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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonKylara Vatta is the unconventional member of a shipping family, and she has been building a defensive force out of a converted ship and a crew nobody else would hire. The attacks on civilian trade that she has been answering turn out to be part of something larger, with a political purpose behind it and a personal interest in her family.
Rating coming soonShuos Jedao wakes up with nothing as he remembers it: he is a teenager and a cadet, he is in the body of an old man, and he is in command of an elite military force, carrying the orders of a hexarch he would not have chosen to serve. He is also the most feared figure in the galaxy.
Rating coming soonA spacecraft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the alien who comes out asks, in English, to be taken to a palaeontologist. He has been comparing the fossil records of several worlds, and what they have in common is the reason he has come: something appears to have intervened at the same points in the history of life.
Rating coming soonLaura Webster is a young executive on the way up inside a multinational conglomerate, in an early twenty-first century that looks peaceful and prosperous because the great powers have settled into a system of networks and delocalised companies. Her career takes her into a dispute about where the boundaries of that system run, and the answer turns out to lie in the parts of the world the network has never reached.
Rating coming soonStephanie Harrington was eleven when her family moved from one planet to another, from a settled world to the frontier of a young star kingdom. Sphinx is forest from pole to pole, which is what she wanted, and the woods turn out to hold a species that nobody has catalogued and a companion who will not be leaving.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years before the fall of the Republic, the Jedi are at the height of their confidence and the Republic is expanding, and the raiders known as the Nihil have made it their business to stop them. Their leader is preparing the attack that gives this novel its name, and the Jedi who have to answer it are the ones who have been trained to believe they will prevail.
Rating coming soonIn 2234 the crew of a survey ship called the Adamura finds something on a planet that appears to have no inhabitants: a circular pit fifty kilometres across, whose curve looks like a design rather than a feature of the landscape. A small team is landed to walk across the surface to the edge of it.
Rating coming soonPersephone Station is a backwater planet that the United Republic of Worlds has ignored for a long time, and the Serrao-Orlov Corporation has begun taking an interest in it because of what it holds. Rosie runs a bar there, and she and the people around her are asked to help somebody who has arrived at a bad moment.
Rating coming soonA young mathematician in Sri Lanka finds a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which is not the sort of thing that usually has consequences beyond the mathematics department. In this case it does, because the proof arrives at the same time as an alien invasion, and both of them turn out to be about how a society decides what is worth knowing.
Rating coming soonWillard Phule is the son of a wealthy arms manufacturer, and he buys his way into the Space Legion and then into command of the unit nobody wants. The unit is a collection of misfits and rejects, and his plan is to make it into an effective force, largely by ignoring the way the Legion is supposed to do things.
Rating coming soonFate of Worlds closes two of Larry Niven's story cycles at once. Decades after the previous Fleet of Worlds novel, the Ringworld has disappeared, and the Puppeteers find their fleet the target of rival war fleets. The exiled puppeteer leader known as the Hindmost has one chance to recover his position, if what he knows about the vanished Ringworld is worth anything to anyone.
Rating coming soonTennal, a rich socialite with telepathic powers he uses illegally, is caught and conscripted. To hold him in line the army binds his mind to Lieutenant Surit, whose coercive ability is strong enough to control him. Tennal wants out, Surit wants his family's pension restored, and both are posted to a frontier where the army's plans matter more than either of them.
Rating coming soonLieutenant Travis Long of the Royal Manticoran Navy likes rules and still finds the sensible answer when everything is coming apart. That talent won him his commission and made him enemies, and his sharpest opponents sit in the young kingdom's parliament rather than in space, where they are certain the navy is a luxury the treasury cannot afford.
Rating coming soonOn Vega III, where the wealthy pass their time in intrigue and pleasure, Lady Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense would rather work in her father's shipyards. Her father makes her his successor at the helm of the Rondymense yards instead of his designated heir, and then a solo test flight of an experimental cruiser goes badly wrong. The relatives she replaced will not wait for her to come home.
Rating coming soonRuby has spent years hiding what she can do, and the epidemic that killed so many American children has left the survivors divided into categories their government treats as threats. In the second Darkest Minds novel she joins the revolutionary Children's League, trading her cooperation for information about the disease that tore her life apart.
Rating coming soonHail Bristol has built a reputation across the galaxy as a gunrunner who is dangerous in a fight, which is everything except the one thing she was born to do. She is the last surviving heir of the Indranan Empire, and going home to take the throne turns out to be her riskiest move yet.
