Best science fiction novels
The whole shelf — first contact, far futures, and the ideas that come with them.
Ranked by how often each title comes up across 22 reading lists on NextBook — not by our opinion of them.
1 of 12recommended on 10 listsEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
Its real subject is the same as Le Guin's: the catastrophe of meeting an intelligence you cannot read, and what you destroy while failing to understand it.
2 of 12recommended on 9 listsDune
Frank Herbert
Paul Atreides is Ender with a longer pedigree: a child trained past the limits of childhood, handed a war, and slowly realising what has been done to him and by whom.
3 of 12recommended on 8 listsHyperion
Dan Simmons
Seven pilgrims tell their stories on the way to a monster on a distant world, and the density and strangeness are exactly why people reread Dune.
4 of 12recommended on 8 listsNeuromancer
William Gibson
The other 1980s book that proved the genre could be written as prose first. Everything else about it — pace, temperature, values — runs the opposite way.
5 of 12recommended on 8 listsThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's ice planet is Arrakis's cold twin: an envoy learning a culture from the inside, with the landscape doing most of the plot's heavy lifting.
6 of 12recommended on 6 listsFoundation
Isaac Asimov
Both books argue that societies are the real characters, but Asimov proves it with equations and Le Guin proves it by making you live in one for a winter.
7 of 12recommended on 6 listsLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
On this list because the reading lists put it there, and it does share the theme of two men from incompatible cultures forced to trust each other.
8 of 12recommended on 6 listsRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson writes a hostile planet with the same seriousness Le Guin gives Gethen's ice — the terrain is not scenery, it is what determines who people become.
9 of 12recommended on 6 listsSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Shares Le Guin's conviction that language and myth make a society, then delivers it as satire at high speed with a skateboard courier attached.
10 of 12recommended on 6 listsThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
First contact handled as a problem of translation and mutual misreading, with a civilisation shaped entirely by the physics of the sky it lives under.
11 of 12recommended on 5 listsAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
The direct descendant. Leckie's narrator uses one pronoun for everyone and cannot reliably read gender, which puts you inside Genly's confusion rather than beside it.
12 of 12recommended on 4 listsAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
For readers who liked how coldly Liu treats a human life as a variable. Morgan makes bodies disposable and builds a mean, propulsive detective story on top of it.
Start from one you already loved
A genre is a blunt instrument. Pick the science fiction book you actually liked and we’ll rank the next one by what you liked about it.
- Books like Ender's GameOrson Scott Card
- Books like Station ElevenEmily St. John Mandel
- Books like DuneFrank Herbert
- Books like The Left Hand of DarknessUrsula K. Le Guin
- Books like Red MarsKim Stanley Robinson
- Books like The 5th WaveRick Yancey
- Books like FoundationIsaac Asimov
- Books like Never Let Me GoKazuo Ishiguro
- Books like The Three-Body ProblemCixin Liu
- Books like Red RisingPierce Brown
- Books like The Forever WarJoe Haldeman
- Books like Old Man's WarJohn Scalzi
- Books like The MartianAndy Weir
- Books like A Wrinkle in TimeMadeleine L'Engle
- Books like A Memory Called EmpireArkady Martine
- Books like All Systems RedMartha Wells
- Books like BlindsightPeter Watts
- Books like Klara and the SunKazuo Ishiguro
- Books like Starship TroopersRobert A. Heinlein
- Books like 2312Kim Stanley Robinson
- Books like Project Hail MaryAndy Weir
- Books like CinderMarissa Meyer
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