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 9 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonSuicide has become an epidemic among young people, and the country has one proven treatment for it. The Program erases the depression along with everything else, and the people who come out of it return as blank slates. Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone, and she knows that her parents have already lost one child and will do anything to keep her alive.
Rating coming soonWhen the bomb falls, places in the shelters go to a privileged few, the men and women judged best able to rebuild Britain. Fewer of them survive the blast than were admitted. In Portsmouth the survivors include Johnny Clayton, a marine engineer, his wife, and the weak infant son she gives birth to underground. They set out for London in the hope of finding some sort of headquarters.
Rating coming soonIn 2020 Reid Malenfant travels to the outer edge of the solar system and finds an artifact left behind by another civilisation. It is a gateway that works like a quantum transporter, moving cargo and people across interstellar distances almost instantly. Malenfant decides to find out what is on the other side, and the decision costs him everything he has.
Rating coming soonThe government of this country says the world is overcrowded, and a family may have two children. A third child is a shadow child, and a shadow child is killed when found. Matthias, Percy and Alia are taken from their school with a crowd of other children and put on a truck that is described as a work detail. What happens on the road gives them a way to fight back from inside the Population Police.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner has been working inside the Population Police from the stables, waiting for a chance to bring it down. When he is sent out to help hand new identification cards to citizens, a moment of refusal sets off a rebellion that sweeps the country, and the organisation that hunted children like him loses its grip. What replaces it turns out not to be what he had in mind.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner has been living at a school under a false name: that of Lee Grant, a boy who died in a skiing accident and whose family agreed to give his identity to another child. Then the Grants decide to send their younger son, Smithfield, to the same school, and he wants to talk about the brother he lost. Luke also finds two documents in Smithfield's room that have no explanation.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven's attack on Manticore has failed, and its leaders are fighting each other over what is left of their authority. Honor Harrington comes home a hero to find that her own country has a problem she cannot fight with a fleet: an old enemy has become a peer of the realm, and a political crisis has her at its centre.
Rating coming soonHonor Harrington is on Hades, the prison planet the Republic of Haven uses for the prisoners it does not intend to release. The footage of her execution has already been broadcast, and state funerals have been held on two worlds. She is alive, she is not alone, and the question the book is built on is how many people she can take with her when she leaves.
Rating coming soonHonor Harrington has just been promoted and returns to her steading on Grayson, where a party in her honour turns into an argument with her superior that neither of them is ready to finish. To get away from her own feelings she takes a convoy escort mission to a system the Havenites have already taken. The operation is a trap laid for her, and what follows is a prison rather than a battle.
Rating coming soonThe world has been wrecked by a century of excess, and what is left of humanity is being hunted and enslaved. Logan Tom remembers the past and has sworn to protect the future: he carries a talisman and an oath to find a being born of magic who is supposed to lead the final fight against the darkness. Across the country, a survivor called Angel Perez has been given a mission of her own.
Rating coming soonHumanity has spread to other stars and met the Watchkeepers, a species of machines that nobody understands. A colony expedition sets out for a distant solar system that appears to hold something ancient and dangerous, and the voyage has to be made with the knowledge that the travellers will not come back to the world they left.
Rating coming soonBinti goes home to work out what she is. She is a harmonizer, which means her abilities are still new to her, and the situation she has returned to does not leave time for study: a war being waged by the Khoush threatens to destroy Okwu and the Meduse, and she is one of the few people with a reason to intervene.
Rating coming soonAmy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot who has spent five years being grown slowly as part of a household that mixes organic and synthetic members. She knows very little about her android mother's past, and when her grandmother arrives and attacks the family Amy survives and leaves, carrying the damaged older machine with her. In Amy alone the failsafe that stops robots from harming humans has stopped working.
Rating coming soonNathan Arkwright is a science fiction writer who has outlived the era that made him famous and has become reclusive and difficult. What nobody outside the family understands is that he has been arranging his real legacy: convinced that humanity cannot survive on Earth, he has set his foundation the task of building a colony on an Earth-like world several light years away, and the generations of Arkwrights who follow are drawn together and pulled apart by the size of that promise.
Rating coming soonVerity grows up on an isolated farm in a world that plagues of engineered organisms have emptied out, after an earlier age of utopian nanotech cities. Her life changes when Blaze, the only other young person in the community and her closest friend, is shot; his body is wrapped in a nanotech cocoon and she sets out for the Enlivened City of Cincinnati, the legendary place where he might be brought back from the edge of death.
Rating coming soonTom Winter takes a secluded cottage in the Pacific Northwest hoping that the quiet will help him recover from lost love and happiness. The cottage turns out to hide a tunnel through time: at one end is the present, at the other is New York City in 1963, and the past looks like a simpler and safer place to start again. The tunnel is not empty, and something has come through it from a much worse future.
