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 8 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIn a Manchester that has been rewritten by the drug Vurt, people take feathers and go somewhere else. Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, are looking for his sister, who vanished on a shared trip into a place called English Voodoo. To find her he needs a feather that is not supposed to exist.
Rating coming soonCaptain Honor Harrington is sent to the planet Grayson, a society governed by men who treat a female officer as an offence. She is there to escort a diplomatic mission that matters to Manticore's chances in the coming war. The Graysons need the alliance as much as she does, and their neighbours are being courted by the other side.
Rating coming soonBean is small even for a child living on the streets of a city where gangs of hungry kids fight over scraps, and he survives with his mind rather than his fists. He is recruited to Battle School, where the children are trained in war games for a conflict they are too young to understand. Bean's talent is finding the weakness in whatever is in front of him.
Rating coming soonMallory is an orphan of the corporate war: she lost her parents and her home in an airstrike and now shares a hotel room with eight people, working several jobs to pay for water. The work she is best at is streaming a virtual reality war game. Then a chance meeting inside the game shows her where the real soldiers came from.
Rating coming soonMasha Maximow works for a cybersecurity company that sells to governments, and her job is to make the hacks that let repressive states watch and manipulate their opponents. The pay is enormous and the work is the best she has ever done. She also sometimes helps those same opponents evade detection, which is a game she cannot keep playing indefinitely.
Rating coming soonJoe Stoshack has to write a report about an African American who made an important contribution to society, and he has an unusual advantage: with the right old baseball card in his hand, he can travel through time. He decides to go and meet Jackie Robinson. What he finds is a trip that changes how he looks at everything afterwards.
Rating coming soonMendoza is a botanist and an immortal, and she has spent a century and a half cataloguing plants in the hills above Los Angeles with almost nobody for company. In the winter of 1862 she is ordered down to a stagecoach inn at Cahuenga Pass to join a team of operatives from the twenty-fourth century. She resents the posting from the moment she arrives.
Rating coming soonThe Cold War grew too complicated for the people running it, so each of the three great powers built a computer to help, and the computers were joined into one. When it became self-aware it destroyed almost all of humanity and kept five people alive. It holds them in the dark inside itself, and it has been torturing them for a very long time.
Rating coming soonOmelas is a city of extraordinary happiness, and the first day of summer is celebrated with a festival and a race. The narrator describes the place and its people, and then explains the arrangement on which all of it rests: somewhere in the city a single child is kept in misery so that everybody else can live as they do. Some of the citizens, having learned this, walk away.
Rating coming soonJoe Stoshack loves baseball and is not good at it, which is most of what he knows about himself. Cleaning out a neighbour's attic for small money, he finds a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card, the most valuable one in the world. When he holds it and wishes he could meet the player, he finds himself standing in front of him.
Rating coming soonAnnette Klein and her family are agents of Crosstime Traffic, working under cover in an alternate world where the Black Death killed most of Europe and Muslims settled the continent. Travelling back to their base in Marseilles, Annette is kidnapped and sold into slavery. There is an unofficial portal in the city, and if she is taken through it she may never be found.
Rating coming soonIn one strand of the story a computer programmer in a newly independent Scotland takes a job on a remote asteroid and finds that the owners of the place have plans he was not told about. In the other, the crew of a starship far in the future trade with an alien world and learn something about where human beings came from. The two stories are the same story.
Rating coming soonJerry Luna is fourteen and has stopped speaking since her mother disappeared, and she is sent to live with her great-great-aunt Constanza in New Mexico. In the basement she finds an old trunk, and the things inside carry her into the lives of her ancestors, first among the Jews of Spain before the Inquisition and later in Spanish America.
Rating coming soonJoe Fernwright repairs pottery on a future Earth where almost nobody needs pots repaired any more, and where the guild has a form for every kind of idleness. A godlike alien called Glimmung hires him for a job on another planet: to raise a cathedral from the bottom of an ocean. Joe travels there with a team of specialists and finds he does not know what he is for.
Rating coming soonThe Stone family live on the Moon, where the twins Castor and Pollux have decided that life is too dull. They buy a used spaceship to go into business for themselves, and their father, mother and grandmother Hazel come along for the ride. The tour takes them from Mars to the asteroid belt and further out, with a cargo of bicycles, a doctor's house calls and one Martian pet that nobody thought through.
Rating coming soonThe Star Empire of Manticore has fought the Republic of Haven for a generation, and Honor Harrington has paid for every victory she has won. Now the Solarian League, with its thousands of capital ships and its trillions of citizens, is drifting into the same war. Honor has a plan to end the older conflict before the bigger one begins, and enemies she cannot see are already moving against her home system.
