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 10 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Oppenheimer Alternative follows J. Robert Oppenheimer through the Manhattan Project and the security hearings of the mid-1950s, and then adds a fictional discovery that the core of the Sun is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late 2020s. The novel asks what the scientists who built the bomb would do with such knowledge.
Rating coming soonOn New Year's Eve in 1982 Oona Lockhart is about to turn nineteen and has to choose between going to London to study economics and staying in Brooklyn for her music and her boyfriend. At midnight she faints and wakes up thirty-two years later, in her fifty-one-year-old body, and learns that she will live the rest of her life out of order.
Rating coming soonFather Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is a Jesuit priest and a biologist, and he is one of four scientists sent to Lithia to decide whether the planet can safely be opened to human contact. The Lithians are intelligent, courteous and free of greed, envy and every other vice he knows. They also have no religion, and the perfect morality of a people who have never heard of God is a problem his faith cannot put down.
Rating coming soonIn the twenty-fourth century telepathy is an established profession and the police number Espers among their officers, which is supposed to make murder impossible. Ben Reich runs a business empire that reaches across the solar system and has decided that a rival must die. Everything then depends on whether a determined man can plan a killing that no mind in the room will read.
Rating coming soonMost of the survivors of Earth have gone to the worlds of the Vega Confederation, and the planet they left behind is a shrunken, half-ruined place with a thin population of people who chose to stay. Conrad Nomikos, an ageless Greek who keeps the old ruins and the old stories, is ordered to guide a Vega official around what is left of it, and neither of them is safe.
Rating coming soonA colony ship brought its passengers to a new world, and its crew used the technology they carried to make themselves immortal, powerful and, to the generations born planetside, divine. The former crew rule as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, complete with reincarnation by mind transfer and a caste system beneath them. Sam, who taught the colonists to think about their own condition, is not willing to leave it there.
Rating coming soonTiamat is an ocean world linked to the rest of the galaxy by a wormhole that closes for a century and a half at a time, and the gate is about to shut. The planet rules itself through a hereditary queen whose successor is chosen when she dies, and this time the choice has gone wrong in a way that matters to the Hegemony as much as to Tiamat.
Rating coming soonAn asteroid called Gateway was hollowed out long ago by an alien species that has since vanished, and it is full of small ships nobody knows how to fly. Humans have worked out how to make them go but not where they will go, how long the journey will take, or whether there is enough fuel to come back. Prospectors take the risk for the chance of a fortune.
Rating coming soonEnoch Wallace came home from the Civil War and was recruited by an alien he named Ulysses to keep a way station: a transfer point for travellers crossing the galaxy, installed inside his own house. He has not aged since, and after a hundred years of quiet the government has begun to notice that a veteran of Gettysburg is still alive and living alone on his family farm.
Rating coming soonTwo factions called the Spiders and the Snakes are fighting a war across all of history, recruiting their soldiers at the moment of death and sending them to change the outcomes of battles that other people have already fought. One of their rest stations, staffed by entertainers and medics drawn from many centuries, is the setting for a single night of that war.
Rating coming soonLorenzo Smythe is a bankrupt actor and a superb mimic, drinking away the last of his money when a spaceman buys him a drink and puts him on a ship to Mars. The job turns out to be impersonating a kidnapped politician whose treaty with the Martians depends on him, and the part becomes harder to leave the longer he plays it.
Rating coming soonGenerations after a nuclear war, healing is done by travelling practitioners who carry trained serpents with them, and the rarest of those animals is the dreamsnake, whose venom eases the dying. Snake, a young healer, loses her dreamsnake and has to cross a thinly populated continent to find another, through settlements that treat strangers in their own ways.
Rating coming soonIn March 1952 a meteorite strikes the east coast of the United States and kills most of the government, and the dust and warming that follow are calculated to make the Earth uninhabitable within decades. Elma York, a mathematician who flew as a WASP during the war, joins the international effort to put people into space, and finds that its doors are closed to women.
Rating coming soonOne October night the stars go out: a black membrane has been placed around the Earth, and time inside it now runs millions of times faster than time outside. Tyler Dupree and the Lawton twins, who watched it happen from a back yard, grow up in a world whose remaining decades are numbered, with Jason trying to understand the membrane and Diane trying to live inside it.
Rating coming soonReseune is a city-sized research centre whose product is people: azi, grown in tanks and trained by tape from birth to fill the roles Union needs. Its director, Ariane Emory, has dominated the politics of Cyteen for fifty years. When she is murdered, her rivals expect to be free of her, and instead her death turns Reseune into an experiment in remaking a human being.