Rating coming soonChaz Koto is a citizen of Xanadu, a near-future society reserved for the wealthiest men and women on Earth, and he carries the burden of a secret that the outside world would be shocked to hear. Lenore Myles travels to Xanadu as a student and becomes involved with Koto; when he unwittingly lends her his access codes she stumbles onto the truth behind the settlement's glittering facade, and a pursuit follows.
Rating coming soonA bureaucrat from the Office of Technology Transfer, charged with restricting the flow of dangerous technologies, is sent to the planet Miranda to find a fugitive who holds forbidden technical knowledge. His quarry knows the world far better than he does, and the continent-inundating Jubilee tides are almost due, so the search is being run in a society that is already coming apart around it.
Rating coming soonKirsten is one of the best and brightest of the humans who have served the Citizens for generations, grateful to the race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship and gave them a home world. When a chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy's core sends lethal radiation outward, the Citizens flee with their planets, and Kirsten's crew volunteers to scout the fleet's path and finds truths that shake the foundations of their worlds.
Rating coming soonNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is building a probe to be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. During testing something goes wrong and an explosion kills seven scientists, and the powerful self-modifying artificial intelligence inside the probe, called Dorothy, escapes into the internet. Wyman Ford is asked by the president's science adviser to find the software, with the help of the woman who created it.
Rating coming soonAlex Lomax is the only private investigator working the mean streets of New Klondike, the Martian frontier town that grew up after two prospectors found fossils on the Red Planet. On Earth almost anything can be synthesised, so the remains of alien life are the most valuable collectibles there are, and shiploads of treasure hunters came to Mars in the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Lomax works a lawless town where everything is cheap and life is cheaper.
Rating coming soonMaya Andreyeva is a camera: a reporter in a future Russia whose virtual reality broadcasting equipment is implanted in her brain, so that what she sees millions see and what she feels millions feel. In a twenty-fourth century where the United States has fallen as a world empire and most nations are third-rate powers beside a hypertechnological Africa, what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre.
Rating coming soonIn a universe protected by the Three Laws of Robotics, humans are safe from their machines: a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow one to come to harm. Then an experiment with a new kind of robot brain goes wrong, and Caliban is created, a robot with no knowledge of and no compassion for humanity, and no Three Laws at all.
Rating coming soonThirty thousand years before the events of A Fire upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is living in anonymity among the Qeng Ho interstellar trading fleet. In high orbit above the planet Arachna they wait for the awakening of its dormant population, the Spiders, who have burrowed deep into the world waiting for the On/Off star their planet orbits to relight and for Arachna to enter a golden age of technology and commerce. Another fleet has other plans.
Rating coming soonWhen the vuvv landed, it came as a surprise to Adam and the rest of the planet, though not necessarily an unwelcome one, since the aliens offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable. It turns out that it can be called an invasion after all: his parents' jobs have been replaced by alien technology, and there is no money for food or water.
Rating coming soonTool is a half-man, half-beast creature designed for combat, and he is capable of far more than the people who made him ever intended. He has gone rogue from his pack of bioengineered augments and has emerged as the victorious leader of a pack of human soldier boys, and he is being hunted by somebody who knows a secret about him.
Rating coming soonOn a frigid autumn morning in 2006, an attack on a British scientific outpost in Antarctica announces the invasion of the seventh continent. Argentina, resurgent after the Falklands war, has launched an armed takeover of the Antarctic Peninsula to seize the last untapped pool of natural resources, and one United States Navy vessel is the only answer.
Rating coming soonFor the fugitive settlers of Jijo, the arrival of starships in the sky is the beginning of the end. The planet that once sheltered six bands of sapient beings now faces the threat of genocide, and the human settlers are among those who have to decide what to do about it. The ships are the first the planet has seen in a long time.
Rating coming soonThe brutal enemy that has pursued the fugitive settlers of Jijo for centuries has arrived, and both the human and the alien inhabitants brace for a final confrontation. Their only hope is the Earthship Streaker, crewed by uplifted dolphins and commanded by a human who has never held that responsibility before. The confrontation the Jijoans have been expecting for centuries is at hand.
Rating coming soonFor sixty thousand years the five races of the Galactic Milieu have watched and waited for the moment when human mental development on Earth would be ready for the Intervention. As the twentieth century ends, operants across the planet begin to display phenomenal abilities: telepathy, mental shields and coercion by power of mind. By then their abilities are already changing the world they live in.
Rating coming soonIn the year 2051, Earth stands on the brink of acceptance as a full member of the Galactic Milieu, and the powerful Remillard family is leading humanity towards it. Somebody, or something, known only as Fury wants the Remillards out of the way, and it begins killing operants wherever it can reach them. The campaign is aimed at the strongest minds on the planet as well as at the family.
