Is your favourite sci-fi novel included here, or have we forgotten it? Almost exactly a year ago, I asked our team of expert science writers here at New Scientist to name their favourite science fiction novels. Personal tastes meant we ended up with a wonderfully eclectic list, ranging from classics by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to titles I’d not previously read (Jon Bois’s 17776 was a particularly wild suggestion, from our US editor Chelsea Whyte – but it’s well worth your time). But! We couldn’t stop there. We New Scientist staffers tend to be sci-fi nerds, and we realised we hadn’t quite got all the greats yet. So here, for your reading pleasure, is our second take on our favourite sci-fi novels of all time, otherwise known as the ones we forgot. Again, we’re not claiming this is a definitive list. It’s just our top sci-fi reads, in no particular order, and we hope you’ll discover some new favourites of your own in this line-up. Advertisement And if we still haven’t got them all, then come and tell us about it on Facebook. Maybe we’ll do a part 3, if we get enough great suggestions. After all, I’m not convinced we’ve picked the right Isaac Asimov here, and as for our choice when it comes to Iain M. Banks, you’ll have to see for yourselves… Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke One of my favourite sub-genres of science fiction is known as Big Dumb Objects (BDO), in which the appearance of a strange, alien object kicks off a story of exploration. Arguably, the monolith in Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey counts as a BDO, but to my mind the genre really begins in Rendezvous With Rama. The titular Rama is a kilometres-long cylinder that appears on the outer edge of the solar system. Initially thought to be an asteroid, it becomes apparent that it is actually a gigantic alien spacecraft. A crew is sent to investigate and discovers a vast landscape inside, full of mysterious structures and even a frozen sea. Join us in reading and discussing the best new science and science fiction books Sign up to newsletter Who built Rama? What is its purpose? And is it a threat to humanity? We explore all of these questions and more alongside the characters, making it feel like your own journey of discovery. I’ve read Rendezvous With Rama many times, and each read still feels exciting. If you enjoy the book, Clarke co-wrote a number of sequels with Gentry Lee, though the general consensus is that his involvement was fairly minimal and Lee did most of the work. The sequels are, to put it bluntly, not as good, but Rama is such an incredible setting and place to explore that I devoured them all anyway. Jacob Aron 1984 by George Orwell Big Brother has a lot of tools at his disposal to control the citizens of Oceania: constant surveillance, imprisonment, the threat of being “vaporised”. But the ones that most struck me when I first read 1984 were the stranglehold on truth and the manipulation of language. Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, works for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to retroactively amend past news reports so they align with the Party’s current messaging. The Party can lie or contradict itself without consequence – there is no reality outside of the one it has fabricated. Then there is Newspeak, the preferred language of the Party, which has the remarkable quality of shrinking every year, as words deemed unnecessary or undesirable are culled. Why have “bad”, “terrible” and “horrendous” when “ungood”, “plusungood” and “doubleplusungood” would cover all that and more? The effect is chilling: by limiting the words people use, the government can actually constrain thought. How could you conceive of a government as being repressive and corrupt, let alone hatch a plan to overthrow it, if you don’t have the words to formulate that thought? This was ultimate power, and it blew my mind at the age of 16. Twenty years later, I reread Orwell’s dystopian tale and found it packs even more of a punch in 2025. Alexis Wnuk The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin This trilogy is set on an unstable continent where cataclysmic earthquakes, volcanoes and other seismic events regularly tear the ground apart and cause months or years of terrible weather conditions, known as Fifth Seasons. Communities are organised around the singular goal of survival, and as part of that, they expel or murder any known “orogenes”, people capable of harnessing geothermal energy to cause – or prevent – those seismic events. This harsh society raises questions of survival and sacrifice, the purpose of community, the impact of oppression – and how to break the cycle of history repeating. I love how Jemisin builds a world that’s apocalyptic but also an engaging place to explore. The plotting is propulsive, and the imagery beautifully imaginative – a town carved into a massive geode, an advanced society supported by plant engineering, a crystal machine the scale of a moon. Even as the characters struggle through dystopia, they are incredibly compelling and never give up hope for the future. Love can be destructive, but people don’t stop loving. And the old world might be ending, but they fight to not die with it. Sophie Bushwick Dune by Frank Herbert I am including Dune here to gloss over the fact that my colleague Finn Grant erroneously chose God Emperor of Dune as his favourite novel in this series in our last round-up. I write as someone who, in her callow youth, read all of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and then was so obsessed that I continued, with ever-diminishing returns, down the road of reading the sequels written by various Herbert offspring and friends (a hard Do