Genre
The best Science Fiction books
The literature of "what if" at every scale: AI emergence, climate collapse, multigenerational starships, post-scarcity economics, mind upload, and the next iteration of whatever ate the last one.
87 reviews in this genre.
Editor's picks
Highest-rated science fiction on the shelf
11/22/63
by Stephen King
11/22/63 by Stephen King 2011 review. An English teacher discovers a portal to 1958 and decides to stop the Kennedy assassination. The single best late-King novel and the rare time-travel book that earns its 849 pages.
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 2021 review. Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the children passing by the storefront and waits to be chosen. Late-career Ishiguro at his most patient and most strange.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 review. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, a special English boarding school. As adults, they begin to understand what Hailsham was for. The novel that defined the contemporary literary-SF register.
The Fifth Season
by N. K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin 2015 review. On a continent where seismic activity defines life, three women's stories converge as a fifth season begins. Hugo Best Novel 2016, the first volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, and the most important fantasy debut of the 2010s.
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 1985 review. In the near-future Republic of Gilead, women have been stripped of their rights, and the handmaid Offred remembers the world before. The most-cited dystopian novel of the late twentieth century.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006 review. A father and son walk south across a burned-out post-apocalyptic America toward an uncertain coast. Pulitzer Prize 2007 and one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century.
The Stand
by Stephen King
The Stand by Stephen King 1978 (and 1990 Complete & Uncut) review. A weaponized plague kills 99 percent of humanity. The survivors are pulled toward Boulder or toward Las Vegas, and the novel that follows is one of the great American epics of its decade.
The Mountain in the Sea
by Ray Nayler
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 2022 review. A scientist studies a possibly-sentient octopus species on a Con Dao island. Nebula Award finalist and the canonical contemporary literary science fiction of its year.
1Q84
by Haruki Murakami
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami 2009 review. An assassin and a novelist navigate a parallel-1984 Tokyo with two moons. Murakami's structural masterwork.
The Candy House
by Jennifer Egan
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan 2022 review. A tech billionaire develops memory-externalization technology. Structural sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad.
The Martian
by Andy Weir
The Martian by Andy Weir 2014 review. Mark Watney is presumed dead and abandoned on Mars. He is not dead. Now he has to figure out how to stay alive until rescue can arrive. The hard-SF problem-solving novel that defined the 2010s popular-science-fiction register.
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 2021 review. A junior-high science teacher wakes alone on a deep-space craft with no memory. Andy Weir's third novel and the canonical contemporary hard science fiction novel about a single problem solved correctly.
Prophet Song
by Paul Lynch
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 2023 review. A Dublin mother of four watches Ireland slide into an emergency-power dictatorship. Booker Prize 2023 and one of the canonical contemporary dystopian literary novels.
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 2014 review. A roving theatre troupe performs Shakespeare in the Great Lakes twenty years after a pandemic. National Book Award finalist 2014 and the canonical contemporary post-apocalyptic literary novel.
Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St. John Mandel
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 2022 review. Four characters across four centuries are connected by the same anomalous moment. Mandel's third in the post-Station-Eleven sequence and the most structurally ambitious of the three.
The Algebraist
by Iain M. Banks
Iain M. Banks's standalone space opera. A galaxy without faster-than-light travel, a millennia-old gas-giant civilization, and one of his best villains.
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
by Ray Bradbury
The career-spanning Ray Bradbury short fiction selection. As close to a complete introduction as a single volume gets.
Falling Free
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Lois McMaster Bujold's 1988 Nebula winner. The Quaddies and Leo Graf. The first book of what became one of the great SF series.
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century
by Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card editing an SF retrospective anthology. His introductions are worth the book on their own.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
by John Clute
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute review. The canonical SF reference work edited by Clute, Peter Nicholls, and David Langford. The right starting point for serious genre study.
Make Room Make Room
by Harry Harrison
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison 1966 review. The 1966 Hugo-nominated overpopulation novel that became the 1973 film Soylent Green, and is meaningfully better than the film remembers.
Cloud Cuckoo Land
by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr 2021 review. Five characters across three timelines connected by a fictional ancient Greek novel. Doerr's follow-up to All the Light We Cannot See.
Remembrance of the Daleks
by Ben Aaronovitch
Aaronovitch novelizing his own Doctor Who script from 1988. Rare case where the novel outperforms the broadcast.
So Vile a Sin
by Ben Aaronovitch
A 1997 Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures novel co-written by Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman. Operatic, dense, the end of a long arc.
