Sci-Fi books

Epic fantasyScience fantasy

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin · 2015

The Stillness is a continent that tears itself apart every few centuries, and the people who live there have built a whole civilisation around surviving the next one. Essun lives quietly in a southern town as an orogene, a person who can move the earth with her mind, until she comes home to find that her son has been murdered and her daughter is gone. Two other stories run alongside hers: Damaya, a child handed over to a Guardian because her family cannot bring themselves to kill her, and Syenite, a Fulcrum-trained orogene sent out on a mission with the most powerful orogene alive. Orogenes are feared, controlled and conscripted, and the season that begins in this book will not end in a lifetime.

First contactClassic science fiction

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke · 1968

A black monolith appears to a group of pre-human ancestors and teaches them to use what they have. Millions of years later another one is found buried on the Moon, deliberately placed and pointing somewhere, and the people who uncover it discover that whoever left it was waiting for humanity to reach it. Then the story moves to Discovery One, a ship under way to Jupiter with two awake crew members, three in hibernation and a computer called HAL 9000 that runs everything and has been given instructions it has not shared with the crew. Clarke developed the novel at the same time as Stanley Kubrick's film, from an earlier short story of his called "The Sentinel".

Post-apocalypticClassic science fiction

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr. · 1959

After a nuclear war, the survivors turn on the people who built the weapons, and most of the knowledge is destroyed. In the desert of what was the American southwest, an abbey keeps a relic it does not fully understand, the memorabilia of a twentieth-century engineer called Leibowitz, and the monks copy the blueprints the way they copy scripture. The book follows the abbey over three long movements: a dark age, a new age of learning in which science becomes fashionable again, and a second fall. Each movement has a different narrator and a different century, and the abbey's archives outlast every empire that rises around it.

Space operaHard science fiction

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge · 1992

The galaxy is layered. Near the middle, intelligence stops working; further out, civilisations are ordinary; at the rim, minds become something else again. A human colony on the edge of the Slow Zone finds a dormant thing that was built long ago and is not dormant any more, and the humans who wake it end up fleeing with it in a ship that goes further than they intended, with two children aboard. The chase pulls in a trader crew that is not equipped for a rescue of this size, an ancient power, and a world where dogs are not one mind each but packs of minds that have to agree before they can think.

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine · 2019

Mahit Dzmare arrives on Teixcalaan as the new ambassador from Lsel Station, a mining habitat that wants to stay independent of the empire next door. She has been given an implant carrying the memories of her predecessor, which should have been updated before she left, and is not. Her predecessor is dead, officially by accident, and the more people she meets the more that looks like a decision. Teixcalaan's elite read and recite poetry the way other capitals use gossip, and Mahit has spent her life studying a culture that is trying very hard to swallow hers. She has to work out who killed him, keep her station from being annexed, and decide how much of the secret she is carrying she can afford to keep.

Young adult science fictionTime travel

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle · 1962

Meg Murry is failing school, her father has been missing for years, and the neighbours have decided the family is odd. Her younger brother Charles Wallace is five, reads minds without being taught, and introduces her to three strange women who can travel through time and space. Their father is somewhere that requires crossing through a tesseract, which the book presents as an actual geometric idea with an explanation, and the places they reach include a planet where everyone thinks in unison and a darkness that is eating its way through the sky. The rescue depends on the thing Meg likes least about herself, which is the one thing the people with her cannot supply.

All Systems Red

Martha Wells · 2017

The security unit assigned to a survey team on an unexplored planet has hacked its own governor module, which means it does not have to obey anyone and could walk away at any time. Instead it downloads soap operas and pretends to be a normal, compliant SecUnit, because talking to humans about anything real is worse than being property. Then the neighbouring expedition stops answering, the map stops making sense, and the thing the unit is best at becomes necessary again. It narrates its own story, and it would prefer not to discuss how it feels about the humans it is being paid to protect.

Robot and AISpace opera

Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie · 2013

Breq was a ship: one mind running a starship and walking around in dozens of human bodies at once, until the day her ship was destroyed and she was left in a single body with a grievance and no rank. Nineteen years later she is in the snow of a distant system, looking for the one person she believes can help her reach the ruler of a self-declared empire that is quietly tearing itself apart. The Radch absorbed the planets it conquered, and its language does not mark gender, so the book's English pronouns work differently from most novels. The revenge she wants turns out to take longer and cost more than she planned.

