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 3 of the shelf.
Search by title or author, filter with the subgenre chips, the primary-genre chips or the tag chips, or sort the list. Filtering happens in your browser and nothing about the visit is stored.
Showing 48 of 536 books
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonThe first novel of the Mars trilogy follows the beginnings of the colonisation of Mars, from the arrival of the group known as the First Hundred to the first Martian revolution. The book covers the early decades of settlement and the political consequences of the settlers' decisions about how the planet should be changed.
Rating coming soonFraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists and philosophers protected from the corrupting influences of the outside secular world by stone, tradition and ritual. Beyond the concent's walls cities and governments have risen and fallen, and three times violence has invaded the community and devastated it. The avout are banned from most advanced technology.
Rating coming soonSet in a near-future society with a youth subculture of extreme violence, the novel is narrated by a teenage protagonist named Alex, who describes his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. Part of the book is written in a Russian-influenced slang of the author's invention, taking its name from the Russian suffix equivalent to the English ending of the teenage years.
Rating coming soonSeveral centuries after the events of Second Foundation, two citizens of the Foundation search for Earth, the legendary planet where human beings are said to have originated. The novel follows the journey of a councilman, a historian and a visitor from a world called Gaia as they look for humanity's ancestral home, and their search is a matter of evidence as much as of navigation.
Rating coming soonSixty-five thousand alien objects have burned in the atmosphere, there has been a brief moment of surveillance by agents unknown, and then two months of silence while the world holds its breath. A half-derelict probe past Neptune's orbit hears a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam, and it is not addressed to humanity. A crew is sent to force an introduction.
Rating coming soonBorn a lowly Red in the mines of Mars, Darrow lost his wife to the Gold overlords and joined a secret revolutionary group, which remade him as a Gold so that he could infiltrate the ruling class and bring it down from within. After years of hiding among the Golds he is ready to declare open revolution, and the final fight is the hardest of them all.
Rating coming soonThe Free Navy, a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships, has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the new worlds beyond the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy is strong enough to protect them, so the remnants of the old powers ask the Rocinante for help.
Rating coming soonSet during an interstellar war between the Terran Federation of Earth and the Arachnids of Klendathu, the novel is narrated as a series of flashbacks by Juan Rico, a capsule trooper in the Mobile Infantry. It opens with him aboard a corvette preparing to raid a planet held by allies of the Arachnids, and then returns to his decision to enlist against his father's objections.
Rating coming soonThe first book of the Interdependency sequence is set in a human interstellar empire whose settlements depend on a network of routes through space. When those routes begin to change, the arrangement that keeps the empire's worlds supplied and connected starts to fail, and the people who understand the problem have to convince an establishment that does not want to hear it.
Rating coming soonA group of history students travel to fourteenth-century France in order to rescue their professor, who has become stranded there during an archaeological project. The technology that sends them is based on quantum and multiverse theory, and the novel follows the consequences of putting people who study a period into the period itself. Their research becomes field experience.
Rating coming soonSet in a future where interstellar travel and relative immortality are made possible by transferring consciousness between bodies, the novel follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite soldier turned private investigator, as he investigates a rich man's death. The case puts him inside a society where death is negotiable and where the powerful can afford to survive almost anything.
Rating coming soonThomas was sure that escaping from the Maze would mean freedom for him and the other Gladers, but the organisation that built it is not finished. Phase Two is the Scorch, and the Gladers have two weeks to cross the most burned-out section of the world, with the odds deliberately stacked against them and other survivors whose own survival depends on theirs failing.
Rating coming soonBreq is a soldier who used to be a warship: once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, she now has a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew she is ordered to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew.
Rating coming soonSet in a dystopian Orange County, California in the then-future of June 1994, the novel includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use, both recreational and abusive. The protagonist is Bob Arctor, a member of a household of drug users who is also living a double life as an undercover police agent assigned to spy on that same household.
Rating coming soonHumans and androids crowd the streets of New Beijing while a deadly plague ravages the population and a ruthless lunar people watch from space waiting to make their move. Cinder is a gifted mechanic and a cyborg, a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister's illness. Then her life becomes entangled with the crown prince's.
