1,663 authors created a book list with their favorite science fiction books, and here are their favorite sci-fi books from those lists. You can browse by subgenres or topics.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I am an astronomer and college professor who loves science fiction. For many years, I have kept a webpage recommending science fiction stories and novels that are based on good astronomy. I love explaining astronomy to non-scientists, and I am the lead author of OpenStax Astronomy, a free online textbook for beginners, which is now the most frequently used textbook for astronomy classes in the U.S. I actually learned English at age 11 by reading science fiction comics and then books for kids, After many decades as a fan, I have recently realized a long-held dream and become a published SF author myself.
I think this novel, by physicist Gregory Benford, is one of the best fictional representations of how science is really done and of the real world of scientists and graduate students.
It is also an early exploration of the concept of tachyons, particles that cannot move slower or as slow as the speed of light but always have to go faster. (These have been proposed only in theory, but what makes them exciting is that they would travel backward in time.) In the book, that property enables people in the future to communicate with us in their past.
Another thing I like about this book is that some of his characters are thinly disguised (or not disguised) versions of real astronomers of the time.
The year is 1998, the world is a growing nightmare of desperation, of uncontrollable pollution and increasing social unrest. In Cambridge, two scientists experiment with tachyons - subatomic particles that travel faster than the speed of light and, therefore, according to the Theory of Relativity, may move backwards in time. Their plan is to signal a warning to the previous generation.
In 1962, a young Californian scientist, Gordon Bernstein, finds his experiments are being spoiled by unknown interference. As he begins to suspect something near the truth it becomes a race against time - the world is collapsing and will…
In school, science and reading were always my favorite subjects so is it any wonder that I grew up to be a scientist who writes? Before I entered my teens, I entered the realm of science fiction through the stories of Asimov, Bradbury, and Le Guin, and I never willingly left that realm. Back then, the one thing I hungered for but so rarely found was a compelling female character. Avid readers all want to find that character to identify with, don’t we? Fortunately, our sci-fi world is now populated with many great female MCs so I’m sharing five of my favorites here with you. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
C.J. Cherryh‘s Hugo-winningDownbelow Station is on a lot of people’s TBR pile but I suspect due to its intimidating size, it never gets any further. Which is a damn shame. Once you get into it, the story is completely absorbing. Cherryh’s world-building is outstanding, presenting a convincing 24th Century society, with just enough enriching detail to draw you in. The politics and tactics of the warring factions are familiar yet not derivative. If you loved Alien’s Ripley as much as I did, then I suspect you will love the character of Captain Signy Mallory. She is presented as a badass in the best possible way: tough, smart, resolute, and unfailingly loyal to her crew. Though this is classic space opera, filled with war, intrigue, and politics, the emphasis is on the people not the pew-pew space battles. If that’s a plus for you like it is for me,…
The Hugo Award-winning classic sci-fi novel about interstellar war.
The Beyond started with the Stations orbiting the stars nearest Earth. The Great Circle the interstellar freighters traveled was long, but not unmanageable, and the early Stations were emotionally and politically dependent on Mother Earth. The Earth Company which ran this immense operation reaped incalculable profits and influenced the affairs of nations.
Then came Pell, the first station centered around a newly discovered living planet. The discovery of Pell's World forever altered the power balance of the Beyond. Earth was no longer the anchor which kept this vast empire from coming…
I believe that in our real world, most heroes are like any other human, exhibiting the struggles, the moral dilemmas, and the psychological battles any human would be. And that is what makes a hero so great. They rise above the internal and external struggles to become something better and something others can look up to. Heroes are not supposed to be Superman. They are Batman, struggling with the darkness of trauma and the weight of responsibility like everyone else.
Elric of Melnibone is an anti-hero. He is a bad guy who worships a god of chaos and delights in doing bad things. Pressured by family, a sense of duty, and a deep devotion to both his lover and his friends, he begins to question his life and his culture up until now. The lack of caring weighs on him as he vacillates between a world of evil and chaos and a world of law and goodness.
Feared by enemies and friends alike, Elric of Melnibone walks a lonely path among the worlds of the multiverse. The destroyer of his own cruel and ancient race, as well as its final ruler, Elric is the bearer of a destiny as dark and cursed as the vampiric sword he carries - the sentient black blade known as Stormbringer.
Containing the novel which perhaps did the most to propel Elric to the forefront of the fantasy genre, along with associated short stories and other material, this volume is a vital part of any fantasy reader's library. With an introduction by…
Maximilian Tundra is about to have an existential crisis of cosmic proportions.
