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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonA disease has killed most of the children in the United States and left the survivors with powers the government will not allow them to keep, for their own protection. Ruby Daly, who has been hiding what she can do, escapes and joins a group of runaways crossing a country that is hunting them.
Rating coming soonZoe Boutin Perry was adopted as a baby by two of the soldiers who saved her colony, and this novel tells the story of the attempt to found a new settlement from her point of view. The account runs alongside the events of the previous book, which Zoe narrates from her own position.
Rating coming soonRichard MacDuff, a programmer, discovers that his employer plans to sell a system that could rewrite history, and turns to Dirk Gently, a detective whose method is to follow whatever coincidence turns up. The investigation takes in a cat, a professor, a horse in a bathroom and the fate of the human race.
Rating coming soonHarrowhark Nonagesimus is on a ship with the Emperor and a handful of survivors, and she has been made a Lyctor. She remembers none of the events that led there, and the novel moves between her present and a version of the past that keeps contradicting what she is told about it and that she cannot check.
Rating coming soonA Culture ship has been asked to carry a musician to a performance, and the musician and the ship's avatar become involved in an argument over whether a civilisation should be told the truth about its own founding. The novel moves between several ships and worlds as the departure approaches.
Rating coming soonCassia lives in a Society that decides what everyone wears, eats and studies, and at seventeen she is matched with her best friend Xander, which is exactly what she wanted. Then a second face appears on the screen, and she has to work out what the mistake means for her and for the boy the Society did not choose.
Rating coming soonCress has spent seven years alone on a satellite, working as a programmer for the Lunar queen and watching the world through screens. When she is finally rescued by the crew she has been helping, the escape goes wrong, and the queen's plans are moving towards a wedding that will decide the fate of two worlds.
Rating coming soonIn a future where disease and death have been eliminated, the population is controlled by professional killers called scythes, who choose whom to end. Two teenagers are apprenticed to a scythe, and as they learn the work they have to decide what kind of people they are prepared to become.
Rating coming soonMelanie is ten and lives in a cell, collected each morning for lessons with a teacher she likes. She is one of a group of children studied by scientists at a military base, and the reason for the arrangement, and what Melanie actually is, becomes the novel's central question and changes what the reader thinks of everyone on the base.
Rating coming soonMenolly, a young musician who keeps nine fire lizards of her own, arrives at the Harper Hall on Pern to begin training as a harper. She is the first girl ever apprenticed there, the Masters disagree about whether she should be taught at all, and the students she has to live with resent her for being different.
Rating coming soonAhsoka Tano left the Jedi Order before the Clone Wars ended, and the purge that followed left her with nothing to belong to. Living under an assumed name, she avoids the Force and the lightsabers she still carries, until the Empire's reach into a small community forces her to choose between staying hidden and helping the people she has come to know.
Rating coming soonA disease called Wanderer's Folly has been spreading for two years, filling people's heads with delusions until the world begins to come apart. David Arlen thinks the worst has passed, and within the same day his wife is dead and he is driving a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter Ellie.
Rating coming soonEarth has been reduced by four waves of attack from beings who arrived without warning. After the first there was no power, after the second only the lucky escaped, and after the third and fourth the survivors learned a rule: trust nobody. Cassie is alone on a highway when she meets Evan Walker, who may be her only chance of reaching her brother.
Rating coming soonJuliette has escaped to Omega Point, where the resistance keeps a refuge for people whose abilities make them dangerous to the government that wants to use them. She is free of the Reestablishment's plans for her, but Warner, the man who held her captive, has not finished with her, and she has to decide what she is willing to become in order to stay out of his reach.
Rating coming soonThe first alien fleet is four centuries away, and the beings inside it have an advantage that no defence can answer: particles that watch and report everything humanity does, so that no plan can be kept secret. The Wallfacer Project gives four men enormous resources and one instruction, which is to devise a strategy hidden through misdirection.
Rating coming soonTally Youngblood has been through the operation that turns sixteen-year-olds into Pretties, and she now spends her days at parties with a brain that has been arranged to keep her happy. Underneath that she keeps catching fragments of her old life in the Smoke, and somebody from it has come looking for her.
Rating coming soonIn a world where most people develop a superpower at the age of four, Izuku Midoriya has none. He wants to be a hero anyway, which means getting into a school that takes only the most powerful students, and an encounter with the greatest hero alive gives him a chance he had given up on.