Rating coming soonA scientific expedition at the South Pole digs out something that has been frozen for centuries and carries it back into the camp. The thing is intelligent, and it can take the shape and the memories of any living creature it kills. Before the men understand what they have brought inside with them, they cannot be sure which of them is still human.
Rating coming soonA huge rounded ship called the Space Beagle carries almost a thousand men on a long scientific mission into interstellar space. Each stage of the voyage brings the crew up against a different alien species, and each one has to be survived in a different way. The book is an account of those encounters and of what they do to the expedition's own politics.
Rating coming soonUlysses Paxton is an American soldier who looks up at Mars in the night sky and finds himself standing on it, in the middle of a war. He is taken in by Ras Thavas, an old scientist known across the planet as the master mind, who has perfected a way of moving a brain from one body to another and sells the operation to rich old men. Paxton becomes his assistant, and then his opposite.
Rating coming soonThe Psychlos found a deep-space probe carrying pictures and gold, followed it home, and have been mining the planet ever since. A thousand years later humanity is down to a few tribes in the parts of the world nobody wants, and the aliens' mine security has an interest in keeping it that way. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler leaves his village to see the lowlands and is captured.
Rating coming soonAfter the attack on the Manticoran home system, Honor Harrington has uncovered a plan to enslave the whole of humanity, and behind the plan the organisation known as the Mesan Alignment. Closing the wormhole network that gives the Star Kingdom both its wealth and its exposure looks like the obvious next move, except that the Solarian League is certain to treat it as an act of war.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven announced that it had executed Honor Harrington, which was a safe thing to announce while everyone believed she was already dead. She is not dead. She has come home from the prison planet called Hell with the prisoners she freed there, and she arrives in Manticoran space in the middle of a war that is entering its decisive stage.
Rating coming soonWilliam Mandella fought in the Forever War and now lives on Middle Finger, an ice-covered world where he fishes and teaches physics. Earth's population has become a single group mind, and it keeps the humans of Middle Finger alive because it values the variety in their genes rather than their company. Mandella and his wife want out, and the only way off the planet is to steal a ship.
Rating coming soonIn 2381 the Earth holds seventy-five billion people and almost all of them live indoors, inside three-kilometre towers called urban monads. The building this book is about is divided into stacked cities of forty floors each, with the administrators at the top. Life inside is orderly, and a few of the residents have begun to find it unbearable.
Rating coming soonThe book opens on board the enormous alien vessel that is carrying a group of humans out of the solar system, with one of them, Nicole Wakefield, escaping from the imprisonment she was left in at the end of the previous volume. The travellers have already met two other species, and the purpose of their journey has not been explained to them.
Rating coming soonSassinak is twelve when the raiders come to the newly settled world her family farms. That is the right age for what the slavers want: old enough to be useful and young enough to be broken. She watches her parents and both her siblings die, is taken off the planet, and spends years in a slave depot before she gets the chance to run.
Rating coming soonDream Park is an amusement park where visitors act out adventures that the park's technology makes solid, and in March 2051 a game is running that has drawn a large audience. Somewhere in the middle of the illusion a man is murdered, with a weapon that should not exist inside the game. Alex Griffin, the park's head of security, has to work out which of the players did it.
Rating coming soonGeorge Poole is in his forties when his father dies, and one of the things he finds among the paperwork is that he has a sister he never knew about. Following her trail takes him to Rome and to an old religious order. Half a continent and sixteen centuries away, a girl called Regina is growing up in Britain as Roman rule comes to an end.
Rating coming soonIn 2055 the Earth is fighting on the side of the Starmen of Lilistar against an enemy called the reegs, and nobody in a position of authority is sure the alliance is a good idea. Eric Sweetscent is an organ-transplant surgeon who keeps the Secretary General of the UN alive. Then he and his wife try a drug that shifts them out of their own time.
Rating coming soonThe dead have come back, and they take over the bodies of the living; the only weapon that works against them is a kind of exorcism, and there are not enough people who can perform it. The Confederation that governs human space is coming apart, and some of its wealthiest worlds are preparing to abandon everybody else. This is the third and last volume of the story.
Rating coming soonThe plague has already happened, and the survivors who can still organise are following a girl called Amy. Their target is the virals: the twelve original creatures, each of whom presides over a hive of its own. A raid on all twelve at once is what the book is building towards, and the weapon the survivors are counting on is a woman who is no longer entirely human.
Rating coming soonHarry Benson has had psychomotor epilepsy since a car crash two years ago, and during his seizures he has beaten three people and remembered none of it. As an alternative to prison he is admitted to a university hospital for an experimental operation: electrodes are implanted in his brain to interrupt the seizures before they begin. The day after the surgery he works out how the machine can be made to please him.