Rating coming soonThree men are found dead in a locked Honolulu office, their bodies covered in ultra-fine cuts, and the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. In Massachusetts a group of graduate students are recruited by a microbiology company and flown to Hawaii. What waits for them is not an ordinary research project.
Rating coming soonFrank Burnet's leukaemia treatment led to a discovery about his genes, and his university sold the rights to his cells to a biotechnology company. When he sues, the court decides the cells were waste. His case is one strand in a satirical novel about genetic research, patent law and the people caught between them.
Rating coming soonIn the near future, the men and women of Shorn Associates make their money by finding a small war somewhere in the world and backing one side against the other in return for a share of the spoils. Their executives are corporate gladiators who drive armoured cars and follow a samurai code, and Chris Faulkner is very good at the work.
Rating coming soonJulian West is a young American who falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep towards the end of the nineteenth century and wakes up 113 years later in the same city. Boston is still there, but the society around it has been transformed: it is the year 2000, and the United States has become a socialist utopia that his hosts are delighted to explain.
Rating coming soonPastwatch is the story of Christopher Columbus and of the future scientists who study him. One of those researchers comes to believe that the history she can see is a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality rather than an inevitable one, and that her machines might make it possible to reach back through time and alter it.
Rating coming soonPerry Nelson is a navy flier killed in a motor accident in 1938, and he wakes up in the year 2086. The novel that follows is his comparison of the world he left behind with the semi-utopian society that has replaced it, and it sets out the arguments its author would spend the rest of his career developing in his fiction.
Rating coming soonIntelligence agents discover something that strains belief but cannot be argued with: the country's greatest adversary appears to be sending agents back through time. Worse still, someone outside recorded history is supplying those agents with weapons and machines far beyond anything either side has built, and the only answer is to go back and find the source.
Rating coming soonA one-way time tunnel to six million years before the present is opened by researchers of the Galactic Milieu, and every misfit for light years around queues up to go through it. Each of them is looking for a happiness they cannot find in their own world, and none of them can guess what is waiting on the other side.
Rating coming soonIn an alternate United States, love has been classified as a dangerous disease and every citizen is required to undergo a procedure called the Cure at eighteen. Lena Haloway is living with her aunt and uncle in Portland, Maine, and looking forward to her treatment. With ninety-five days to go, she meets a boy from the Wilds.
Rating coming soonFor twenty thousand years, humanity has been at war with the alien Xeelee, using weapons so advanced that time itself has become a battlefield. The war has cost billions of lives and has been fought with a ruthlessness the population has never been allowed to question. A young pilot is about to find out what the conflict is really for.
Rating coming soonCarl Marsalis is a traitor, a killer and a reminder of everything dark in the human psyche. He is also beyond the jurisdiction of anybody who wants to arrest him, until the American police offer him a deal. Somebody has come back from Mars, and a series of brutal murders has begun across the country.
Rating coming soonThe novel begins sixty-five million years ago, with a small mammal in a world that is about to be struck by an asteroid, and ends half a billion years in the future, when the descendants of humanity have changed past recognition. Between those points it follows a single line of descent, and its characters change as the line does. The result is a family history rather than a hero's story, running from the age of the dinosaurs to the far end of time.
Rating coming soonA robot called Roz opens her eyes for the first time on a wild island and finds herself alone there, with no idea how she arrived or what she is for. She survives a storm and a bear, and works out that her only chance is to learn from the animals who see her as a dangerous stranger. Then her past catches up with her.
Rating coming soonKatniss Everdeen survived the Games twice, and the second time she was pulled out of the arena by rebels who want her to be the face of their war against the Capitol. She agrees, on conditions she does not really expect to be met, and becomes the Mockingjay in a propaganda campaign. The fighting is real, and so are the people making films about it.
Rating coming soonAn unnamed narrator who works out product recalls for a car company cannot sleep, and finds relief by turning up at support groups for conditions he does not have. Then he meets Tyler Durden, who has ideas about how a man should live, and the two of them start a fight club in the basement of a bar. What begins as an experiment has its own plans.
Rating coming soonIn the thirtieth century most people have left their bodies and live as software in the polises, where citizens are born from mind seeds and design their own children. Yatima is one of these, and when a catastrophe destroys the flesh-and-blood humans still living on Earth, the polises have to decide what they owe the rest of the universe. Then an ancient, encoded theory of physics turns out to be true.
Rating coming soonThe Time Traveller returns from the year 802,701 determined to go back and rescue Weena, the Eloi woman who died in the fire. The quartz of his machine contains a substance given to him years earlier, and the journey takes him much further into the future than he intends, to a sky that has gone permanently dark and to a version of the Morlocks nobody has met before.
