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 6 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonHumanity has been extinct for more than a century, and the Solar System has been left to the androids that humans built. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her line still running, and the market for the work she was designed to do disappeared with the people who paid for it. She takes a job carrying a package from Mercury to Mars, which is enough to put her in the path of some very powerful humanoids who want what is inside it.
Rating coming soonCaptain Ivan Vorpatril is a staff officer on Komarr, cousin to Miles Vorkosigan, and comfortably short of the imperial succession now that other heirs have taken that particular headache away from him. An old friend in Barrayaran intelligence asks him to look into the identity of a young woman who may be on the hit list of a criminal syndicate, and Ivan's approach to the problem is to flirt with her. It goes badly, and then two men break into the flat he is tied up in.
Rating coming soonDon Harvey is taken out of his New Mexico boarding school in the middle of term so that he can join his parents on Mars, and the headmaster suggests the real reason is the prospect of war. Before he leaves, an old friend of the family asks him to deliver a ring to his father, which is how Don becomes the carrier of something he does not understand. He is arrested, released after the ring has been examined, and told that his friend has died of heart failure.
Rating coming soonAlien scientists from an alliance of races called the Galactic Hegemony study footage of the Battle of Agincourt and decide that humanity belongs in the same category as the Shongairi, a carnivorous species the Hegemony has recently admitted. On the strength of that verdict a Shongairi fleet is sent to bring Earth under Hegemony control. What the fleet does not expect, arriving in the Solar System centuries after the images were taken, is how far the technology on the ground has moved since.
Rating coming soonKyr has spent her whole life training to avenge the destruction of Earth. She was raised inside Gaea Station with the last scraps of humanity, taught to expect the day when she would face the Wisdom, the reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory in the Majo War, and she has become one of the best warriors of her generation. When Command assigns her brother to a posting that amounts to certain death, and refuses to explain why, she starts asking questions the station would rather she left alone.
Rating coming soonSharrow once led a personality-attuned combat team through one of the small commercial wars fought in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now the Huhsz, a religious cult, holds that its messiah cannot be born until her family's female line has ended, and it has been granted permission to kill her. Her only way out is to find the last Lazy Gun, an ancient weapon of enormous destructive power that her own ancestor stole from the cult, before the Huhsz find her first.
Rating coming soonAdrana and Arafura Ness are sisters with a rare talent for bone reading, the art by which ships in this far-future system speak to one another. The skill gets them taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a vessel whose captain, Pol Rackamore, makes his living cracking open the hidden, booby-trapped worlds that hold the relics of older civilisations. While the crew is hunting one of those baubles, the notorious pirate Bosa Sennen attacks them and separates the sisters.
Rating coming soonJohn Thomas Stuart XI is a high school senior in a small Rocky Mountain town who looks after Lummox, an extraterrestrial animal his great-grandfather brought home. Lummox has learned to speak, was once small enough to carry and is now large enough to ride, and after eating a used car and flattening a good deal of the neighbourhood, the creature has become the town's problem. The argument over what to do with it then stops being a local one.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven is close to economic disaster, unable to keep paying for its welfare system and losing its grip on its own politics, and its leaders decide that a short war against Manticore will solve both problems at once. Honor Harrington returns to command of a brand-new battlecruiser after nearly a year recovering from her injuries, and the third Honor Harrington novel puts her in front of an overwhelmingly larger force as open warfare begins.
Rating coming soonAfter the scandal that followed her duel with Pavel Young, Captain Honor Harrington has withdrawn to the planet Grayson, where she holds the title of Steadholder and intends to do nothing more demanding than manage her land and recover from the death of the man she loved. The People's Republic of Haven is rising again from its defeat and looking at Grayson, and the young Grayson Space Navy needs her experience badly enough that refusing is not really an option.
Rating coming soonThe Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, and when it is gone the star systems of the Interdependency will be cut off from one another. Emperox Grayland II is trying to make the empire prepare for a collapse that most of its people would rather not think about. Claiming religious visions to force the issue wins her enemies inside her own church and among the great houses.
