a king's son and drawn into the politics of a Britain that has become a republic. His sister Perdita marries Lord Raymond, the soldier who becomes Lord Protector, and the family's fortunes rise before the sickness reaches Europe. Then a plague arrives and sweeps across the world, and Verney is left to write down what happened to everyone he knew.
Rating coming soonMalcolm Ross, a young barrister, is called out in the middle of the night to the house of the Egyptologist Abel Trelawny, whose daughter has found her father unconscious and bleeding on the floor of a room full of Egyptian relics. The instructions Trelawny left behind require that his body stay where it is, watched, until he wakes. At the centre of the house, and of the archaeologist's work, is the mummy of an Egyptian queen.
Rating coming soonYoung Kindan expects little from his life until the people of Pern discover what the watch-whers, distant relatives of the dragons, can actually do. The beasts can warn miners about gas in the seams they are digging and find men trapped after a cave-in, and the work of putting them to use begins in the camp where Kindan is growing up.
Rating coming soonThe people of the silo live underground in a world their ancestors ruined, and their only view of the surface is a screen showing a spoiled and rotten landscape. Anyone who breaks the rules is sent outside to clean that screen, and Sheriff Holston has spent years wondering why the condemned do it.
Rating coming soonJake is an ordinary kid in an ordinary suburb until a creature from space finds him and his friends and gives them a power nobody should have: the ability to take the shape of any animal they touch. The five of them become the Animorphs, and the enemy they are up against has already been living among the people they know.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years before the Empire, the Republic is expanding and the Jedi are building a beacon called Starlight to link the far parts of the galaxy. Then a cargo ship is destroyed in hyperspace while taking evasive action, and the wreckage begins dropping out of hyperspace across whole systems, killing thousands and leaving the Jedi to reach the survivors and work out who caused it.
Rating coming soonThe Imperial prison barge Purge is carrying five hundred of the galaxy's most dangerous convicts when its engines fail somewhere remote and empty. The only hope for the people aboard is a Star Destroyer found drifting nearby and apparently abandoned, and the boarding party sent across to strip it for parts comes back with fewer than half its people.
Rating coming soonRevan was a Jedi, and then he was something else: his memories were taken from him and he was made into a weapon for the Sith. He has come back to himself believing that he once found something that threatens the Republic, and he sets out to deal with it with no clear idea of what it was or who he can trust with the search.
Rating coming soonOn the planet Tython, long before the Jedi Order of the films existed, the Je'daii order was founded and its masters taught the mysteries of the Force. Lanoree Brock became one of its most capable students, while her brother, in whom the Force showed itself not at all, grew up despising everything the Je'daii stood for. When he goes beyond the order's reach, she is the one sent after him.
Rating coming soonDarth Bane is the last surviving Sith, and the rule he has laid down for the order's future is that there must never be more than two of them. Now he needs a student to carry the dark side forward, and a Jedi called Johun Othone, whose master died at Bane's hands, has made finding him a personal matter.
Rating coming soonIris Chase is an old woman looking back at the death of her sister Laura more than fifty years earlier, and she tells the story of two sisters raised in a small Ontario town who grew up into very different lives. Inside her account there is another book, a novel about a secret affair and a writer of pulp science fiction, and nobody agrees about who wrote it.
Rating coming soonThe Enterprise is on patrol near the Romulan neutral zone, and the crew has begun to dream. Kirk and Spock both admit to the same dream, in which Spock commands the ship and Kirk serves as an ensign, and Starfleet intelligence reports that the Romulans are attempting to use time travel and are moving more ships towards the region.
Rating coming soonThe Romulans attack the planet Gateway, where Federation scientists are studying the Guardian of Forever, and the Enterprise is sent to protect or destroy the portal. Spock has already used it, because records of the destroyed world of Sarpeidon include a cave painting of a Vulcan face, and it belongs to a son he did not know he had.
Rating coming soonAn advertisement appears in the newspaper asking whether the reader is a gifted child looking for special opportunities, and dozens of children answer it. Only four pass the strange tests that follow, and the four of them are then sent into a school run by a man named Curtain to find out who is sending secret messages into people's minds.
Rating coming soonA world economic crisis leaves a small, mismatched group of people shipwrecked on a fictional island in the Galapagos, and then a disease makes every other human on the planet infertile. The survivors are the only fertile people left, and the novel follows their descendants across the next million years from the point of view of a ghost watching it all.
Rating coming soonIt is twenty-four hours since Max Ride and the other bird-kids escaped the New York Institute, and they are still running. There are six of them, 98 per cent human and 2 per cent bird, and they came away with information that might tell them where their parents are, if they can work out what the garbled words and numbers mean.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has taken fairy technology and built a computer far beyond anything the human world can produce. Then he shows it off to an American businessman, who simply takes it from him, and the only way to get it back is to work alongside the fairies he has spent years outwitting and robbing blind.
Rating coming soonJuliette Ferrars thought the fighting was over. She has taken control of Sector 45, been named the new Supreme Commander of North America, and has Warner at her side, which is more than she had ever expected to have. Then a death in her circle forces her to deal with what she has become as well as what surrounds her.
Rating coming soonMichael Vey has a secret he cannot show to anyone: he can send a current of electricity through his hands. When an organisation with its own interest in people like him starts watching him closely, Michael and his friends have to work out what it wants from them, and then it takes his mother.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is on Mars with the woman he loves imprisoned in a place he cannot reach, held there by a religion's rules rather than by walls. He has a year to find a way in, and the planet's politics, its warring nations and its strange temples all stand between him and her.
Rating coming soonDarth Plagueis is a Sith Lord with a rare and dangerous command of the dark side: his studies have given him power over life and death itself. His apprentice is the man who will one day become the Emperor, and the two of them work patiently to bring the whole galaxy under the rule of the Sith.
Rating coming soonQui-Gon Jinn and his Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi are a working pair, and the training between them runs both ways. Then an offer arrives that threatens to end the apprenticeship, and the two of them are sent to a planet where the politics are dangerous and the future is more uncertain than either of them can admit.
Rating coming soonThe Empire stands close to collapse and has kept one plan back for the very end. A plot is set in motion that could destroy the New Republic in a bloodbath of civil war, and it is followed by news that changes every calculation: Grand Admiral Thrawn, the warlord long believed dead, may have come back to lead what is left.
Rating coming soonA castaway wakes on the shore of an island with no memory of how they arrived and no idea where they are. The world works by rules that nobody explains, and staying alive means working those rules out one experiment at a time, from what can be eaten to what comes out after dark, while the island keeps its own secrets.
Rating coming soonTara, princess of Helium and daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, has suitors she has no patience for, and Gahan, jed of the city-state of Gathol, is one of them; her first impression of him is that he is vain and decorative. Then a storm catches her flier and drives it far beyond the country she knows, and she is taken captive in a region where the name of Helium carries no weight at all. The fifth Barsoom novel follows a princess who has to survive on her own.
Rating coming soonThe Inhibitors are ancient machines built to find and destroy any species that reaches a certain level of intelligence, and they have arrived at last where humanity lives. A first strike scatters the war veteran Clavain and a group of refugees into hiding, with leadership coming apart and the colony's position growing more desperate by the month. Then an unexpected visitor offers to lead the survivors to safety, and nobody can be certain whether she is an answer or the thing that finishes the job.
Rating coming soonIn the twenty-fourth century, eight million people escape the destruction of human civilisation by a genocidal alien enemy and settle a world they name Safehold, hoping to stay hidden. To keep the colony invisible from space, its leaders decide that it has to give up advanced technology altogether and live as a pre-industrial society. Administrator Eric Langhorne goes considerably further than the plan allows, and the first of the Safehold novels follows what his version of it does to the people who have to live inside.
Rating coming soonThe Arisians are ready to give the first Lens to a human being, and the honour goes to Virgil Samms, who will be known from then on as the First Lensman. The Lens is a symbol, an authority and a set of telepathic powers in one badge, and it can neither be forged nor worn by anyone it has not chosen. Samms has to earn it by building the Galactic Patrol, an incorruptible force strong enough to stand against the Eddorians, while assassins work against him at home.
Rating coming soonQuillon is a pathologist in Spearpoint, a city of more than thirty million people built on the surface of a vast artificial spire that the locals call the Godscraper. The world around it is divided into zones, regions of space-time that exist at different energy states, and each one supports a different level of technology. When Quillon is forced into exile, the only way to survive outside the zone he was born into is to keep moving, and every step takes him further from the last thing he understands.
Rating coming soonTom Dreyfus is a prefect, one of the officers of Panoply whose job is to keep order among the thousands of orbital habitats of the Glitter Band, and to investigate any of them that steps far enough out of line. When the entire population of a habitat is killed in what looks at first like an accident, the investigation runs into the interests of the very people who are supposed to be keeping the Band safe. The book is set before the catastrophe that the other Revelation Space novels are already living with.
Rating coming soonJack Holloway lives alone in the wilderness of the planet Zarathustra, prospecting for the valuable sunstones that the Chartered Zarathustra Company has made its business. One day he finds what he takes to be a small golden-furred animal, and then its family; the creatures turn out to be curious, capable tool users. Their existence matters enormously, because a planet with a native sapient species cannot be owned and worked the way the company owns and works this one.
Rating coming soonMiles Vorkosigan wants to court Ekaterin Vorsoisson, a widow whose husband died during the events Miles set in motion in Komarr, and he is fairly sure that approaching her openly so soon would end the whole idea before it began. So he hires her to design a garden beside Vorkosigan House, which gives him an excuse to be near her while pretending the arrangement is business. Meanwhile the imperial wedding of Emperor Gregor is approaching, and half the capital is watching what Miles does next.
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 are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books