Rating coming soonPollution, disease and war have left the world largely sterile, and one large and prosperous family retreats to a valley in Virginia to survive what is coming. When it becomes clear that no child born to them will be able to have children of his own, they turn to cloning, and the community that results is coherent, efficient and very different from the one that made it.
Rating coming soonValentine Michael Smith is a human being, born on Mars after the first expedition failed and raised by Martians. He comes to Earth as a young man, the heir to a fortune and a legal curiosity, and understands almost nothing about the world he has been brought into, including its money, its churches and its manners.
Rating coming soonNed Henry is a historian at Oxford in the twenty-first century who does his research by travelling into the past, and he has been sent to the middle of the twentieth century far too many times. His assignment is to establish where an ugly ornament called the bishop's bird stump was during the Coventry Blitz, and he is too exhausted to be sure what he is doing.
Rating coming soonAt Oxford in the twenty-first century, history students do their fieldwork by travelling into the past as observers, and Kivrin Engle has prepared for years to visit the fourteenth century. Her tutors finally agree to send her, and then the drop does not go as planned and the team at home has problems of its own to deal with.
Rating coming soonCordelia Naismith has left her own advanced world to live on Barrayar as the wife of Aral Vorkosigan, a soldier and aristocrat whose planet runs on older technology and rougher politics. She is expecting their first child when the dying emperor manoeuvres her reluctant husband into serving as regent for his young grandson.
Rating coming soonMark has lived his short life as a copy of Miles Vorkosigan, made to be harvested for the benefit of someone else. He hijacks part of Miles's mercenary fleet and takes it to Jackson's Whole, where the clone creches that raised him are, meaning to destroy them. The raid goes wrong, and Miles has to go after his brother and his troops.
Rating coming soonMiles Vorkosigan has just graduated from the Imperial Academy and is posted to a winter infantry training base on an island in the far north, a test of whether he can be an ordinary officer. He finds the base commander giving orders he considers criminal, refuses to obey them, and is arrested for mutiny within weeks.
Rating coming soonEveryone who has ever lived wakes on the banks of a river that seems to have no end, naked, hairless and alive again, on a world nobody can name. Each of them finds a grailstone and a container that supplies food, and no explanation at all. Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer, is among the resurrected, and he wants to know who is responsible.
Rating coming soonIn 2048 the Alliance fights a long series of wars against poorer nations using soldierboys, nearly indestructible robotic machines piloted by mechanics who are linked to them from a distance. Julian Class is a physicist working on a huge particle accelerator near Jupiter and a mechanic in his other life, and when he learns what the Jupiter Project could do he has to decide what to do about it.
Rating coming soonIn the twenty-second century an engineer named Vannevar Morgan proposes to build a tower from the equator to geostationary orbit, a structure 36,000 kilometres high that would carry payloads into space without rockets. Only two places on Earth can anchor it, and the better of them is a mountain occupied by a community of monks who want nothing to do with the project.
Rating coming soonWar has come to New Prentisstown. An army of Spackle is marching on the city from one direction and the forces of the Answer from the other, and Todd has freed Mayor Prentiss in the hope that he can defend it. Viola is trying to warn the arriving settlers, and both of them have to decide what they are willing to do to stop the fighting.
Rating coming soonIn the Queendom of Sol, programmable matter called wellstone can imitate almost any substance, and a crystal made of miniature black holes called collapsium can send matter and information across the solar system instantly. Bruno de Towaji invented collapsium and dreams of an instrument that could reach the edges of spacetime, while his rival Marlon Sykes is building a ring of it around the sun.
Rating coming soonIn a parallel world the Neanderthals became the dominant human species, and their civilisation is as advanced as ours with a different history, a different society and a different philosophy. A physicist named Ponter Boddit steps through the barrier between the two worlds by accident and arrives in ours, while his colleagues at home are left with a missing body and a murder charge.
Rating coming soonJulia and Victor became the most famous astronauts alive on their mission to Mars. Decades later the Consortium sends them to Pluto, where a starship under the brilliant and arrogant Captain Shanna Axelrod has found intelligent creatures living in a methane sea at three hundred degrees below zero. The two crews have to work together.
Rating coming soonIn 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police is called out to a robbery at a company that has just been floated on the London stock exchange. The crime took place inside a multiplayer online world, the value stolen was in virtual property, and the suspects appear to include the avatars of the players who were in the room at the time.
Rating coming soonEmika Chen has survived the Warcross Championships, and she has learned what Hideo's new algorithm is actually for, which means she can no longer trust the person she once admired most. While she is deciding what to do about it, she is approached by the Blackcoats, a secret organisation with its own plan for the game and for the man who owns it.