Rating coming soonThe world is run by six mega-corporations, and its population is divided between citizens who are bound to serve corporate goals and the dispossessed, who have no status at all. The corporate armies are at war with the separatists of Mars, who are accused of making the whole population of Sao Paulo disappear. Soldiers are broken down into light in order to be sent to distant battlefronts, some of them come back changed, and all of them learn that talking about it is punished.
Rating coming soonWhiteChrys is a cryocorp on the planet Kibou-daini, a company whose business is freezing the sick and the dying in the hope that they can be revived and cured later, and it is opening a subsidiary inside the Barrayaran Empire. Emperor Gregor sends his troubleshooter Miles Vorkosigan to establish what the arrangement actually means. An attempt to abduct the attendees at a conference puts Miles in the underground Cryocombs, where the frozen are stored.
Rating coming soonNews of the coming collapse of the Flow streams has spread across the Interdependency, and there is no longer any question that the empire will fall with them. The End system has become the most valuable place in human space, because it holds the only planet able to support life outside a closed habitat. The disgraced House of Nohamapetan has taken End and blockaded its one remaining incoming Flow stream.
Rating coming soonJack Holloway is a rebellious former lawyer working as a contract surveyor for Zaracorp on the colony planet Zara XXIII, and he is fired for causing environmental damage after letting his dog set off explosives again. The explosion uncovers a seam of sunstones worth a fortune, and Holloway talks the Zaracorp manager into a rider that gives him a much larger share of what comes out of it. Then he meets a family of clever, cat-like creatures, and the claim stops being a simple matter of contract law.
Rating coming soonAn alien armada is sitting at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, nobody can communicate with it, nobody can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options. She asks for a diplomatic envoy, and Three Seagrass, now a senior official in the Information Ministry, smuggles herself to the frontlines by way of Lsel Station, where she persuades Mahit Dzmare to come with her. Mahit is asked by one of Lsel's leaders to sabotage the contact effort.
Rating coming soonThe Starship Titanic is sabotaged before its maiden voyage is properly under way, and the damage brings on a catastrophe the story calls a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, leaving the liner crashed on Earth. Three humans from the planet it has landed on are recruited to help repair it, which means dealing with the ship's central computer as well as the bomb on board. Two of the people behind the sabotage had arranged it for the insurance.
Rating coming soonTwo rises in sea level have left most of New York City permanently under water, and the streets have become canals while the skyscrapers have become islands. The residents have adapted: the upper floors are still lived in, and the flooded city, nicknamed SuperVenice, is as busy as it ever was. Against that backdrop the book follows a group of people who live in one building, the MetLife Tower on 23rd Street, and the changes the water keeps forcing on the city around them.
Rating coming soonAn alien invasion is under way in China, and humanity is divided about how to answer it: the Chinese government is determined to fight on its own despite losses close to catastrophic. Captain Wit O'Toole of the Mobile Operations Police and Mazer Rackham have destroyed one of the three alien landers, but they did it without authorisation and with a nuclear warhead they were not permitted to use, which leaves them in Chinese custody. The third book of the First Formic War follows the attempt to turn isolated victories into the defence of a planet.
Rating coming soonGora has no water, no air and no native life, and its only advantage is that it sits near a transit hub where several wormhole tunnels meet, which makes it a useful stopover for ships crossing the Galactic Commons. The Five-Hop One-Stop on its surface sells fuel, transit permits and supplies to long-haul crews. Then a technical failure brings down almost every satellite in orbit and halts traffic for days, and the travellers stranded at the Five-Hop have to spend that time in one another's company.
Rating coming soonA man wakes up naked and freezing, with no memory, on a ship he does not recognise. A small girl leads him through a series of corridors in search of somewhere warm, calling him Teacher, and together they meet other strange inhabitants of the vessel as they try to stay alive. The ship is a generation ship that has lost its way, and the answers to what happened to it are stored in fragments left behind by people who have been through this before.
Rating coming soonA century after the Sentience Wars nearly ended intelligent life in the galaxy, the survivors settled on a way of celebrating their continued existence: an interspecies music contest called the Metagalactic Grand Prix. For a species to be admitted to galactic civilisation rather than declared non-sentient and destroyed, it has to take part, and it must not come last. Humanity's entry turns out to be Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, a washed-up glam rock band with only two members still alive and able to perform.