Rating coming soonThirty-five girls entered the competition to marry Prince Maxon, and four are left at the palace. America Singer never expected to be one of them, or to have come so close to the crown, but the competition is nearly over and the threats outside the palace walls are getting worse. One of the four will be chosen.
Rating coming soonMenolly is the daughter of a fishing family on Pern, and she has a talent for music that her hold has no use for. When her father forbids her the training she wants, she leaves home, and the timing could not be worse: the deadly rain that falls from the sky, called Thread, has begun again.
Rating coming soonFive years after the destruction of the second Death Star, the New Republic is still putting itself together. In what remains of the Imperial fleet, the last of the Emperor's commanders has taken charge, and he has two discoveries that he believes can destroy everything the Rebellion built. The books introduce the commander who will become the Republic's most dangerous enemy.
Rating coming soonJuliette believed she had beaten the Reestablishment and taken charge of her own life, and the fifth book of the series begins with her finding out how much of what she knew was arranged for her. She is left with the same choice as before, between being used as a weapon and fighting back.
Rating coming soonMare Barrow was the lightning girl, and the third book of the Red Queen series begins with her a prisoner, her ability suppressed and her mistakes weighing on her. She is held by Maven Calore, who was once the boy she loved and is now the king. The book alternates between her captivity and the war being prepared outside the palace.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner is the third child of a farming family, which makes him illegal. In a country where the government has taken drastic measures over population, families are allowed only two children, and Luke has lived his whole life as a shadow child, kept out of sight. When new houses are built on part of the farm he loses what little freedom he had, and then he finds another hidden child living next door.
Rating coming soonA starship carrying the descendants of people who left Earth generations ago is closing on the world that is meant to become their new home. The voyage has lasted longer than anyone planned for, the ship is ageing around them, and the settlement plan turns out to rest on assumptions that the travellers can no longer make. The story is told largely in the voice of the ship itself.
Rating coming soonElijah Baley is a New York police detective in a future city buried under steel and roofed against the outside, where most people live in enormous communal blocks and housing is rationed down to the last square metre. A Spacer has been murdered, and the Spacers will only accept the arrest if the investigation is carried out alongside a robot partner.
Rating coming soonJean le Flambeur is a thief imprisoned in a prison of his own psychology, where he has to outwit copies of himself to survive. He is broken out by a warrior from a society that hides its thoughts, who wants a particular artefact stolen and has arranged for Jean to be in her debt. The theft takes the pair to a moving city on Mars.
Rating coming soonPrincess Winter of Luna is admired across the court for her grace and kindness even though her face is scarred. Her stepmother, Queen Levana, rules by controlling what her subjects are allowed to see and think, and Winter's refusal to use that same power on anyone keeps her in danger. She is also in love with her childhood friend Jacin, a palace guard.
Rating coming soonCharlie McGee is a child with the ability to start fires with her mind, and a secret government agency wants her badly enough to hunt her across the country. Her father Andy has a milder version of the same gift and has spent years keeping her hidden, but a laboratory called The Shop knows the family exists and is prepared to take the girl by force.
Rating coming soonAt the end of the Second World War, Europe is full of soldiers, spies, engineers and profiteers, and the German V-2 rocket programme is being dismantled by whoever can reach the paperwork first. Several of them are looking for a device that seems to connect the rockets to a pattern in the lives of the people around them.
Rating coming soonSix million years ago a woman named Abigail Gentian split herself into a thousand male and female copies, called shatterlings, and sent them out to watch civilisations rise and fall. Once every two hundred thousand years the shatterlings meet to trade memories of what they have seen. This time nobody arrives, and the line is being murdered.
Rating coming soonHumanity has handed its government to an artificial intelligence that runs the world so well that nobody dies of accident, illness or want. The one thing the Thunderhead cannot control is the scythedom, the order of human beings who decide who has to die. A year after going missing, Rowan has become a vigilante killing people he considers disgraces to that order.
Rating coming soonCenturies after the last people left Earth, the ships of the Exodus Fleet are still flying, kept alive by the descendants of the crews who built them. Humanity has been accepted into the wider galactic community, and many of the fleet's young people are leaving for alien cities, which leaves the people who stay wondering what their way of life is still for.