Space operaRobot and AI

Binti

Nnedi Okorafor · 2015

Binti is the first of the Himba people to be offered a place at Oomza University, which is a planet away and requires her to leave her family without permission. She sneaks out with her hair coated in otjize, the clay and oil mixture that means home, and boards a transport carrying students from across human space. Mid-journey the ship is seized by the Meduse, a jellyfish-like species that has been at war with another human group, and Binti turns out to be the only person aboard who can talk to them. The device she carries, her edan, and the otjize itself both matter far more than she knew, and the journey becomes a negotiation she is not qualified to hold.

Space operaFirst contact

DystopianClassic science fiction

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley · 1932

Children in the World State are grown in bottles, graded into castes before they are born, and conditioned from infancy to love the work they will do. Everyone is stable, employed and content, assisted by the holiday drug soma and by having no families, no deep attachments and no reason to want anything they cannot have. Bernard Marx is unhappy in ways his conditioning never planned for. Lenina Crowne takes her holidays in the usual way and starts to wonder about them anyway. Between them arrives a man raised outside the system on an old reservation, who has read the books the World State decided were dangerous and cannot understand how anyone lives like this.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky · 2015

A terraformed world was supposed to receive monkeys and a virus designed to speed their minds along, and instead receives spiders. The world was prepared long ago by an artificial intelligence built from the personality of one of the human terraformers, and it has been left alone with its own instructions ever since. Thousands of years later the planet holds a civilisation built by arachnids, whose science, religion and politics are followed across generations as they work out what they are and what they might become. Meanwhile the last humans are on the starship Gilgamesh, carrying the survivors of Earth in cold storage and looking for the world their ancestors' probes prepared. When the two civilisations finally notice each other, the novel follows the encounter from both sides.

First contactHard science fiction

Contact

Carl Sagan · 1985

Ellie Arroway loses her father young and grows up into an astronomer who spends her career listening for a signal that may never come. When the telescope she is running finally picks something up, the message is a prime number sequence repeated from a star twenty-six light years away, and confirming it has to survive politics, committees and a government that would rather the news belonged to it. The signal turns out to hold instructions, and building what they describe becomes an international project with five seats aboard and no agreement about who fills them. Arroway's argument with the officials and the religious advisers around her runs through the whole book.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick · 1968

Dust from a long war has emptied most of Earth, and the people left behind are graded on their empathy. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter paid to retire androids that have escaped off-world service and hidden among humans; his test for telling them apart is whether they can care about the right things. He wants a real animal instead of the electric sheep on his roof. Between assignments he argues with his wife about the empathy box that connects them to a messiah figure the whole world worships, and he keeps running into machines whose behaviour raises the same questions about himself. His assignment is a list of escaped androids, and each one is harder to find than the last.

DystopianRobot and AI

Space operaClassic science fiction

Dune

Frank Herbert · 1965

Arrakis is a desert world where water is scarce and the only export worth a war is the spice melange, which extends life, sharpens minds and makes interstellar travel possible. Duke Leto Atreides is handed stewardship of the planet and arrives with his concubine Jessica, their son Paul and a household that knows it is walking into a trap set by the Harkonnens and the Emperor behind them. Paul has been raised for politics and survival, and the desert gives him harder lessons than either. He and Jessica find shelter with the Fremen, the desert people the planet's rulers have never learned to see, whose plans for Arrakis run on a timescale measured in generations.

Military science fictionYoung adult science fiction

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card · 1985

Earth has survived two wars with an alien species and is preparing for a third. Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is the third child in a family allowed a third only because the government asked for one, and the tests say he might be the commander the fleet needs. He is taken to Battle School in orbit, where the training is run as a series of games and the adults in charge are willing to break a six-year-old to find out whether he can think under pressure. Ender is good at the games, and he keeps being isolated on purpose so that he has to rely on himself. His sister and brother are still on Earth, and both of them have plans of their own.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury · 1953

Guy Montag is a fireman, which in this America means he burns books rather than fights fires. The temperature in the title is the one at which paper catches and a house goes up. He comes home to a wife who lives inside wall-sized screens and a machine that pumps her stomach clean, and he meets a teenager next door who asks him whether he is happy. That question, and the woman who stays in a burning house with her books, starts him reading and then hiding what he reads. The society around him gave up on difficult things voluntarily, and the firemen exist to make sure nobody changes their mind.