Not Recommend). And come on. Dune is head and shoulders above its successors. There is our mind-blowing introduction to the desert planet of Dune/Arrakis and its fantastic giant sandworms. There is the scene in which Paul Atreides is tested by the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother with the gom jabbar (I still mutter his incantation to myself on nervous occasions). There are the wild rides of the Fremen through the desert, our discovery of Paul’s destiny and how it has been plotted out for him for millennia; plus his terrifying visions of the future. I read it again after watching Denis Villeneuve’s new film adaptations, and I can confirm: it holds up. It is dense, packed with invention and utterly mind-blowing. Alison Flood A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote an essay on the idea of the singularity – the point at which technological development accelerates out of control after the creation of advanced artificial intelligence. He thought it was more-or-less inevitable, but also that it wouldn’t make for a good sci-fi setting: once you let the machine god out of the box, either humanity ascends to join it, or we get wiped out. In either case, there’s nothing left resembling a person to write a good old-fashioned space opera about. So, in his “Zones of Thought” universe, in which A Fire Upon the Deep and two other novels are set, Vinge found a way to protect fledgling spacefarers from their AI creations. Through means either of some ancient technology or an as-yet undiscovered natural law, the galactic setting It took me a while to warm to the idea, but I was won over by the clever ways Vinge builds narrative tension based on this premise. Daring souls bet everything on journeying to the “Transcend”, where computation is fastest, hoping to ascend themselves or return with technologies far in advance of their own. If they brush shoulders with malevolent AIs, the consequences may be dire, but perhaps they can escape back to the lower regions, where the slowness of thought prevents them from being pursued. There are many other fascinating ideas crammed into A Fire Upon the Deep, but if that has whetted your appetite, I’m sure you will enjoy discovering them for yourself. Tom Leslie New Scientist book club Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews. Sign up The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin We had a Le Guin in our first best sci-fi list: The Dispossessed, chosen by my colleague Rowan Hooper. And OK: it’s great. But for me, the best Le Guin (if we’re excluding fantasy and children’s literature, and I therefore can’t name A Wizard of Earthsea) has to be The Left Hand of Darkness. Winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, it is the story of Genly Ai, an ambassador for a coalition of planets known as the Ekumen, who is sent to the planet of Winter, or Gethen, to persuade them to join. Gender is fluid on this world: the people of the planet – the Gethenians – are ambisexual, and androgynous, all referred to by Le Guin as “he”; when they enter the state of “kemmer”, they can choose if they want to become either male or female, in order to reproduce. It isn’t too easy to persuade them of the benefits of joining the Ekumen, and Genly finds it hard to understand their motivations. Various betrayals and misunderstandings ensue, culminating in a brilliant prison-escape-and-trek-across-the-ice set piece, which I adored. There’s no-one like Le Guin for writing deep-thinking, beautifully crafted science fiction, that also manages to be an excellent adventure. Alison Flood Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie From a world of “hes” to one of “shes”: Ancillary Justice is set in a universe where gender isn’t important, and where every character is referred to as “she” by our narrator (more on her in a second), regardless of their gender. It is also a universe where warships’ AI minds control armies of brain-wiped soldiers – ancillaries – and use them to “annex” planets. Our narrator is The Justice of Toren, a once-colossal warship that has been destroyed, with its artificial intelligence now housed in one, ship-possessed soldier, Breq. “I had once had twenty bodies, twenty pairs of eyes, and hundreds of others that I could access if I needed or desired it. Now I could only see in one direction,” she tells us. She’s out to take revenge on the ruler of the galaxy-spanning Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai, who destroyed her. This novel – astonishingly, a debut – was the first to win the Arthur C. Clarke, the Nebula and the Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is clever and thrilling and well worth your time, if you’ve yet to come across it. Alison Flood The right novel in the Dune sequence is now featured in this list Ready Player One by Ernest Cline So much about Ready Player One went completely over my head. I was born in 1996, so the 80s pop culture references don’t feel like something I lived through, but rather a nostalgic era that preceded me. I know the references are basically the whole point of the book, but I still loved it. I think about the OASIS (the virtual world where most of the book takes place) a lot. This is a mega nerdy read, and I love how the main character’s avatar, known as Parzival, keeps levelling up and acquiring new magical artifacts and gear until he’s OP (overpowered). And of course, his IRL iteration Wade Watts is the salt-of-the-earth hero battling corporate greed – a tried and tested formula that never fails to please! The 2018 film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is also incredibly nerdy and enjoyable. It doesn’t require you to have quite so much 80s pop culture knowledge either. Both