When a physical duplicate of him appears in his living room, wearing a tight-fitting silver lamé unitard and speaking with an English accent, Max knows something bad is about to happen. Bad doesn’t cover it. Max discovers he’s the only human being who can prevent the end of the world, and not just on his planet! In the multiverse, infinite Earths will be destroyed.
★★★★★ "Funny, yet deep, this is definitely worth venturing into the multiverse for."
Amazing Stories says: "Snarky as Pratchet, insightful as Stephenson, as full of scathing social commentary as Swift or Voltaire, and weirdly reminiscent of LeGuin, Alpha Max is the only multiverse novel you need this month, or maybe ever."
Maximilian Tundra is about to have an existential crisis of cosmic proportions.
When a physical duplicate of him appears in his living room, wearing a tight-fitting silver lamé unitard and speaking with an English accent, Max knows something bad is about to happen. Bad doesn’t cover it. Max discovers…
This book is
just as gorgeously and intelligently written as the first installment in the
Teixcalaanli space empire.
It picks up the series’ examination
of colonialism, otherness, and language’s complicity in conquest while
bringing in new, alien elements that force the protagonists to grapple with the
concept of personhood.
We follow disillusioned Mahit Dzmare as she struggles to
adjust to life after the events of the first book, her will-they-won’t-they
relationship with her former imperial liaison, and an all-new threat to
Teixcalaan that challenges loyalties and the social and personal mechanisms on
which empire grinds.
Readers who know the sting of being othered, who enjoy
smart drama and political machinations, or who like messy first-contact stories
that demand the most from their characters will love this sequel too.
A Desolation Called Peace is the spectacular space opera sequel to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
An alien terror could spell our end.
An alien threat lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is supposed to win a war against it.
In a desperate attempt to find a diplomatic solution, the fleet captain has sent for an envoy to contact the mysterious invaders. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass - both still reeling…
My name is Aer-ki Jyr and I’m the creator of the Star Force Universe. I started writing because most of the new books coming out just plain sucked, so I figured if I could do better, then I should…and I did. What people only partially realize is that Star Force is filled with references and homages to the past great works. There’s far more in there than they realize, but those who have also read them will know when they see them. This list gives you the biggest influences that shaped my childhood mind, and why there are literally statues in the Star Force Universe to a lot of this stuff.
Heir to the Empire was the foundational book in my childhood. I lived and breathed the Star Wars movies, and this book was essentially another movie continuing the story rather than some authors’ fanfic projects (too many to name). Reading about Luke, Han, and Leia doing new things was a breath of fresh air after watching the movies 50 times each, but that’s not why this book is so important. I can sum it up in one word…
Thrawn.
He is a character unlike any other I’ve ever encountered and is the benchmark for me when it comes to a mastermind. He’s evil, but not completely, and you find you almost want him to win as you read through it. Not because he’s evil, but because he’s professional, motivated, and immensely skilled…as opposed to the Rebel Alliance that can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this essential Star Wars Legends novel—the first ever to take place after the events of the original trilogy—Grand Admiral Thrawn makes his debut on the galactic stage.
Five years ago, the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star, defeated Darth Vader and the Emperor, and drove the remnants of the old Imperial Starfleet to a distant corner of the galaxy. Princess Leia and Han Solo are married and expecting twins. And Luke Skywalker has become the first in a long-awaited line of Jedi Knights.
But thousands of light-years away, the last of the Emperor’s…
Growing up in the ‘80s, I discovered cyberpunk just when the subgenre acquired its name and was instantly hooked. While its style and action were certainly engaging, it was cyberpunk’s message about the surveillance state, corporate power, fascism, and corruption, which contrasted so violently from mainstream science fiction, that kept me turning pages. 40 years later, after writing novels for 25 years, completing 12 books, I’m still fascinated by what cyberpunk can do. In an age where Humanity is mortally threatened by climate change and inequality, we need cyberpunk now more than ever, with its action and adventure and a little something for us to think about, too.
City Come A-Walkin’ is it, the beginning, the first true cyberpunk novel.
As William Gibson famously said in the forward to the 15-year anniversary edition, “John Shirley is cyberpunk’s patient zero.” Debuting in 1980, City follows Stu Cole, a streetwise nightclub owner who angered San Francisco’s political and criminal elite, bringing down the full weight of their power; his only hope, the enigmatic construct known only as, “City.”
A proto-AI, City was a conglomeration of the computer, surveillance, and data infrastructure that took on a life of its own, becoming sapient and dangerous. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest book I had ever read (and it didn’t hurt that the school library refused to order it for me) and really put the punk in cyberpunk.