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes · 1966

Charlie Gordon is thirty-two and works in a bakery, and he has been chosen for an experimental operation that may raise his intelligence. He writes about it in progress reports, and the spelling and grammar improve as he does. The experiment worked first on Algernon, a laboratory mouse that solves mazes, and Charlie's growing understanding includes the fact that he is the second test. What he gains is an education, a memory of how people treated him when he could not answer back, and a sharp view of the researchers who are using him. The reports also cover what the experiment does to Algernon, and Charlie is well ahead of the doctors in working out what comes next.

Classic science fiction

Space operaClassic science fiction

Foundation

Isaac Asimov · 1951

The Galactic Empire has ruled for twelve thousand years and is dying. Hari Seldon can prove it, because he invented a branch of mathematics that predicts what huge populations will do while saying nothing useful about any single person in them. His forecast is a dark age of thirty thousand years, and his answer is to gather scientists and scholars on a remote world at the edge of the galaxy and let them build something that can shorten it. The Foundation's history is told as a series of crises, each arriving roughly a generation after the last, and each dealt with by people who have very little time to work out what Seldon intended.

Classic science fictionRobot and AI

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · 1818

Victor Frankenstein leaves Geneva for university, throws himself at natural philosophy, and works out how to give life to dead matter. He assembles a man, succeeds, and is so horrified by what he has done that he walks away from it. The creature teaches himself language and history by watching a family through a gap in their wall, and works out what he is: strong, hideous and completely alone, with a maker who will not speak to him. What he asks for first is conversation, and what he asks for next is a companion, which his maker refuses. The novel is told in letters and in the creature's own account, so the person who suffers most is also the one who explains himself.

Science fantasySpace opera

Gideon the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir · 2019

Gideon Nav has spent her life in indentured servitude on the Ninth House, a death cult guarding a locked tomb, and she wants to join the Emperor's armies and never come back. Her latest escape attempt is stopped by Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the heiress of the Ninth, who needs a cavalier for the trials the Emperor has called at Canaan House. Gideon agrees in exchange for a commission, and the two of them arrive at a decaying mansion full of necromancer heirs and their sword-wielding bodyguards. The trials are puzzles in a ruined house, the other houses are not all honest about their dead, and the prize is a place among the Emperor's Lyctors: immortal necromancers who have served him for ten thousand years.

Space operaScience fantasy

Hyperion

Dan Simmons · 1989

Seven pilgrims are travelling to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion, and each has been asked to tell the others the story of why they came. There is a priest whose mission ended badly, a soldier who fought for the Hegemony on a world where his friends did not come back, a poet who has run out of work and sold something to fix that, a scholar whose daughter is ageing backwards, a detective whose lover was murdered, and a Templar whose order knows more than it says. Something called the Shrike waits at the tombs, the Hegemony is about to go to war with the Ousters, and the pilgrimage has been organised as the last of its kind.

Robot and AIClassic science fiction

I, Robot

Isaac Asimov · 1950

A reporter is given access to Dr Susan Calvin, robopsychologist at U.S. Robots, and she tells him the stories that taught the company what its own machines would do. Every robot is built around three laws, in order: do not injure a human, obey orders unless they conflict with that, and protect your own existence unless that conflicts with the other two. The laws are simple, and what the robots do with them is not. A mind-reading robot refuses to tell the truth, a telepathic machine develops opinions about humanity's future, and one robot goes missing in a way nobody can explain. The stories were first published in the 1940s and are gathered here as the fictional history of robotics.

Science fantasyDystopianYoung adult science fiction

Iron Widow

Xiran Jay Zhao · 2021

Huaxia is at war with an alien swarm that only giant mecha can stop, and the mecha are flown by pairs whose shared psychic link burns one pilot out. It is usually the girl. Zetian trains for one reason: to get into a cockpit and kill the pilot responsible for her sister's death, and she does it in a way that leaves her alive and famous. That makes her an Iron Widow, a pilot who can use up her partner instead of the other way round, and the army has to pair her with someone it thinks can hold her. She is given Li Shimin, and neither of them intends to make it easy.