Rating coming soonKindan has taken a place as an apprentice at the Harper Hall, where he has to deal with a bully, a relationship the people around him consider forbidden, and the responsibility that comes with being a protector of the hall's new female apprentices after the Masterharper ends the old prohibition on women becoming harpers. Then an illness arrives that spreads like influenza, and it threatens to do what centuries of Threadfall never managed: kill every human being on Pern. The book sits shortly before the third return of Thread.
Rating coming soonFor forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home, the place where she married, raised her surviving child, kept a garden and grew old. Then the company that owns the colony decides to abandon it and ship the residents away in cryogenic sleep, and Ofelia, who doubts she would survive the freezing and does not want to leave the graves of her family, stays behind. She hides in the woods until the others are gone, and lives alone in the village until the planet's own inhabitants make contact.
Rating coming soonSet nearly a century after the events of Dune: The Battle of Corrin, this is the third book of the Great Schools of Dune trilogy, which follows the founding years of the organisations that will matter in Frank Herbert's Dune. The Bene Gesserit, the Mentat schools and the Spacing Guild are all still being formed, and all of them are threatened by the anti-technology forces that have been gaining power since the Butlerian Jihad. The volume closes the sequence and accounts for the origins of the Navigators.
Rating coming soonAfter a hundred years of brutal war against the Syndics, the Alliance fleet is marooned deep inside enemy territory, weakened, demoralised and desperate to get home. Its fate falls to Captain Black Jack Geary, a man who was presumed dead and who emerges from a century of survival hibernation to find that his name has become a legend, and who is forced by a cruel turn of events into taking command of the fleet.
Rating coming soonIt is 1961 in a world where a meteorite strike pushed humanity off the Earth faster than history managed, and the International Aerospace Coalition has a colony on the Moon. Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, is flying shuttles on rotation and calculating orbits. The next target is Mars, and the crew list for the first exploratory mission contains no women, on the grounds that the journey is too dangerous for them.
Rating coming soonThe Intersolar Commonwealth is a star-spanning civilisation in the twenty-fourth century, wealthy, peaceful and confident, until a ship sent to investigate a disappearing star releases something predatory that turns on the people who let it out. The alien invaders can take on human form, and the war against them is being fought by corporations, colonies and soldiers who cannot agree on what is happening.
Rating coming soonBefore the Clone Wars break out, the Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth asks the Senate to back a voyage unlike any the Republic has attempted: six Jedi Masters, twelve Jedi Knights and fifty thousand settlers aboard one enormous vessel, sent past the edge of known space to find intelligent life and settle new worlds. The project is called Outbound Flight, and it carries the hopes of its passengers and the attention of people who would rather it never arrived.
Rating coming soonHumanity was lifted off the Earth and scattered across the galaxy at random by a machine intelligence called the Eschaton. When a young planetary civilisation is murdered by something that makes its sun explode without warning, the investigation has to work out who owns a weapon that breaks causality. Meanwhile Rachel Mansour is asked to explain her expenses, and Martin Springfield is looking for work.
Rating coming soonTen thousand years from now, human civilisation covers a great many worlds, and Alex Benedict makes his living buying and selling the objects it left behind. A woman brings him a cup covered in archaic symbols and asks what it is worth. The answer is that it came from the Seeker, one of the first faster-than-light ships, a colony vessel crewed by people who wanted a free world and never said where they found one.
Rating coming soonThe passengers of the no-ship Ithaca have been searching for a new home for nearly two decades, carrying among them revivals of figures from the long history of their species while an old enemy hunts them through the darkness. Behind them, in what was the Old Empire, a commander is trying to hold a fracturing human alliance together for one last stand. The machines that were once feared as servants are now the ones doing the hunting.
Rating coming soonFlynne Fisher lives in a small town in a near-future America where steady work is scarce and the drug trade is the largest employer. Her brother Burton, a veteran with an implant and a limp, is offered security work that he thinks takes place inside a simulation, and when he cannot take the shift Flynne sits in for him. What she sees through the headset is a murder in a city that is not hers.
