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 11 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonSkade is sent to inspect a Conjoiner ship that has come home after decades away and finds its founder, Galiana, aboard and no longer alone inside her own head. The agents that took the ship also killed its crew, and they are still with her. Ten years later, Nevil Clavain is trying to find out what became of her, and he is not the only one.
Rating coming soonA repressive interstellar state sends a warship to punish one of its colony worlds for an invasion that never happened. What did happen is that the Festival arrived and began paying the colonists for being entertaining, which has broken the colony's economy, its politics and the rules it was kept under. Two people on the flagship have reasons of their own for wanting the mission to fail.
Rating coming soonJohn Perry and Jane Sagan are offered the leadership of a new colony called Roanoke, drawn from the first ten human worlds, and they accept and travel out with Zoë and her two alien protectors. When they arrive they are not at the planet they were assigned, and a soldier who rode out attached to the outside of their ship tells them there is no question of leaving.
Rating coming soonA reclusive station colony called Rotor has left the crowded Earth and taken up orbit around a newly discovered red dwarf, above a semi-habitable moon named for the red light that falls on it. Its people cannot agree on where to go next, and the moon's bacterial life turns out to be far more than bacteria. Behind them, Earth is perfecting a kind of flight that makes distance small.
Rating coming soonEarth and the Colonial Union have parted ways, and neither is on good terms with the Conclave, the coalition of alien governments. The Union is running out of soldiers because no new recruits are coming from Earth, and something calling itself Equilibrium is attacking both sides. A lieutenant and a small group of diplomats have to find out who before the colonies become easy targets.
Rating coming soonAn interstellar comet is found to be on a collision course with the Moon, and the early analysis says the impact will shatter it. The vice president of the United States happens to be on the Moon that week, opening the first moonbase, and the base is home to about a thousand people with very little time to leave.
Rating coming soonThe Colonial Defense Forces learn from a captured alien scientist that one of their own consciousness-transfer specialists has turned against them and built an alliance of three species aimed at wiping out humanity. He had stored a copy of his mind on a computer before he vanished, so a soldier is built from his DNA to carry it.
Rating coming soonDalgard Nordis has gone out on his man-journey, three generations after his people reached the world of Astra, and his companion is a merperson named Sssuri. They are exploring the ruins of a city left by Those Others, the species that once enslaved Sssuri's people, and the journey is how Dalgard proves himself fit to sit on the Council of Free Men.
Rating coming soonRigg, Umbo and Param get through the wall and out of Ramfold, and keep going, through fold after fold and back into the past as well. What they are trying to piece together is the history of the world they live on, because the future they are trying to avoid is one in which an enemy arrives and destroys it.
Rating coming soonDan Sylveste is an archaeologist on the planet Resurgam, digging up the remains of the Amarantin, a species whose world was destroyed when their own sun turned on them nearly a million years ago. Elsewhere in the same system, a vast ship called the Nostalgia for Infinity is looking for him, because its crew believe he is the only person who can help their captain.
Rating coming soonHumans have been driven off the Earth by aliens known as the Invaders and have settled the Moon and the rest of the Solar System. The Moon is the most heavily populated world left, and it is run for everybody's convenience by the Central Computer, which is government, courts, information source and friend at once.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years after Blue Remembered Earth, humanity is sending hundreds of huge generation ships, carrying millions of people, towards planets outside the Solar System. The engines can get the ships up to speed, but there may not be enough fuel to slow them down again. One woman, cloned centuries earlier so that she could live three lives, is on all three of those paths at once.
Rating coming soonThe dolphins the original colonists brought to Pern are still there in the Ninth Pass, and two young people are the ones who rediscover what they are. Readis, the son of the Paradise River Lord Holder, was saved as a boy by dolphins he calls shipfish; T'lion is a young dragonrider who had an encounter of his own.
Rating coming soonPeter Reidinger is the telepath and telekinetic first met in Pegasus in Flight, and his ability to draw on energy from outside himself could make him the most powerful psychic that human beings have produced. That possibility attracts enemies, and they are enemies of all Talents rather than of him alone.
Rating coming soonA human generation ship arrives at its destination star to make first contact with whatever is there and finds an industrial-age civilisation, the first alien species humanity has met. That changes what the ship's protocols say to do and divides the people aboard, while on the planet below nobody is expecting visitors.
Rating coming soonTwo years after Aurora Rising, citizens of the Glitter Band are dying in a manner nobody can explain: the neural implants in their heads overheat and destroy their brains, apparently at random. As the deaths become more frequent, two Prefects have nowhere obvious to start, and several habitats are deciding to leave.