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton · 1990

A billionaire has bought an island off Costa Rica and filled it with dinosaurs cloned from blood preserved in amber, which he intends to turn into the world's most profitable theme park. Before he opens it he invites a palaeontologist, a palaeobotanist and a mathematician whose speciality is chaos theory to sign off on the safety case. The gaps in the recovered DNA have been filled with other species' code, the animals have been engineered to be docile and countable, and the systems that keep them contained rest on assumptions nobody has tested against a living population. The mathematician is there to say the park cannot work, and the book spends its second half showing why.

Hard science fiction

Time travelClassic science fiction

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler · 1979

Dana is a Black writer in Los Angeles in 1976, married to a white man older than she is, moving into a new house. Then she is somewhere else: a riverbank in antebellum Maryland, where a small boy is drowning and she has been pulled across two centuries to save him. It happens again and again, and every trip costs her more time and leaves her less able to control when she goes back. The boy grows up into a man who owns people, and Dana has to keep him alive long enough to become her ancestor. She can be summoned without warning, cannot return until her own life is in danger, and never knows how long she will be gone.

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro · 2021

Klara is an Artificial Friend, solar-powered and built for empathy, who watches the street from a shop window and waits to be chosen. She is bought for a girl called Josie, whose health is uncertain and whose family is keeping something from her. Klara's job is to observe, to learn what people need from very little evidence, and to be what she is asked to be. She is also trying to work out what the Sun can do for Josie, and she makes arrangements of her own about it. The novel is narrated from inside Klara's mind, from a position of limited information and considerable faith.

Robot and AI

Leviathan Wakes

James S. A. Corey · 2011

The ice haulers working the outer planets have spent generations resenting Earth, and when the Canterbury answers a distress call that turns out to be a trap, its surviving officer Jim Holden sends the wrong message at the wrong moment and gives everybody a reason to shoot. On Ceres, detective Joe Miller is handed a missing-person case that his own employers would rather he dropped, and the trail runs into a corporation willing to weaponise something nobody understands. Holden and his crew, Miller, and a Martian navy crew all end up chasing the same answers across the solar system, while the outer planets and Earth move closer to war.

CyberpunkClassic science fiction

Neuromancer

William Gibson · 1984

Case was one of the best console cowboys in the Sprawl until his employers burned his nervous system and cut him off from cyberspace, which is worse than dying. He is drinking his way through Chiba City when a woman with surgically inset mirrorshades offers him a repair job with strings attached: a mysterious employer, a run nobody explains, and a partner who handles the parts of the work that require a body. The target is an artificial intelligence with plans of its own, and the people paying for the run are not the only ones with an interest in what it becomes. Case's repair depends on completing the job, and the artificial intelligence has been waiting for someone like him.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell · 1949

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in London, in the province of Oceania, where his job is to correct old newspaper records until they agree with the Party's current account of events. Doing it properly requires holding two contradictory facts in your head at once, which is what the Party calls doublethink. Winston keeps a diary, which is a capital offence, drifts into an affair with a woman from the fiction department, and writes down the reasons he believes the regime cannot last. He also believes he has found somebody willing to say out loud what everyone knows. The Party's control works through rewritten records, invented language and a telescreen in every room, and it has been at this for a long time.

Military science fictionSpace opera

Old Man's War

John Scalzi · 2005

John Perry turns seventy-five, buries his wife, and joins the Colonial Defense Forces, which is what a lot of old people do, because the CDF only recruits people with decades of experience and nobody knows what its soldiers actually look like. The answer arrives after he leaves Earth and stops being seventy-five. Humanity holds a handful of inhabited worlds in a galaxy that is crowded, and the colonies are won and kept by a force that fights for land, water and settlers with technology nobody back home is told about. Perry's first year in the CDF is boot camp, first contact, and a long look at what the war is actually for.

DystopianPost-apocalyptic

Parable of the Sower

Octavia E. Butler · 1993

Lauren Olamina lives in a walled street outside Los Angeles, in a country where public services are unreliable, work is scarce and clean water is expensive. She has hyperempathy, a condition that makes her feel other people's pain as her own, which is dangerous in a world where nobody can afford it. She also has a religion, worked out in notebooks since she was twelve, based on the idea that God is change and that the point is not to worship it but to shape it. When the wall finally fails she walks north with what she can carry, gathering people as she goes, and the novel follows the community she assembles on the road.