Stu Cole is struggling to keep his nightclub, Club Anesthesia, afloat in the face of mob harassment when he's visited by a manifestation of the city of San Francisco, crystallized into a single enigmatic being. This amoral superhero leads him on a terrifying journey through the rock and roll demimonde as they struggle to save the city.
I'm the author of over 15 novels written for kids, teens, and adults across several genres. The thing all my books have in common is that they are sad and they are dark. My most recent novel is my most distilled, compressed delivery of deliciously dark sadness yet! Oddly, I'm rarely sad in real life. My daughter suggested that I write books to get the darkness out of my head and onto the page, which I think is very insightful (she is my kid, after all). I enjoy the beauty in the breakdown, I savor the sublime catharsis of tragedy, and I want to share that perspective with everyone.
I found this story collection by Machado to be not only dark and sad, but wickedly funny. How often does our laughter turn to tears, or vice versa? These things are not mutually exclusive, and Machado lives within that uncomfortably liminal space with obvious relish.
I also appreciate it's unabashed feminism. So much of the horror genre is seen through a male lens that leaves me feeling cold and left out. In Machado's writing, I feel not only seen but celebrated, and I will happily live within her ferociously accepting stories of darkness as many times as she offers them.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018
'Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart' Garth Greenwell
'Impossible, imperfect, unforgettable' Roxane Gay
'A wild thing ... covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi' New York Times
In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice.
I find joy in niches and steampunk is not cut from the ordinary cloth. I was originally challenged to produce a story that incorporated magic into steampunk. The resulting character, Kassandra Leyden who can speak to the dead, brought to life an alternate history where a deadly plague made the British Empire emigrate to the Americas and begin anew. The style and fashion of steampunk in modifying the ordinary appeals to the maker in me. I am an avid renfaire attendee and create and sell garb, which now includes steampunk elements. I hope you enjoy these choices and discover what steampunk has to offer as a genre.
The subtitle to the work, “a Mad Victorian Fantasy” goes a long way to explaining the style of Infernal Devices which follows George Dower inheritor of his father’s clockwork business. Dower bumbles where his father was a genius but that doesn’t stop him from getting involved with time travelers, automaton doppelgangers, and fish people selkies. A romp full of purple prose from one of the progenitors of the term “steampunk.”
The classic Steampunk novel from the creator of the term itself - thirty years ago this month.
When George Dower's father died, he left George his watchmaker's shop - and more. But George has little talent for watches and other infernal devices. When someone tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, music and sexual intrigue.
I’ve now completed four books in my New Rock fantasy series; and, while the stories are full-on adventures in a strange (but strangely familiar) new world, they contain lots of comedic characters and situations. I come from a background of comedy writing. Comedy isn’t nice people telling jokes. That’s a dinner party. Comedy is all about pain, fear, misery, confusion, suffering, mistakes, betrayals, accidents, dangers, and things going horribly wrong—and what good adventure doesn't have those? And why wouldn’t any strange new world be full of them? New Rock New Role, the first book in the series, is published on December 12th 2023 by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy.
Robert Sheckley stands out from his contemporaries of the golden age of science fiction by being not just great but also often very funny.
Sheckley has a wry, insightful wit, which puts him in a class of his own among the giants of the post-WW2 era. Start with his eight stories of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service. Great idea, great characters, great settings (two shysters running a fly-by-night planetary fixer-upper service, on the cheap): they are light, effortless, unpretentious, insightful, and brilliant.
It’s basically Ghostbusters in space. What more could you want?
Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.This volume has the following great stories: Warm, Ask A Foolish Question, Beside Still Waters, Cost of Living, Forever, Keep your Shape The Leech, Seventh Victim, Watchbird, Warrior Race, One man's poison, The Perfect Woman
The
closest person to me in the world, before she died, gave me a copy of this book, several years ago. I eyed the copy in my house, waiting until I felt ready to
read it. I had only read Vonnegut once before, nearly forty
years ago.
This book surprised me with its linguistic lightness of
touch and beautiful playfulness. There is a cumulative power in the
storytelling, crescendoes of pyrotechnic virtuosity, and an underlying
solemnity and fatality in dealing with mortality or the occasional weird
transcendence of it in time and space.
I kept experiencing the book as a form
of letter from my lost loved one, as her mind had travelled through those pages
before mine, and she had given me that physical copy, wishing my mind to travel
across those pages too. It has left me wanting to read more Vonnegut.
A deep and meaningful masterpiece of science fiction, full of heart and mind-bending ideas. A true classic, Vonnegut will make you laugh and have you contemplating the meaning of life
When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour.
But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be.…