Rating coming soonIt is the 2160s, and humanity has repaired the Earth's climate and colonised the inner Solar System. A surveillance system called the Mechanism means violent crime is almost unheard of, genetic engineering has stretched human lifespans, and Africa, China and India are among the leading powers. Two adult siblings set out to solve a mystery left by the head of their family.
Rating coming soonRigg can see the path of any living being, however long ago it passed, and he has grown up hunting in the mountains with his father. When his father dies, his last instruction sends Rigg looking for a sister he had never been told that he had. Then a boy drowns at the falls near their home, Rigg is blamed for it, and the town turns on him.
Rating coming soonA thousand five hundred years after the Commonwealth barely survived a war against an alien species called the Prime, the galaxy is facing something larger. At its centre is the Void, a self-contained microuniverse that cannot be entered or destroyed and has been expanding for millions of years, consuming everything in its path. Then an astrophysicist studying it begins to dream of people who live inside.
Rating coming soonBiron Farrell is a student at the University of Earth when a radiation bomb is planted in his dormitory room, which turns him from an innocent young man into a marked one, running from an assassin he cannot identify. He then learns that his father, the Rancher of Widemos, has been murdered light-years away. Finding out why draws him into a rebellion.
Rating coming soonFive years after the hydrogues attacked the human-colonised worlds of the Spiral Arm, they still control the fuel that drives starships, and the embargo is strangling human civilisation. On Earth the attacks have started again, and the Terran leaders decide to send a cybernetic army against them, not realising that those machines have already destroyed the people who built them.
Rating coming soonIt is the year 2380, and the Intersolar Commonwealth is a sphere of stars four hundred light-years across with more than six hundred worlds in it, all joined by a web of wormhole transport tunnels. At the far edge of it, an astronomer watches a star more than a thousand light-years away simply disappear. It does not explode and it does not collapse. It vanishes.
Rating coming soonIt is a world shrouded in mystery: a planet pocked by meteors, baked by ultraviolet light and covered in deserts the colour of dried blood. To that world travel the twenty-five astronauts of an international mission, who have to come together once the landers are down, the base dome is inflated and the robotic explorers are sent out.
Rating coming soonMark Studdock has just been made a senior fellow in sociology at Bracton College, in the University of Edgestow, where the fellows are arguing about the sale of a piece of college land to a scientific body called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. The land is an ancient wood believed to be the resting place of Merlin, the sale is controversial, and the Institute already employs some of the college's own faculty. Mark's wife Jane has been having a nightmare about a severed head, and the book follows the two of them into what the Institute is really for.
Rating coming soonAtalantia au Grimmus, the dictator of the Society Remnant, has destroyed the Solar Republic's fleet in orbit and is besieging its Free Legions on Mercury. Three weeks after departing from Venus, Darrow of Lykos arrives on Mercury with his team to break the siege, and Atalantia agrees to an alliance with the Rim on the condition that two of its people take part in her attack on the planet.
Rating coming soonIt is 3172, and most human beings belong to one of two factions: the Earth-based Draco and the Pleiades Federation. Starship travel depends on Illyrion, a rare and valuable power source. The most important family in the Pleiades is the Von Rays, and the most important family in Draco is the Reds, who own the company that makes the interstellar drives. Lorq Von Ray means to fly his ship through a nova to get hold of it.
Rating coming soonA statue of a two-legged alien, recovered on Iapetus, one of the moons of Saturn, settled the long question of whether human beings were alone, and faster-than-light ships went on to find enormous Monuments circling other stars. The people who built them were never seen. Priscilla Hutchins, a starship pilot, and the scientists she flies for are still trying to explain the Monuments, where their makers put them and what they were for.
Rating coming soonNine years after the Discovery One mission failed at Jupiter, a joint Soviet and American crew goes back to salvage the abandoned ship, to examine the monolith that Dave Bowman found, and to work out what became of Bowman himself. 2010: Odyssey Two is Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 1982.
Rating coming soonTuf Voyaging is a science fiction book by George R. R. Martin, published in hardcover in 1986, and it is a fix-up of stories that had appeared separately over the decade before. Its central figure is Haviland Tuf, a solitary space trader who comes into possession of an ancient seedship with vast powers of ecological engineering and then travels from world to world offering to solve their problems.
Rating coming soonThe Songs of Distant Earth is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1986 and built out of a short story he had written nearly thirty years earlier. It is set in the far future, after the Sun has destroyed the Earth, and it follows a ship of sleeping colonists who stop for repairs at a world that was settled seven hundred years before and has long since lost touch with its origins.