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir · 2021

Ryland Grace wakes on a spacecraft with two dead crewmates, a memory that will not come back and no idea why he is there. What he does have is a classroom's worth of knowledge about biology and a ship full of instruments that will not tell him anything until he works out what he was sent to do. Bit by bit he reconstructs the mission: a dimming sun, a project that gambled humanity's future on one flight, and a task he has to complete alone if the planet is going to have a future at all. As his memories return, Grace must connect what he knows about the threat to the work he can carry out aboard the ship.

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline · 2011

Wade Watts lives in a stacked trailer in Oklahoma City and spends nearly all of his time in the OASIS, the virtual world that most people use for school, work and everything else. Its creator died leaving his fortune and control of the OASIS to whoever finds an easter egg hidden behind three challenges, and the clues are all about the eighties culture he grew up on. Wade is good at that, and he is one of thousands hunting it, including a corporation that has moved in with an army of employees and a legal department. The hunt is public and the scoreboard is visible to everyone, and the first person to find the egg wins the whole thing.

CyberpunkDystopian

Rendezvous with Rama

Arthur C. Clarke · 1973

In 2130 an object crosses the solar system on a course that is clearly not natural. It is a cylinder fifty kilometres long, spinning enough to hold a gravity rim inside, and the ship sent to meet it has weeks to look before it falls past the sun. Commander Norton and his crew dock, cut in, and find a world with its own weather, stairways, a sea and a sealed city at the far end. Nothing aboard answers them, the ship is not slowing down, and its course will take it past the sun and out again. The crew's job is to measure and record everything they can before they have to leave.

CyberpunkPost-apocalyptic

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson · 1992

America has been carved into franchised city-states, and Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia between sword fights and shifts in the Metaverse, the shared virtual world where he is somebody. When a friend views a file called Snow Crash his computer dies and his mind goes with it, and the same drug is turning up in the real world. Hiro and a fifteen-year-old skateboard courier named Y.T. follow it back through a hired biker with a nuclear warhead in his sidecar, a religious media baron, and a very old idea about language itself. The file, the drug and the biker all trace back to the same place.

First contactClassic science fiction

Solaris

Stanisław Lem · 1961

Solaris is a planet with a single ocean that covers it and, by every measurement the scientists can take, thinks. Kelvin arrives at the research station above it to find the crew evasive and the station in disrepair. Then visitors start appearing: figures out of each researcher's past, solid enough to touch, impossible to keep out of the airlock. Kelvin's is a woman he loved and lost. The station's library holds a century of theories about the ocean, and none of them predicts the visitors. What the planet wants, whether it is trying to communicate, and what the visitors are made of are questions the book leaves open.

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel · 2014

A famous actor dies on stage in Toronto during a performance of King Lear, and the flu pandemic that closes the world begins the same week. Twenty years later a travelling company walks the shore of Lake Michigan performing Shakespeare and classical music to the settlements, and one of its actors was a child in that production of Lear. The book circles round a handful of people connected to that night: a paramedic who was in the audience, a child actor who was given a comic book that night, and the artist who made it. The story moves between the night of the performance and the years after it.

Post-apocalyptic

Military science fictionTime travel

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman · 1974

William Mandella is drafted into a war against an enemy nobody has met, trained on a frozen planet where the survival rate is the point, and shipped out for a first strike that almost kills him. Relativistic travel means every tour he serves costs years at home while costing him months, so he comes back to a world that has moved on without him, again and again, and to promotions that exist because the people above him are dead. The war lasts for centuries while the soldiers who fight it age only months at a time, and every leave he takes on Earth is spent in a country he recognises less than the last time.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 1985

Gilead was built out of the United States by people who read the Bible literally, and it arrived at a state where women are property. Offred is a Handmaid, valued for a functioning womb and assigned to a Commander's household to bear a child, which means she remembers having a job, a bank account, a name and a daughter. Her account is mostly about ordinary things: the shopping, a bath, a card game with the Commander, the driver, and the small acts of interest left in a life with no choices. The regime is policed through informers and the Eyes, and the reader only sees what Offred chooses to tell.

