The best science fiction books

A man wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is -- and gradually realizes he's humanity's last hope.

An astronaut accidentally left behind on Mars must survive alone using nothing but science, duct tape, and dark humour.

A Black woman in 1970s California is pulled back in time to an antebellum plantation -- repeatedly, involuntarily, always to save the life of her white ancestor.

The last human survivors search for a new home -- and find a planet already claimed by a civilisation of rapidly evolving spiders.

The world's most gifted child soldier is trained in zero-gravity combat simulations for an alien war -- but the final battle may not be a game.

Seven pilgrims journey to a monster that kills in ways that make no sense -- and each of their stories is a different kind of science fiction, and together they become something stranger.

A teenager with hyper-empathy -- she feels others' pain as her own -- watches her gated community collapse and walks north through a burning California to build something better.

On a desert planet of immense value, a young nobleman navigates prophecy, politics, and the weight of destiny.

Moments before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, an ordinary man is rescued by his alien best friend.

In a totalitarian state where Big Brother watches everything, one man dares to hold onto his own truth.

A neuroscientist's memory technology goes terribly wrong, unravelling reality itself -- and a detective races to stop it.

A man with an IQ of 68 undergoes an experimental procedure that triples his intelligence -- and then discovers what it means to lose everything you've gained.

A crew of misfits takes the long route through the galaxy on a tunnelling ship, building found family one meal at a time.

A mathematician predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire and establishes a Foundation to preserve human knowledge -- a plan that will take a thousand years to unfold.

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet it orbits -- the first person to make that crossing in 170 years -- and is changed by both worlds.

On his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry joins the army -- they give elderly recruits young bodies to fight interstellar wars he doesn't yet understand.

A part-organic, part-mechanical security robot who has hacked its own governor module and just wants to watch TV discovers it may have to save the humans it is assigned to protect.

A ship captain and a detective find themselves converging on a conspiracy that could ignite a solar system already on the brink of war.

Aliens visited Earth for a few hours and left -- and the zones around their landing sites are full of incomprehensible artifacts that illegal stalkers risk their lives to retrieve.

An envoy from Earth visits a planet where people have no fixed gender -- and learns how much of politics, trust, and love depends on it.

In the Republic of Gilead, Offred is a Handmaid -- a woman reduced to her reproductive function -- and everything she tells us may or may not be the truth.

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time -- moving randomly between the firebombing of Dresden, a zoo on an alien planet, and an ordinary American life.

A physicist investigating a series of suicides discovers that humanity has been contacted by an alien civilisation -- and some people are trying to help them invade.

The last human survivor of a corporate-engineered plague wanders a transformed Earth -- and remembers how two friends he loved caused it.

Nine stories about robots bound by three laws and the endlessly inventive ways those laws can produce unintended consequences -- and the humans who learn to live alongside them.

A physicist is kidnapped, drugged, and wakes up in a life that is almost his own -- except the wife and son he loves do not exist in this version.

A tea monk searching for purpose rides into the wilderness and meets a robot who has never encountered a human before -- and both of them are looking for the same thing.

Monks in the post-nuclear American desert preserve the fragments of human knowledge across six hundred years of civilisation's slow return -- and its equally slow drift back toward catastrophe.

A Jesuit priest is the sole survivor of humanity's first contact mission to another world -- and the novel is the account of what happened to him there.

After a flu pandemic devastates civilisation, a travelling Shakespeare company performs for those who remain.

A genetically engineered utopia where everyone is conditioned to be happy -- except for those who can't stop thinking.

A bounty hunter is hired to retire six escaped androids -- and becomes unable to say with certainty whether the difference between them and him is real.

A psychologist arrives at a space station above a planet-sized ocean to find the crew shattered -- because the ocean has been reading their minds and recreating their dead.

A man whose dreams alter reality comes under the control of a therapist who sees the therapeutic -- and political -- possibilities of that ability.

A Victorian inventor hurtles 800,000 years into the future -- and finds that humanity has split into two terrifying species.

An artificial friend observes the human world from a shop window, forming an intense bond with the girl who chooses her.

A fireman whose job is to burn books begins to question everything he has been told in a future where reading is illegal.

Citizens of the One State live in glass apartments where all behavior is visible and scheduled -- and one engineer's love affair begins to give him a private interior life he cannot afford.

Four women enter a mysterious quarantined zone where nature has gone impossibly wrong -- and where the greatest danger may be what it turns them into.

Martian tripods incinerate the English countryside and all of Victorian England's confidence in its own dominance -- a novel that invented the alien invasion.