Rating coming soonWalls of ice are advancing across the world, and governments are losing the argument with the weather. A man who may be a narrator or may be several narrators is looking for a girl: pale, silent, and always being taken somewhere else by someone with more authority. The same search happens over and over, in different cities and with different outcomes, and the ice keeps coming.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years after China established a permanent colony on the Moon, an American technician called Fred Fredericks arrives to install a communications system for a Chinese research foundation. Hours after landing he witnesses a killing and cannot remember what he saw. A travel reporter and a dissident leader on her way to giving birth become part of the same escape.
Rating coming soonBy 2031 the greenhouse effect has rebuilt the weather, and Texas has become a place of storms that no insurance market will cover. Janey Unger arrives from an illegal clinic in Mexico with her sick brother in tow, and joins the Storm Troupe, a group of scientists and computer people who chase tornadoes to measure them. This year there is talk of an F-6.
Rating coming soonThe twelve original creatures have been destroyed, along with most of the viral population they created, and the survivors on the continent are beginning to build something. Their relief lasts one generation. Two survivors go looking for the truth about what remains: one hunting the creature that started everything, the other sailing in search of the minefields that were supposed to keep the infection contained.
Rating coming soonTwo people who have reasons to spend their lives in a game log in as their characters and settle in to play. One of them is a police officer confined to a wheelchair. What neither of them knows is that a hacker has decided to keep them there, and that the machine they are attached to can deliver pain as well as sensation. The only way out is a menu inside the game.
Rating coming soonInferno is a planet whose terraforming failed, and its surface will not support human life for much longer. Its inhabitants live alongside robots built to the Three Laws and, more controversially, robots built to a revised set of laws that let them protect humanity as a whole rather than an individual. A young man proposes to dig a northern sea with a redirected comet, and not everyone wants the plan to happen.
Rating coming soonDavid Rice can teleport, short distances and long ones, and he has been careful about who knows it. He takes occasional work for the National Security Agency, only the jobs he can live with. Then his handler is shot in front of him, David is drugged and taken, and he wakes up in a windowless room chained to a wall with people who intend to make him work for them.
Rating coming soonMost people in this near future live inside gated communities or travel in armed groups, and nobody who can avoid the desert goes into it. A physician named Blake Maslin is driving across the Mojave with his sixteen-year-old twin daughters when the three of them are taken by a man who has been out there for years. His name is Eli Doyle, and what he carries is not a weapon.
Rating coming soonThe war between Manticore and the Republic of Haven has started again, and the terms are worse than before: the Star Kingdom's shipyards were hit while a government more interested in politics than strategy was in charge, and it will be two years before the losses can be made good. Honor Harrington is given Eighth Fleet, the Alliance's main striking force, and orders to make the other side cautious.
Rating coming soonPern has not recovered from the plague that killed holders and craftsmen less than fifteen years earlier, and now the dragons themselves are falling ill. Fiona of Fort Weyr, the only surviving child of Lord Holder Bemin, is caught up in it when she impresses a gold dragon she was not expecting. The story takes place in the winter of 508 After Landing, weeks into a new Pass of Thread.
Rating coming soonFirestone is the mineral that lets the dragons of Pern breathe flame, and the mine that produces it has exploded, killing the men inside. A young man called Cristov volunteers to go back for the rock the dragons need, and the work is as dangerous as the accident that started it. His story is told alongside those of Pellar and Halla, who are the same age.
Rating coming soonVerity Jane is a talented software tester in San Francisco, and she is hired to try out a new kind of assistant built by the military for a start-up. In another version of the same year, the 2016 American election went the other way, and people in a much later century are watching what happens next with more than academic interest. They can reach into 2017, and they do.
Rating coming soonDane Thorson finishes trade school and is assigned as apprentice cargo master on the Solar Queen, a free trader that hauls cargo between the planets and takes whatever contracts it can find. At the end of his first flight the captain gets the chance to bid on a newly opened world, and the crew puts everything they have into winning the contract for a planet called Limbo. The information that comes with the contract is not encouraging.
Rating coming soonOwen is a high school teacher with an implant in his head, put there when he was a boy to control epilepsy, and he has always thought of it as a medical device. In the society of the near future, that is no longer a neutral fact: neural implants have made the people who carry them equal or superior to everybody else, and the Supreme Court has just ruled that those people are no longer a protected class.
Rating coming soonRamón Espejo left Earth for a colony world and found the same poverty he had run from. He is a prospector with a temper, and one night a fight outside a bar becomes a murder and sends him into the wilderness to hide. What he finds out there is a hidden installation and a race of aliens, and they do not intend to let him go home with what he knows.
Rating coming soonPaul Formain is a mining engineer in the late twenty-first century, and over a short period he survives several accidents that should have killed him, losing an arm in one of them. The pattern draws the attention of a guild that believes the human species has become a dead end and that the only way forward is to clear space for what comes next. Formain wants to know why he is still alive.
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