The Also People
by Ben Aaronovitch
Aaronovitch's 1995 Doctor Who novel, riffing on Iain Banks's Culture. Better than tie-in fiction has any right to be.
Blood Pact
by Dan Abnett
A late Gaunt's Ghosts novel. Abnett moving the series into a quieter and more political register.
Double Eagle
by Dan Abnett
Warhammer 40,000 air-combat novel by Dan Abnett. Yes, really. Yes, it is much better than that description suggests.
Ravenor
by Dan Abnett
Dan Abnett doing far-future psychic-investigator novels in the Warhammer 40K universe. Tighter than the Eisenhorn books before it.
Straight Silver
by Dan Abnett
A mid-period Gaunt's Ghosts novel. Trench warfare on a barely-habitable Imperial world. Dan Abnett doing WWI in space and meaning it.
Titanicus
by Dan Abnett
Dan Abnett writing the Warhammer 40K novel that nobody asked for and that turned out to be one of his best. Giant war-machines, factory cities, and an honest piece of social fiction underneath the metal.
Life, the Universe and Everything
by Douglas Adams
The third Hitchhiker's book. Cricket-themed apocalypse. Funnier than its reputation and a small structural marvel.
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
by Douglas Adams
The fourth Hitchhiker's book. Adams writing a love story disguised as an SF comedy. Calmer, sadder, surprising.
Grimspace
by Ann Aguirre
The first Sirantha Jax novel. Ann Aguirre writing tough-femme space opera with one foot in Firefly and one in romance.
Wanderlust
by Ann Aguirre
The second Sirantha Jax novel. Ann Aguirre raising the political stakes and giving Jax a job that she should not be doing.
Man In His Time
by Brian W. Aldiss
A second short fiction collection. The title story alone earns the entry.
The Cretan Teat
by Brian W. Aldiss
A Brian Aldiss late novel set on Crete, half-memoir and half-rumination on faith, marriage, and the lasting strangeness of the Aegean.
Isaac Asimov's Inferno
by Roger MacBride Allen
The second Caliban novel. Roger MacBride Allen writing the smartest authorized Asimov sequels of the post-Foundation era.
Isaac Asimov's Utopia
by Roger MacBride Allen
The third Caliban novel. Roger MacBride Allen closing out his Asimov continuation trilogy with appropriate political weight.
Allies and Aliens
by Roger MacBride Allen
A Roger MacBride Allen solo SF novel. Two short pieces in one volume, both with the careful diplomacy-first SF sensibility his Asimov books also have.
Orphan of Creation
by Roger MacBride Allen
Roger MacBride Allen's genuinely strange standalone SF novel. An anthropologist uncovers fossil australopithecines on a Mississippi plantation. The book that made Allen's reputation.
The Torch of Honor
by Roger MacBride Allen
The Torch of Honor by Roger MacBride Allen 1985 review. A near-future SF novel about an Earth-led expedition arriving at the colony world of New Finland to find it under Guard occupation.
A Song of Stone
by Iain M. Banks
Iain Banks's 1997 literary novel. A castle, a civil war, and a couple whose privilege is unraveling in real time. Bleak and beautifully written.
Carnival
by Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear's 2006 SF novel. Diplomats on a matriarchal world, a planet of telepathically suspicious humanity, and the most interestingly compromised first contact in recent SF.
The Chains That You Refuse
by Elizabeth Bear
The Chains That You Refuse by Elizabeth Bear 2006 review. The first collection of short fiction from a Hugo-and-Campbell-winning writer at her most generous.
Centaurus : The Best of Australian Science Fiction
by Damien Broderick
Damien Broderick and David Hartwell's canonical 1999 anthology of Australian SF. Greg Egan, Sean McMullen, George Turner, others. The right entry point.
Irrestible Forces
by Lois McMaster Bujold
A Catherine Asaro-edited SF romance anthology with a Bujold Vorkosigan-universe novella at the center. Better than the form usually delivers.
Sunborn
by Jeffrey A. Carver
The fourth Chaos Chronicles novel from Jeffrey A. Carver. SF that takes its actual science seriously while keeping its emotional center intact.
The Infinity Link
by Jeffrey A. Carver
The Infinity Link by Jeffrey A. Carver 1984 review. A first-contact hard SF novel about a NASA technician who becomes the conduit for a deep-space alien dialogue that nobody else knows is happening.
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