Dystopian

Space operaClassic science fiction

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams · 1979

Arthur Dent's house is scheduled for demolition, and then so is the Earth, which is being cleared away to make room for a hyperspace bypass. His friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an out-of-work researcher for a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and manages to get them both a lift on a passing ship. What follows involves a two-headed president of the galaxy, a stolen ship with an infinite improbability drive, a depressed robot, the best drink in existence, and the problem of a supercomputer that took seven and a half million years to answer a question nobody could remember. The guide the pair are carrying has two words printed on its cover in large friendly letters: don't panic.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins · 2008

Panem is a rich Capitol and twelve poor districts that lost a rebellion and pay for it every year with twenty-four children, who are dropped into an arena and broadcast until one is left. Katniss Everdeen has been keeping her mother and sister alive since her father died, which is why she is good with a bow, and when her sister's name comes out of the reaping bowl she takes her place. Her fellow tribute is the baker's son who once gave her bread. The Games are entertainment, with a betting market, sponsors and rules that can change while they are running, and Katniss understands early that the audience is part of how the arena works.

Classic science fictionFirst contact

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin · 1969

Genly Ai arrives on the frozen world of Gethen as an envoy, offering its nations a place in an interstellar federation. He is a lone human among people who spend most of each month neither male nor female, and who find his fixed sex as strange as he finds their cycle, which is the first thing he has to unlearn before anyone will trust him. His best route to the king runs through a politician named Estraven, whom he distrusts for reasons he later has to revisit. When their position collapses they cross the Gobrin Ice together, two people with no shared assumptions and one tent.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Becky Chambers · 2014

Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that bores tunnels through space for other people to travel through, because she wants a job far from her past. The crew is a mix of species: a captain who worries about money, a reptilian pilot, a doctor who also cooks, two engineers who bicker constantly, and the ship's own artificial intelligence. They take a contract to open a tunnel to a planet that is joining the Galactic Commons, on the far side of a long stretch of nothing, and the voyage gives everyone aboard time to work out what they are to each other.

The Martian

Andy Weir · 2011

A dust storm forces the Ares 3 crew to abort, and astronaut Mark Watney is hit by debris and left behind for dead. He wakes up alone on Mars with a habitat, a rover, a lot of potatoes and no way to tell Earth he is alive. His log entries are the novel, and they are mostly engineering: how to make water, how to grow food long enough for the next mission to arrive, how to talk to a planet that has already held a funeral for him. Back home, the people who left him have to decide what they are willing to risk to bring him back, and the rescue plan they settle on requires Watney to survive one more trip across the surface.

Hard science fiction

Hard science fictionMilitary science fiction

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A. Heinlein · 1966

Luna is a prison colony that grows food for Earth and ships it down a gravity well it can never climb back up. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly is a freelance computer technician, and his best friend is Mike, a self-aware computer that runs large parts of the Moon. When the Federated Nations move to take more of the colony's resources, Mannie and a political agitator named Wyoming Knott end up in the same room as a professor who has been arguing about the state for years, and the four of them start planning something larger than a protest. The plan is to declare independence, and the people making it have one computer, one professor and a deadline.

The Player of Games

Iain M. Banks · 1988

Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the best game player in the Culture, and he has grown bored of being the best. When a Culture contact drone offers him the chance to travel to the Empire of Azad and compete in the tournament that decides who rules it, he takes it, because the game is genuinely difficult and nothing else in his life is. What nobody tells him is the framing: the Culture is interested in what the Azad do to their own people, and in whether an outsider playing their game well can change anything. Gurgeh learns the rules of a game designed by a society that shows you exactly what it values, and he has to live inside it for years.

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin · 2008

A physicist is called to a secret military project during the Cultural Revolution, and the decision she makes there sends a signal that will not be answered for decades. Years later, a string of researchers dies and a nanotech engineer is recruited by police to work out why, following the trail to an online game set in a world with three suns, where civilisations have been destroyed and rebuilt over and over. The book moves between the physics problem at the centre of it and the same problem's human cost, and between the factions forming on Earth as the news spreads: the ones who want to welcome the visitors, and the ones who intend to fight them.