Rating coming soonAn old enemy returns home with more power and technology than anyone thought possible, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante try to rally forces against the new invasion. In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling, and in the space between Earth and Jupiter the inner planets and the belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance.
Rating coming soonNow fully embedded among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his work to bring down the Society from within, pursuing the future his murdered wife believed in. The second volume of the trilogy follows his double position as a member of the elite and an agent of a rebellion, and the cost of maintaining both.
Rating coming soonSeveral years after the events of the previous volume, the elderly politician Chrisjen Avasarala dies and is given a state funeral on Laconia, where James Holden, still a captive, pays his respects. Holden is allowed to move around the grounds of the High Consul's residence, and the situation he is in is one of comfortable detention rather than escape.
Rating coming soonA shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick is stranded on a Pacific island presided over by the notorious Dr Moreau, and he confronts dark secrets, strange creatures and a reason to run for his life. The novel is an early work by H. G. Wells in which the possibilities of science are shown as a source of terror rather than of wonder.
Rating coming soonThe novella is set in a future dark age of the great we, a world that deprives individuals of name, independence and values. Its protagonist lives in that age and dares to love a woman of his own choosing, and in a period that has lost the traces of science he seeks knowledge.
Rating coming soonGeorge Orr has an unusual gift: he is an effective dreamer, and his dreams become reality when he wakes. He remembers his past and current life, but the people around him know only the version of reality they are living in, and he begins taking drugs to suppress his dreams, which eventually leads him to a psychotherapist with a machine that records the brain patterns of people as they sleep.
Rating coming soonThe children of Dune are the twin siblings Leto and Ghanima Atreides, whose father, the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, disappeared into the deserts of Arrakis. Like their father they possess unusual abilities, which makes them valuable to their aunt Alia, who rules the Empire as regent. If Alia can obtain the secrets of the twins' prophetic visions, her rule becomes absolute.
Rating coming soonZack Lightman has spent his life dreaming that the real world could resemble the science fiction books, films and video games he consumes, and telling himself that he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. Then he sees a flying saucer, and the alien ship is straight out of the online flight simulator he plays every night, a game in which players defend the Earth from alien invaders.
Rating coming soonA radio signal from another world gives the Jesuit order a reason to send a mission, and a small group of linguists, doctors and priests makes the journey. Years later the mission's surviving priest is brought back to Earth, and the novel works out what happened to the people who went with him.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter, a Confederate veteran who has not aged for as long as he can remember, is transported from Arizona to Mars, where the weaker gravity gives him great strength. Captured by the green Martians, he meets the princess Dejah Thoris, becomes involved in the politics of a dying world, and has to earn a place among people who regard him as a curiosity.
Rating coming soonSnowman, once called Jimmy, lives alone on a shore after a plague has destroyed almost everyone, and the only people left with him are the Children of Crake, a gentle species engineered by his friend. To explain how the world ended he works backwards through his friendship with Crake and his feelings for the woman they both wanted.
Rating coming soonA human ship sent to investigate a signal finds the Moties, a species confined to a single star system by their own biology, and the crew has to work out how to talk to a civilisation that has risen and collapsed over and over again. First contact turns into an argument about what should be done with what they learn.
Rating coming soonCoriolanus Snow is eighteen and preparing for the tenth Hunger Games, at which tributes will be paired with student mentors for the first time. He is given the girl from District 12, and the two of them work out what will keep her alive, beginning the process that turns Snow into the man he becomes.
Rating coming soonJohnny Smith wakes from a coma of nearly five years and finds that touching people gives him visions of their past and their future. Some of what he learns is ordinary and some of it is not, and one of the futures he sees belongs to a politician whose ambitions would be catastrophic.
Rating coming soonTally Youngblood is about to turn sixteen, when an operation will make her Pretty and move her across the river to live with the other new Pretties. Her friend Shay does not want the operation and disappears before the date, and Tally is given a choice by the authorities: find her, or never be made pretty herself.
Rating coming soonThe journalist Ed Malone asks for an assignment dangerous enough to impress the woman he wants to marry, and is sent to interview Professor Challenger, who claims to have found a plateau in South America where prehistoric animals still live and where no expedition has returned. A party sets out to prove or disprove the claim.