Rating coming soonIn 1942 a young American mathematician named Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is posted to a unit whose existence almost nobody knows about, with the job of keeping the Germans from realising that their codes have been broken. Sixty years later his grandson is helping to build a data haven on a small island in the Pacific, using the same mathematics for a different kind of freedom.
Rating coming soonTokyo has been rebuilt after a catastrophic earthquake, and Rei Toei, a singer who exists only as software, is a star. Rez, half of the rock duo Lo/Rez, announces that he intends to marry her. A young fan from Seattle flies to Tokyo to find out whether the story is true, and a data analyst is hired to find out what Rez is doing.
Rating coming soonA hollowed-out asteroid appears in near-Earth orbit, an exact copy of the asteroid Juno but carved into seven enormous chambers and rotating to make its own gravity. The United States and the Soviet Union both want it, and the scientists who go inside find cities that have been running themselves for centuries. At the end of the last chamber is a corridor that leads nowhere on Earth.
Rating coming soonIn a galaxy where no species becomes intelligent without being raised by a patron, humans are the youngest clan and are still suspected of having no patron at all. The planet Garth has been leased to them, and the avian Gubru have arrived to take it, holding the world hostage in order to learn what the dolphin-crewed ship Streaker found. Its uplifted inhabitants have to decide whether to fight.
Rating coming soonPaul Durham has worked out how to copy a human mind into a computer and keep it running, and he needs paying customers. Maria Deluca scans herself to pay for her mother's treatment. The copies live in a virtual city that can be edited, duplicated and switched off, and the question the novel keeps asking is whether the difference between a copy and a person matters.
Rating coming soonTwo centuries after the robot novels began, the Spacer worlds are fading and the crowded population of Earth wants somewhere to go. A robot who has outlived his owner sets out to settle an old account with the man who tried to destroy humanity's home world. The story of how robots disappear from the galaxy is told in the gap between this book and the Empire.
Rating coming soonCommander Honor Harrington has embarrassed a powerful officer, and the reward is command of a light cruiser posted to Basilisk Station, a picket assignment nobody wants, on a ship whose weapons do not work. Her crew blames her for the posting and the local interests resent any authority at all. Then she starts looking into what the smuggling is for.
Rating coming soonFriday is an artificial person, engineered to be stronger, faster and quicker than the humans she works among, and she is employed as a courier by an organisation that operates across a fractured North America. Her abilities are an asset in her work and would expose her to prejudice if anybody found out about them. On one assignment everything goes wrong at once.
Rating coming soonElijah Baley, a detective from overcrowded Earth, is sent to the Spacer world of Aurora to investigate the destruction of a humanoid robot. The man who could have done it has the means, the motive and the opportunity, and the politics of the situation require that he be proved innocent. Baley works with two robots, one his old partner and one far older.
Rating coming soonThe Earthship Streaker is crewed by a hundred and fifty uplifted dolphins, a handful of humans and a chimpanzee, and it has just found a fleet of fifty thousand derelict ships that appear to belong to the first race in the galaxy. Every other species wants to know where they found it. The ship limps to a planet with a poisonous ocean and waits to be found.
Rating coming soonRobert Gu was a celebrated poet with a mean temper, and then Alzheimer's took twenty years from him. He wakes in San Diego in 2025 with his mind restored and his body looking decades younger, in a world where almost every object is networked and much of what people see is added by their clothes and contact lenses. He has to learn to live there, and then somebody recruits him.
Rating coming soonThe world of 2010 has too many people in it, and the institutions that are supposed to manage them are run by corporations. Norman House is a rising executive in one of the largest, using his background to build a career, and Donald Hogan is his roommate, working for an intelligence agency in ways he cannot discuss. Both are about to be sent a long way from New York.
Rating coming soonCasseia Majumdar grows up in one of the old Martian family syndicates, in a society that runs its own affairs and resents the influence of Earth. She goes to university, becomes involved in politics, and finds herself in the middle of the argument about whether Mars should unify. Then a scientific discovery gives the planet a weapon it never expected to have.
Rating coming soonPeter Hobson invents a device that detects a pattern leaving a body at the moment of death, and he wants to know what the pattern is. With his friend Sarkar Muhammed he makes three electronic copies of his own personality, two of them altered and one left as a control. Then the copies escape into the networks, and people Hobson dislikes begin to die.
Rating coming soonAt a party in Kansas City a young woman tries to introduce a man to her father and ends up married to him before the evening is over. The four of them, two of them mathematicians, find themselves flying a ship that can travel between universes. They are not lost exactly, but they cannot get home, and something is following them.
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