the film and the book inspired me to get my own VR headset which I used about four times and now sits in a drawer gathering dust. We have a long way to go! Finn Grant Solaris by Stanisław Lem Nothing much happens in Solaris, yet it’s one of the most haunting novels I’ve read. It follows psychologist Kris Kelvin after he is sent to a research station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious ocean world that resists investigation by Earth’s scientists. After decades of work, they have established that Solaris is sentient, but have achieved little else. Attempts to communicate with the planet or puzzle out its phenomena are met with silence at best and strange apparitions at worst – such as the vision of Kelvin’s late wife, Rheya, that manifests on the station. In Solaris, Lem plausibly charts the history of a failed branch of science, Solaristics, without ever losing your attention – quite the opposite, in fact. No other writer has examined the limits of human knowledge with such poignancy. Contemplative and unwieldy, Solaris is a masterpiece that will get under your skin. Plus, it may just have the greatest final line of any novel yet written. Bethan Ackerley Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks It doesn’t take much prompting for a New Scientist staff member to recommend Iain M. Banks. A previous iteration of this list plugged the entirety of his Culture series, and a recent column by one-time editor of the magazine Emily H. Wilson suggested starting with the second book in the set, The Player of Games. He was such an excellent author though, that I can’t help highlighting one of my own favourites. Whichever route you take into Banks’s space opera, you will find that he loves depicting his advanced Culture civilisation interacting with other species, especially those who are a few rungs further down the developmental ladder. By interacting, that often means interfering: the Culture – particularly its Special Circumstances division – can’t resist poking its nose into other people’s business, finding ways to nudge its fledgling neighbours into being just a little bit more like itself. Out of all the Culture books, Look to Windward is perhaps the most concerned with what happens when that sort of meddling goes wrong. In short, it isn’t good. In long, it involves a lot of musing about the emotional consequences of war, the politics of revenge and how flesh and blood people might find ways to meaningfully exist in a universe that contains artificial intelligences many, many times smarter than they are. All of this is wrapped up in a mystery and cut with a hefty serving of Banks’s signature wit. Plus, there are enormous living islands that float through the sky: they’re called dirigible behemothaurs, and they’re great! Tom Leslie Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Do you like The Last of Us, and the terrifying havoc wreaked on humanity by the fungus Cordyceps? Do you also like gothic horror, and ingenious post-colonial takes on the gothic fiction of the past? Then you will love, as I do, Moreno-Garcia’s speculative novel, in which Noemí travels to the remote Mexican countryside to rescue her cousin Catalina from a new husband she says is poisoning her. High Place is a remote and palatial home, and Catalina’s handsome English husband is a menacing figure. Noemí, though, is a brilliant heroine, and despite the strange dreams that start to plague her, she won’t be put off her investigations into the secrets that lie within the walls of High Place. I can’t think of a book I’ve recommended more to people in recent years than this one: it is an absolute joy of a read. Alison Flood The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Science fiction extrapolates from existing tech, social constructs and values to come up with a plausible future – that’s kind of its job. But good science fiction isn’t just about “what if”, it’s about what happens after “if” does. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age posits a future of advanced nanotechnology, one that means more or less whatever you want can be created from almost nothing, from air, from whatever. Governments are rendered meaningless and globalisation has won, but it’s a hollow victory – instead, people sort themselves and their children into a rigid social web of class, ethnic, economic and tribal allegiances. Our heroine is young Nell, a girl born into a socio-economic underclass who is suddenly gifted a new life via an interactive, reactive book, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Basically, this novel is the cyberpunk exploration of education, opportunity and destiny that Dickens would have written. The Diamond Age is by no means a perfect book – there is a lot of jargon-heavy world-building to wade through, and in some places, excitement overruns plot, stereotype gets in the way of character. But it’s worth it. The future, just like the now, isn’t really ever dystopian or utopian; it’s just us, still humans doing what humans do. And that, I think, is what draws me back to The Diamond Age. Linda Rodriguez-McRobbie House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Some of the best book recommendations are when a trusted friend hands you a novel and tells you to read it, with no further explanation. If you don’t have someone to do that with House of Leaves, please just take my word for it. But if you need a little more convincing, this is a book designed to stretch and break your brain. It involves, in part, the exploration of an incredibly bizarre space. It also deals with the breakdown of a marriage, metafictional storytelling and nested unreliable narrators, plus extremely petty and cutting academic discourse. If you are a fan