Rating coming soonAnd Another Thing... is the sixth Hitchhiker's Guide book and the only one not written by Douglas Adams. Eoin Colfer was asked to write it by Adams's widow, Jane Belson, and it appeared in hardback on 12 October 2009, thirty years to the day after the first book in the series. It begins where Mostly Harmless left off and follows the surviving characters on from there.
Rating coming soonMostly Harmless is the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide novel, and the last one Douglas Adams wrote. Its cover called it the fifth book in an increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, and the story it tells follows Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect through another round of mishaps, with the two of them apart for most of the book.
Rating coming soonThe First Men in the Moon is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells about two Englishmen who travel to the Moon and find an advanced civilisation of insect-like creatures living inside it. It appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in 1900 and 1901, and came out as a book in 1901.
Rating coming soonDiamond Dogs, Turquoise Days brings together two science fiction novellas by Alastair Reynolds. Both of them are set in the same universe as his Revelation Space novels, though they stand apart from those books' plots and from one another, and the volume was published by Gollancz in 2003. The first of the pair is a story about a maze, a team and a very old alien structure.
Rating coming soonOrson Scott Card's Ender in Exile, published in 2008, is part of the Ender's Game series. It fits into the gap between the first novel of the series and its first sequel, and it expands the last chapter of the earlier book into a volume of its own while drawing on the Shadow Saga as well.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Red Planet, published in 1949, is about two boys at a boarding school on Mars and the Martian creature one of them keeps as a pet. It is the first of his books to show the wise and ancient Martians that appear in his later work, and it also has a publishing history of its own, because the first edition was altered against his wishes and was later restored.
Rating coming soonWyrms is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, published in 1987. It is the story of a young woman raised in secret among people who mean to use her, it deals with desire, wisdom and will, and it turns on a prophecy that she has no wish to fulfil, and on a world where an entire religion has grown up around a birth that has not yet happened.
Rating coming soonTunnel in the Sky is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein for younger readers, published in 1955. A class of students is dropped on an uninhabited planet for a survival test that is supposed to last a few days, and the test turns into something much longer when nobody comes to collect them.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky, published in 1950, is about a teenage boy whose family emigrates to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter that is being made fit for farming. A shorter version had appeared in a boys' magazine the same year under the title Satellite Scout, which is how many of its first readers met the story.
Rating coming soonThe Ringworld Engineers is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven, published in 1979 as the first sequel to Ringworld. Niven had not intended to write a second book about the enormous ring, but readers kept pointing out problems with his engineering, and the novel is partly an answer to them.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, published in 1963 after being serialised the year before, takes the form of a diary kept by Podkayne Fries, a fifteen-year-old girl on Mars. She talks her way onto a luxury liner bound for Earth, travelling with her younger brother and their great-uncle, a senator, and the voyage turns out to be more than a holiday.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, published in 1957 after four issues of Astounding Science Fiction, follows a boy sold at a slave auction on a distant planet. It is about the old beggar who buys him and raises him as a son, and about the question of who the boy really is and where he came from.
Rating coming soonA Time of Changes is a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg, published in 1971 and the winner of the Nebula Award for that year. It takes place in a culture where the first person singular is an obscenity, and it is told as the autobiography of a man who breaks that rule and leads a revolution against it.
Rating coming soonSarek is a Star Trek novel by A. C. Crispin, published in 1994 and set shortly after the events of the film Star Trek VI. The Vulcan ambassador Sarek finds evidence of a plot against the Federation and has to work out who is behind it while grieving for his human wife, and the book is as much about that loss as about the conspiracy.
Rating coming soonTitan is a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, published in 1997 and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. It describes a crewed mission to Titan, the moon of Saturn, whose thick atmosphere and chemistry have led some people to think it may hold the building blocks of life.
Rating coming soonThe Power is a science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman, published in 2016 and winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. Its premise is that women develop the ability to release electrical jolts from their hands, which turns them into the dominant sex. The book is framed as a history written thousands of years after the events it describes.
Rating coming soonIn the Ocean of Night is a science fiction novel by Gregory Benford, published in 1977 as the first book of his Galactic Center sequence. It was put together from novellas and novelettes he had published between 1973 and 1977, and it was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel and for the Locus Award the following year.
Rating coming soonJack Morgan is fourteen, recently orphaned and wanted over a robbery he had nothing to do with, so he is hiding in the starship his uncle left him when another vessel crashes nearby. The only survivor is Draycos, a warrior of a dragon-like species who cannot stay alive for long without a living host to ride on. Draycos needs a body and a pilot, Jack needs someone who can clear his name, and the arrangement they make is meant to be temporary.
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