Rating coming soonIn a distant future, human beings are one of only three intelligent races known in the galaxy, and we have had star travel for only a few centuries. The second race, the Ildirans, are ruled by their Mage-Imperator, and the third, the Klikiss, appear to have vanished, leaving behind artefacts and technology that humans are beginning to use.
Rating coming soonOn the technological and decadent world of Proton, somebody is trying to destroy Stile, a serf who is also a master Gamesman. His only escape lies through a mysterious curtain revealed by a robot, and beyond it is Phaze, a world entirely ruled by magic, where his alternate self has already been murdered. The two worlds are linked closely enough that a death in one of them is not contained by it.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner is terrified. He is out of hiding for the first time in his life, and any minute one of his new classmates could discover his secret: he is a third child passing as the recently deceased Lee Grant. In a society where families may not have more than two children, being a third child means death.
Rating coming soonThe generation ship Peerless was launched in The Clockwork Rocket and travelled into the void in The Eternal Flame, and this novel describes its return journey, the construction of a device that can receive messages from its own future, and the arrival at a world where time runs in reverse.
Rating coming soonDerek Vandeveer is a pioneering expert in computer and network security with a traditional hacker personality, and his life changes irrevocably after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months his fortune is gone to a scandal of the kind that ruined Enron, and he is recruited into a new wing of the government.
Rating coming soonAn experimental memory-modification device goes wrong and affects the President of the United States, and the race begins to establish whether somebody has obtained his memories, including secret military plans. The novel opens with a war veteran arriving at a Washington hospital for memory treatment. The device was built to edit memories rather than to share them, and what happened was not planned.
Rating coming soonDaryn Alwyn is the younger son of one of the richest families in the world, augmented with nanites and tuned before birth by DNA manipulation into what his society calls a pre-select. He does not go to work for the family media corporation, choosing the military and then freelance writing instead.
Rating coming soonFaye Smallwood grew up on Demoth, a colony world that humans share with the winged Oolom, and helped nurse the plague that killed millions of them before her father found the cure. In her forties she joins the Vigil, an order of monitors who investigate official corruption, and the link it gives her to the planetary datasphere brings her a vision that assassins want stopped.
Rating coming soonEtienne Steward wakes as a clone whose memories are fifteen years out of date, because the original never had the copy brought up to date. In the years he has lost, the corporation that employed his original has collapsed after a war over alien artifacts, most of his friends are dead, and the man he was grown from has been murdered.
Rating coming soonCommander Elena Shaw is chief engineer aboard a Central Corps ship, and when her crewmate Danny is murdered on the colony world of Volhynia the authorities arrest her lover Treiko Zajec, who she knows was with her at the time. Retracing Danny's last hours, the pair uncover a link to a starship explosion the government has lied about for twenty-five years and may go to war with the outlaw PSI to protect.
Rating coming soonNemo's parents left their bodies behind to join the Bin, the virtual afterlife that holds twelve billion uploaded personalities in crime-free, disease-free societies. He has grown up on a nearly deserted Earth among the stragglers who refused it, and on a rare visit to his parents he meets Justine, a new arrival who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night and has no body to go back to.
Rating coming soonIn a near future where life is ruled by what people buy, Zoe Zindleman, numerical ID 009-99-9999, starts work at AllMART, where a smile is part of the uniform. Her mother has moved away and the house is about to be foreclosed, so she has to choose between waiting to be stripped of everything and moving into the Warren, an abandoned shopping centre full of other children left behind.
Rating coming soonStile lives in two worlds at once. On Proton he is a serf who has to compete in the Great Games to prove he deserves to exist, and on Phaze, where only magic works, he is the Blue Adept learning sorcery. In both worlds somebody is trying to kill him, and he also has to win Lady Blue and find the ultimate weapon.
Rating coming soonStosh is surprised when Bobby Fuller, the boy who has always been his enemy, asks him for a favour: to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who lost his medals after a scandal and never recovered his fame. The two of them travel into the past on a quest to save Thorpe's reputation.
Rating coming soonCayce Pollard is a marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols, and her work takes her to London, Tokyo and Moscow to judge proposed logos. She is also addicted to fragments of film footage being posted anonymously on the internet, and she is hired to find whoever is making them.
Rating coming soonNew York in 1999 holds thirty-five million people, who run their televisions off pedal power, riot for water and live in rooms shared with strangers. Detective Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the murder of a gangster during a heat wave, and he is also drawn to the dead man's girlfriend, which makes an already crowded life more difficult to manage.
Rating coming soonMatthew Sobol, a brilliant programmer and the chief technology officer of a games company, dies of brain cancer, and the publication of his obituary activates a daemon: a distributed program that begins to change the real world. Its first task is to kill two programmers who worked for his company and unknowingly helped to create it.
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