Rating coming soonBill Masen wakes in hospital with his eyes bandaged to find that almost everyone who watched a spectacular meteor shower has been blinded, and that society has stopped. The triffids, walking plants that have been farmed for their oil, are now free to move and kill, and he has to decide what kind of life is possible.
Rating coming soonBy 2100 humanity has found a way to exchange matter with a parallel universe through a device called the Pump, and the arrangement has made the world wealthy. One physicist works out that the exchange will eventually destroy the sun, and the novel follows the three stages of the argument against the people who refuse to hear it.
Rating coming soonA secret government project turns twelve death-row inmates into something that spreads across the country, and a six-year-old girl is carried out of the facility by an agent who means to keep her safe. The novel follows the collapse of the United States and then, decades later, a community of survivors living behind lights that the infected will not cross.
Rating coming soonArthur Dent and his companions, having escaped the destruction of the Earth, need somewhere to eat, and the universe offers a restaurant that survives to the end of time. The journey there involves a stolen spaceship, a planet of people nobody wants, and the story of what happened to the rulers of the galaxy.
Rating coming soonBen Richards cannot afford medicine for his daughter, so he applies for the only work that pays enough: a game show in which a man is released into the country and hunted for a month. The longer he survives, the more money his family receives, and the audience watches every stage of it.
Rating coming soonBreq, who used to be a warship and is now a single body, has been given a station to look after and a fragile peace to keep. A search of the station's slums turns up someone who should not exist, and a messenger from the Presger empire arrives with questions nobody can answer.
Rating coming soonDays after the contest that made him the owner of the OASIS, Wade Watts finds a second challenge hidden in the archives of its founder. What is waiting there points towards technology that could change what the virtual world is for, and towards a rival who wants the same thing and has more money than he does.
Rating coming soonThomas and the other survivors are told that the trials are finished and that their memories will be restored so they can help find a cure for the virus that has emptied the world. None of them trusts the organisation that has been running the tests, and Thomas has to decide what to do about what he remembers.
Rating coming soonAfter a war over abortion, a compromise called the Bill of Life allows a child between thirteen and eighteen to be unwound, with every part of the body transplanted rather than the child being killed. Three young people run before their turn comes, and the novel follows them towards a harvest camp where the process is carried out.
Rating coming soonShevek is a physicist on Anarres, a world settled by anarchists who left the capitalist planet Urras generations earlier. He travels back to Urras to work on his theory, and finds that each society holds ideas about him that he cannot satisfy, and that his own has become something he no longer recognises.
Rating coming soonThe last book of the Expanse opens with the human worlds under attack by something from beyond the gates, and with the crew of the Rocinante scattered by the events of the previous volume. The question is no longer who wins the war but whether humanity can keep using the ring network at all.
Rating coming soonDominic Salt and his three children are the caretakers of Shearwater, a small island near Antarctica that holds a seed vault and very little else. A woman named Rowan is shipwrecked on the shore during a storm, and the family has to decide what to do about her while the weather closes in and the island's purpose is called into question.
Rating coming soonAn expedition sent by a company hunting diamonds in the Congo finds its previous team dead, apparently killed by something in the forest. A primatologist and her gorilla join the second party, which has to cross a country in the middle of a war to reach a lost city and the source of the danger there.
Rating coming soonKira is orphaned and disabled in a village that has no place for her, and she is taken to live in the Council Edifice, where she is given the work of repairing a ceremonial robe. The task brings her comfort and standing, but the more she learns about the building and the people kept in it, the less comfortable her position becomes.
Rating coming soonJoseph Schwartz, a retired tailor in the twentieth century, is caught in an experiment and wakes in a future Earth that has been poisoned by radiation and is ruled from elsewhere in the galaxy. Taken for a harmless old man, he is drawn into a conspiracy that will decide whether the planet's population is ever free.
Rating coming soonDr Elwin Ransom, a philologist on a walking holiday in the English countryside, is kidnapped by two men and carried in a spacecraft to Mars, which its inhabitants call Malacandra. He escapes into the planet's interior and is sheltered by three different species, and learns what their history has to do with the isolation of Earth.
Rating coming soonHuge ships appear over the cities of Earth, and the Overlords who command them begin a period of peaceful rule, ending war, poverty and cruelty within a generation. Humanity prospers under a system it did not choose, and the cost of the arrangement becomes clear only as the next generation grows up.
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