of The X-Files, Susanna Clarke or the SCP Foundation, you will find something to love here. House of Leaves will enter your mind and squat there for many days after you finish it. Just make sure you pick up a physical copy – there is no way a digital version can do it justice. To find out why, well, you’ll just have to trust me. Jacob Aron The Children of Men by P. D. James There are few classier writers out there than P. D. James, and although she may be best known for her crime novels, her take on dystopia is a classic of the genre. In James’s vision, it is 2021 (behold the future!), and an inexplicable and insoluble sterility has descended on the human race. No human baby has been born for 25 years, and the ageing population is preparing to quietly fade away. England is under the rule of a despot, Xan Lyppiatt, and we follow the travails of his cousin, Theo Faron, as he learns about the rumblings of a resistance and decides the path he is going to take. There are thrills and action aplenty, but it is the smaller details that really bring James’s dystopia to chilling life – the women who, in the absence of any child of their own, dress kittens and puppies in baby clothes and push them around in prams. Or the Quietus, in which those over 60, seen as a burden to society, are done away with in state-sanctioned mass drownings. A dystopia for the ages. Alison Flood Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel For another, equally elegant take on dystopia, I will always recommend Station Eleven, a strangely beautiful look at the world after a flu pandemic has wiped out much of humanity (published, I might add, in 2014, well before most of us were thinking about such things). Mandel does her killing off stage, with the majority of her story taking place 20 years in the future, following a group of travelling Shakespeare actors bringing culture to the scattered people who remain. (Delightfully, a quote is painted onto one of their caravans: “Because survival is insufficient”. As one of the actors says, however: “All I’m saying is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.”) This is a believable dystopia, skilfully drawn and brimming with nostalgia for a time we currently live in. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below … no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment…” Alison Flood Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov At the core of the Foundation series is the idea that the future can be predicted using the practice of psychohistory, a mathematical discipline developed by one of the key characters, Hari Seldon. Seldon planned to use psychohistory to guide humanity through the dark ages following the decline of the Galactic Empire. And so, the Foundation (or in fact two foundations) was born in its aftermath to steer events. Foundation’s Edge is the fourth book in the series, set 500 years after the… well, foundation of the Foundation. A Seldon Crisis – a pivotal moment when the Foundation must choose the right course of action – has just been averted, and all seems well. Alas, the phrase “there’s always a bigger fish” comes to mind when I recall the plot. The Foundation fears the mind-controlling abilities of the Second Foundation. The Second Foundation fears a hidden faction with similar powers, sometimes referred to as “Anti-Mules.” And then there’s Gaia – a superorganism where everything, from plants to people to rocks, shares a collective consciousness. Asimov expands his universe in fun and unexpected ways, and while Foundation’s Edge may not be the most beloved instalment, its ambition and scope make it a fascinating chapter in the saga – and my personal favourite. Finn Grant Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn Some people credit these three Timothy Zahn novels with reviving public interest in Star Wars in the decade following the original film trilogy. When I first read the books as a teenager, I was just thrilled to be immediately swept up in the continued adventures of Luke, Leia and Han as they and the fledgling New Republic face a resurgent Galactic Empire under the command of the blue-skinned Grand Admiral Thrawn. In contrast to tempestuous Dark Side users such as the iconic Darth Vader, Thrawn proves himself a formidable adversary through his cerebral demeanour and clever stratagems that continually keep the New Republic forces off balance. As the fast-paced storytelling keeps both our heroes and probably most readers guessing what Thrawn may do next, Zahn also takes the time to ground the Star Wars universe in some science fiction realism beyond the original films’ space fantasy visuals of space wizards with laser swords and starfighters mimicking second world war aerial combat. Thrawn is such a compelling villain that he has even transcended the novels to become a canonical part of Disney’s ongoing Star Wars shows – but for my money the non-canonical Zahn trilogy still showcases him at his finest. Jeremy Hsu The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin This trilogy is unabashedly about big ideas, first and foremost, with characters mostly representing certain archetypes to help explain those big ideas and to carry the story forward. It begins with the societal upheavals of China’s Cultural Revolution shaping one person’s worldview in such a way as to spur a fateful first contact between humanity and aliens. From there, the narrative explores the many ways in which the shock of discovery and many revelations that follow influence humanity’s societal progression decades and then centuries into the future, accounting for both major technological leaps and factionalism in how various governments, organisations and individuals choose to respond. Along the