Rating coming soonThe National Security Agency's code-breaking supercomputer meets a cipher it cannot break, which would be a problem for any bureaucracy in any week. The programme was written by a former employee who objects to the agency reading private messages, and he has arranged for the algorithm to be published if anything happens to him. Then he dies, and the head cryptographer has a day to find out who is holding the key.
Rating coming soonJack Forman loses his job in software and takes the only work he can get, which is judging whether a company's new technology is real by trying to defeat it. The technology is a swarm of microscopic machines built to work together like a living thing, and the company's founders are not telling him how much of it has escaped. Then people start disappearing, and the swarm is learning.
Rating coming soonTwo species older than humanity have been fighting a war across the galaxy for longer than humans have existed, and one of them has been quietly breeding human genetic lines for generations to produce a weapon. The novel opens with the end of Atlantis, passes through imperial Rome, and follows the families whose descendants will have to take part in the fight.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years after the defeat of the Empire, Leia Organa sits in a Senate that can barely pass a motion, split between planets that want their own authority and those who want a strong centre. When rumours of a new criminal power reach her, the investigation she opens will put the secret of her parentage in front of the whole galaxy.
Rating coming soonThe Soviet Union and the United States exchange nuclear strikes, and the small Florida town of Fort Repose is left standing but cut off. There is no electricity, no fuel and no supplies coming in, and the people who live there have to work out how to keep going with what is in the shops, the gardens and the river.
Rating coming soonSeth Wearing drowns in the sea off the coast of his home town, and then he wakes up on an empty street in a town that looks like the one he grew up in and has nobody else in it. He is naked, thirsty and starving, and he has no idea whether he is dead, dreaming or somewhere that has been arranged for him.
Rating coming soonBefore the maze, there was the world's end: forests burnt, rivers dried, the oceans swollen, and then a plague that spread across the globe until families were dying and people were killing each other. Then came WICKED, an organisation looking for a way out of it, and the children it collected in order to find one.
Rating coming soonUnwinding is legal: difficult teenagers can be taken apart, and their organs and limbs given to other people. The revolt at a harvest camp made the practice impossible to ignore, and the three young people who escaped it are now the most wanted fugitives in the country, with a movement growing behind them and a system that needs them caught.
Rating coming soonOn a planet where violence and vengeance are the ordinary business of government, every person develops a currentgift when they come of age, and most of the gifts are useful. Akos and Cyra are not so lucky: his gift makes him unable to bear the pain of others, and hers gives pain to everyone who touches her, including herself.
Rating coming soonTurner is a corporate mercenary who wakes in a rebuilt body and is sent out on a job more dangerous than the one that nearly finished him. Elsewhere a woman in the art trade is offered a piece that comes with a strange history, and a teenager in the projects finds that something in the matrix has noticed him. The three stories are heading for the same place.
Rating coming soonTakeshi Kovacs is serving with a mercenary outfit on a planet where a war between the corporate governments and a rebel movement has settled into a stalemate. A pilot offers him a private scheme instead: a Martian artefact has been found that opens onto a ship left by a civilisation long gone, and the people who know about it intend to own it.
Rating coming soonLife on Mars is hard enough that the colonists depend on a drug which lets them share in a fantasy world built around a set of dolls and their house. Then Palmer Eldritch comes back from the outer system with something new, and the men who make their living from the old arrangement have to work out what he has brought with him.
Rating coming soonColin Laney studies the patterns that very large amounts of information make visible, and what he has concluded is that the world is approaching a point at which the arrangements of the present will be replaced by something else. He expects it to happen around the settlement built on the Bay Bridge, and other people have their own plans for the same moment.
Rating coming soonHaden's Syndrome left a proportion of the people who caught it alive and conscious but unable to move their own bodies, and most of them meet the world through robot bodies instead. That has produced its own culture, including a violent sport in which one player is chosen at random to be decapitated. A death in the game cannot be explained.
Rating coming soonRichard Forthrast, known as Dodge, is a billionaire who made his fortune from games and who is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. His will asks for his body to be preserved so that his brain can be scanned later, and the scan is carried out. What follows is a world that has to decide what a copied mind is.
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