Rating coming soonSpensa has wanted to be a pilot since she was a child, and on the ruined world where what is left of humanity has taken shelter, pilots are the only heroes there are. The trouble is her father, who flew before her and who broke formation in the battle that made the survivors what they are, and nobody intends to let his daughter forget it.
Rating coming soonSeven years ago a ship called the Atargatis sailed for the Mariana Trench to film a documentary about legendary sea creatures and was lost with everybody aboard. Footage recovered from the vessel appeared to show mermaids killing the crew, and the world decided it was a hoax. Now a second expedition is being assembled, and the scientists on it are not out to entertain anybody.
Rating coming soonIn twenty-third-century Thailand, the sea has risen, the oil is gone, and energy comes from springs that have to be wound by hand. Biotechnology is the dominant industry, controlled by the companies that own the calorie supply, and the people at the bottom of the arrangement include a manufactured woman who works in a club and is owned by the business that made her.
Rating coming soonVictor and Eli were college roommates, both of them brilliant and arrogant and lonely, and both of them recognised the same quality in the other. In their final year they began investigating whether a near-death experience could produce extraordinary abilities, and when the theory moved from the seminar room into practice, it went very badly wrong.
Rating coming soonBobbi Anderson is a writer of westerns who lives outside the small town of Haven, Maine, and one afternoon while walking in the woods behind her house she trips over a piece of metal. It turns out to be part of something enormous buried under the ground, and once the object is uncovered the people of the town begin to change.
Rating coming soonBefore the organisation in the other books was formed and before the maze was built, solar flares struck the Earth and killed most of the people living on it. Mark and Trina were in New York when it happened and they survived, and what they find afterwards is a second disaster: a virus that fills the people it infects with murderous rage.
Rating coming soonThe drought has been going on long enough that life is a list of things people are not allowed to do with water, and then the taps stop running for good. In a California suburb, Alyssa's street turns into something close to a war zone as neighbours and families fight each other for a supply that cannot cover them all.
Rating coming soonA politician is murdered on a world where robots are built to obey human beings and to keep them from harm, and the chief suspect is the one robot in existence who has no such obligation to anyone. His existence raises a question about the place society has given machines, and the answer is not only about one dead man.
Rating coming soonHope Hubris begins as an innocent, and he will end up accused of every crime there is. It starts when he defends his older sister against a wealthy young man, and his family, who are peasants, has to leave the moon of Callisto and try to cross space as refugees hoping for asylum on Jupiter.
Rating coming soonHistorians at Oxford in the middle of the twenty-first century do their field work by travelling into the past to observe it, using a portal that stays behind in their own time, and each of them can only return when somebody in the future opens it again. Several of them are sent into England during the Second World War.
Rating coming soonMr Free owns a house that the city wants to demolish, and he puts an advertisement in a newspaper offering free living quarters to anyone who will help him find a lost object hidden somewhere inside it. Four strangers answer the advertisement, and they are not the sort of people who usually share a house. None of them can afford to be choosy.
Rating coming soonDuring a war between the stars, one side develops a language that can be used as a weapon, because learning it changes how a person thinks and turns them into an unwitting traitor. A poet and linguist is recruited to work out what it is. The language is the weapon and the puzzle at the same time.
Rating coming soonIn a near-future America that has been almost completely mechanised, there is no more need for human labour, and the people whose skills machines have replaced have nothing to do. An engineer named Paul Proteus begins to think about getting out of it. The engineers are not happy either.
Rating coming soonThe Sarl are a feudal people who live on the eighth level of a shellworld, an artificial planet built as nested spheres by a race that is no longer around to explain it. Their king is murdered by the man who served him, and the heir who sees it happen has to run. He goes looking for the sister who left the world years before, and she is very far away.
Rating coming soonRobin wakes in a rehabilitation centre with no memory of his life and a strong suspicion that somebody is trying to kill him. He signs up for an experiment in which a group of volunteers reconstruct the late twentieth century inside an isolated society, and discovers he has been given a new body and a new name. The experiment has rules that nobody explained to him.
Rating coming soonSomething shatters the Moon, and an astronomer works out what follows: the pieces will spread into a band, come down as a rain of fire, boil the oceans and leave the surface uninhabitable for thousands of years. There are two years to get as many people and as much of the human species as possible into orbit, aboard a structure that was never built to hold them.
Rating coming soonPlateau is a colony built on a mesa that stands forty miles above a poisonous atmosphere, and everything on it is owned by the descendants of the crew who flew the settlers there. Colonists who break the law are executed and then cut up so their organs can be used to treat the Crew, and nobody else is treated at all. Into that arrangement comes a miner named Matthew Keller.
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