way, Liu also presents a mind-bending array of astonishing and vividly imagined scenes that are fantastically grand in scope while still remaining tethered to reality through scientifically plausible concepts. Few other science fiction books that I’ve read in my adult life have left me so awestruck. Jeremy Hsu The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein You may question whether a lunar penal colony with a severely skewed sex ratio can really evolve into a respectful libertarian society where individuals collectively and spontaneously enforce social norms. But I still view Robert Heinlein’s story about the Loonie revolution against an overbearing Earth as one of the science fiction classics of its era alongside Frank Herbert’s Dune. Like Herbert’s treatment of the desert world Arrakis and its Fremen inhabitants, Heinlein depicts a future moon where water is always precious, the local resources are being exploited by an off-world entity, and many of the hardy residents have adapted well to their harsh environment. That sets the stage for a budding band of revolutionaries, including a one-armed computer technician, an outspoken activist, a political exile from Earth and a computer with a sense of humour that just happens to control all the Lunar Authority’s critical systems. The ensuing action includes clever political machinations to foment and organise the broader resistance along with the development of some improvised weaponry to counter Earth’s more traditional military advantages. But as with any historical revolution, the greatest challenges may arise when the lunar dust has settled and it’s time to govern. Jeremy Hsu Battle Royale by Koushun Takami In a dystopian version of 1997, in the Republic of Greater East Asia, a class of junior high school students wake up on a deserted island where they are told they have to fight each other to the death until only one of them survives. In Takami’s vision, a totalitarian government has implemented the “Battle Experiment No. 68 Program” as a way to keep its populace under control (it has also outlawed rock music). Participants are given special collars that explode if they don’t stick to the rules, as well as various weapons, and set loose on each other. Controversial on release for its level of violence, this nightmarish vision of what kids could do to each other preceded Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), and is well worth a read if you’re a fan of Katniss Everdeen’s exploits in Panem. Alison Flood Poor Things by Alasdair Gray Eccentric surgeon Godwin Baxter has created human life in an outlandish experiment, but unlike Frankenstein’s creature, his creation is a beautiful young woman whose child-like innocence proves irresistible to men. Poor Bella is ultimately cast as a monster because of her refusal to behave in the way prescribed by patriarchal cultural norms. I loved the recent film adaptation, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, but the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray offers so much more to enjoy. Most of the story is narrated by Baxter’s student Archibald McCandless, but we are invited to doubt whether his telling is reliable. Other parts are delivered in letters from Bella as she travels the world with her suitor, Duncan Wedderburn, getting an eye-opening education in social injustice and gender politics. The book sucks you in with wicked humour, larger-than-life characters and sharp social satire – I found it impossible to put down. Sam Wong Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling This book is bursting with bizarre transhumanist ideas, each introduced and discarded so rapidly that you barely have time to process one before the next weird concept arrives. If you’re looking for a tightly structured plot, well… forget about the plot. Who needs plot when the Mechanists (cybernetic zealots who are more machine than human) and the Shapers (genetic engineers sculpting themselves into superhumans) are waging war across the solar system? (I don’t think picking sides is the point of the book, but I would be a Shaper.) At the centre of all this is Abelard Lindsay, a Shaper exile who is up for literally anything. I think I like this book so much because Lindsay takes every new and strange way of being into his stride, dabbling here and there, and generally not being judgemental. Whether this is a prescient look at the future of humanity, or just a peek inside Sterling’s wild imagination, I very much enjoyed it. Finn Grant A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle I don’t think I’d read any science fiction as a child until I found a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 book at our local library, so for me, it is, perhaps, the ur-science fiction novel, despite being a children’s book. The story of grumpy 13-year-old Meg (in whom I saw a kindred spirit) whose father, a brilliant scientist, has disappeared, it has everything: space, science, adventure, romance. After meeting her mysterious neighbours, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, Meg learns that her father was working on something called a tesseract when he vanished. Together with her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and a boy from her school Calvin (told you there was romance), Meg travels through a tesseract (this is called tessering, and involves folding the fabric of space and time) to rescue her dad. There’s a tremendous evil at the heart of this novel, called the “Black Thing”, and I still so vividly remember the moment Charles Wallace is under its power and Meg is trying to rescue him. There are also wonderful aliens (Aunt Beast!), terrible peril and a whole lot of love. Perfection. Alison Flood Topics: