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.
75 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ravenor
by Dan Abnett
Dan Abnett doing far-future psychic-investigator novels in the Warhammer 40K universe. Tighter than the Eisenhorn books before it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Hammer Of God
by Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke's 1993 asteroid-impact novel. Late-period Clarke at his most readable and his most quietly worried.
The Light Of Other Days
by Arthur C. Clarke
The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter 2000 review. Wormhole technology lets anyone look anywhere, anytime. The end of privacy and the end of secret history arrive in the same decade.
Appleseed
by John Clute
John Clute's 2001 space opera novel. The SF Encyclopedia editor finally writing his own novel. Dense, formally daring, genuinely strange.
Eastern Standard Tribe
by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow's second novel. Time-zone tribes, an asylum-committed protagonist, and a meditation on belonging in a globalized communication world.
A Stainless Steel Trio
by Harry Harrison
An omnibus of three Harry Harrison Stainless Steel Rat novels. Comic SF heist work from one of the form's most reliable comic voices.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
by Robert A. Heinlein
To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein 1987 review. The final Heinlein novel, narrated by Maureen Johnson Long, mother of Lazarus Long, across a hundred and fifty years of Howard Families history.
Transit
by Ben Aaronovitch
A Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures novel from the mid-90s. Better than it has any right to be, weirder than the show ever managed.
The Guardians
by Lynn Abbey
A Forgotten Realms novel by Lynn Abbey. Bloodstone Lands, ranger protagonist, and the kind of competent shared-world fantasy the era produced in volume.
Miamigrad
by Jerry Ahern
Miamigrad by Jerry and Sharon Ahern 1989 review. A late-Cold-War paramilitary thriller about a Soviet invasion of Miami via Cuba, played for paperback action rather than political seriousness.
Super-State: A Novel of a Future Europe
by Brian W. Aldiss
Late Aldiss imagining a politically unified near-future European super-state. Strange, sprawling, sometimes brilliant.
SuperNova
by Roger MacBride Allen
SuperNova by Roger MacBride Allen 1991 review. A standalone hard-SF novel about a small team of physicists racing to interpret a nearby supernova that arrives ten thousand years earlier than astronomy predicted.
The Last American
by Steven Burgauer
The Last American by Steven Burgauer review. A post-apocalyptic SF novel about a survivor of civilization's collapse. Pulpy, ambitious, mid-90s independent SF.
The Rapture Effect
by Jeffrey A. Carver
The Rapture Effect by Jeffrey A. Carver 1987 review. A near-future SF novel about a small team racing to interpret a wave of mysterious mass disappearances before the government does.
Cradle
by Arthur C. Clarke
Cradle by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee 1988 review. A retired Navy diver in Key West stumbles onto a Trident missile recovery operation and an alien artifact older than Earth.
The Ghost from the Grand Banks
by Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke's 1990 Titanic-raising novel. Strange, gentle, slightly ramshackle. Late-Clarke unwinding in a particular direction.
The Trigger
by Arthur C. Clarke
The Trigger by Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell 1999 review. A field that detonates all chemical explosives within range arrives in a near-future America. The Second Amendment debate gets a hardware upgrade.
Area 51: The Grail
by Robert Doherty
A late Robert Doherty Area 51 sequel. Bob Mayer (writing as Doherty) running his ancient-mystery thriller machine.
Area 51 : Excalibur
by Robert Doherty
Area 51: Excalibur by Robert Doherty review. The 6th Area 51 paranormal-thriller. Bob Mayer (writing as Doherty) running the alien-ancient-mystery formula at full pulp speed.
The Rock
by Robert Doherty
The Rock by Robert Doherty 1996 review. A military-SF thriller about a Special Forces team sent into Antarctica to investigate an alien artifact buried in the ice and very much active.
Atlantis
by Greg Donegan
The first Atlantis novel from Greg Donegan (Bob Mayer pseudonym). Special-forces-meets-alien-mystery thriller. Pulpy, propulsive, exactly what its readers want.
Mindflight
by Stephen Goldin
Mindflight by Stephen Goldin 1978 review. A hard-SF novel about a starship pilot whose telepathic interface with his ship is the reason he can fly it and the reason he is losing his mind.
J.O.B.: A Comedy of Justice
by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein's 1984 late-period theological satire. Bibles, Mark Twain, and the kind of cosmic flippancy only late Heinlein could pull off.
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