Rating coming soonIt is the morning of the fiftieth Hunger Games, a Quarter Quell, and the districts of Panem are waiting to learn who will be taken from them this time. In District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think about his chances. He cares about getting through the day and about the girl he loves, and then his name is called.
Rating coming soonTodd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown, a settlement where a germ has left every man able to hear the thoughts of every other man and nobody able to keep anything to himself. A month before the birthday that would make him a man, he has to run, taking a dog with him and meeting something he has never encountered before: a person whose thoughts he cannot hear at all.
Rating coming soonSolaria is a Spacer world where nobody touches anybody and conversation happens through holograms, with robots doing all the work and the settlers living alone on enormous estates. It is also the setting for the first murder in two hundred years, and the Solarians want the case cleared up without the disturbance of an Earthman living among them.
Rating coming soonChasm City was a utopia built under a dome on a planet human beings should not have been able to settle, and its wealth came from somewhere else entirely. A virus that infects machinery as readily as flesh has left the city half ruined, its buildings and its people altered, and its survivors living inside what remains.
Rating coming soonThe crew of the Rocinante has time on its hands while the ship sits in dock, and each of them goes off to deal with something personal. Meanwhile a radical faction has been stealing stealth technology from Martian shipyards, which turns out to be the first sign of a plan aimed at the whole of humanity.
Rating coming soonAugust Landry moves to New York expecting to be proved right about the world, and instead falls for a woman she keeps meeting on the subway. Jane is a punk from the 1970s who has been displaced in time and cannot leave the train, and August decides to find out why.
Rating coming soonAn exiled Chiss warrior is found on an unnamed world at the edge of the Outer Rim and offered a place in the Imperial navy by Emperor Palpatine. Thrawn is not interested in rank for its own sake, and the Empire is not sure what it has taken on or how far the officer's loyalty will stretch.
Rating coming soonTakeshi Kovacs comes home to the planet where he was born, in a body that is not his own, with a religious movement hunting him after a series of attacks. Harlan's World is also where the politics of his earlier life are waiting to be settled, along with everyone who knew him before he left it.
Rating coming soonKira Navarez is a xenobiologist on a survey contract on an uncolonised planet, with plans to settle down with her fiance once the work is done. Investigating a crashed drone, she finds a structure left behind by a civilisation that no longer exists, and wakes something inside it that fastens itself to her body and changes what she is.
Rating coming soonNova was raised by the Anarchists after her parents were murdered, and now she is expected to work her way inside the Renegades, the syndicate of people with extraordinary abilities who have kept order in the city since the civil conflict that first brought them to power. The Renegades believe they are protecting everyone from people like her, and Nova has no intention of failing the family that took her in.
Rating coming soonEternity is an organisation that exists outside ordinary time and adjusts human history from within, smoothing away disasters and the risks that would otherwise shape it. Andrew Harlan is one of its technicians, and the assignment he is given sets him against the rule he has spent his working life serving.
Rating coming soonAna Dakkar is in her first year at a school that trains marine scientists, naval officers and underwater explorers, and both her parents died on a research voyage for the same institution. On the day of her first trial at sea the school is attacked, and Ana and her classmates find out what the school's founder actually left them.
Rating coming soonIntruders break into a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis in the middle of the night and murder Luke Ellis's parents, and the whole operation takes less than two minutes. Luke wakes up in a room that looks like his own except that it has no window, in a building full of other children who were taken the same way and who have telepathy or telekinesis.
Rating coming soonBy the year 2312 humanity has spread across the solar system, and the great city of Terminator on Mercury is built on rails so that it can stay just ahead of the sunrise. The novel follows a woman who has lived her life in that moving city out into the rest of the inhabited system, where the settlements are holding an argument about who gets to decide what happens next.
Rating coming soonThe gates left behind by the civilisation that made the protomolecule have opened the way to a thousand worlds, and the rush to settle them has started. On the first of those colonies a small group of Belters who arrived first and a corporate survey party sent by the charter are arguing about who owns the ground, and the ship that made the gates available has been asked to keep the peace.
Rating coming soonThe western United States is now the Republic, a country permanently at war with its neighbours, and June is fifteen, rich and being trained for the highest military circles. Day is fifteen too, born in the slums and the Republic's most wanted criminal, and the two of them have no reason to meet until June's brother is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect.
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