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Explore and discover your next great read with us!
Whether you're seeking romance and joy, drama and action, or anything in between, our genre spotlights will help you find your next favorite read. Happy reading! |
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Science Fiction
| What is Science Fiction?
Stories derived from historical events, discoveries, and farfetched possibilities. Settings include planets of all varieties and alternate versions of Earth.
Science fiction is a type of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction often poses the question "what if" to the reader. What if we could travel to Mars? What if we could travel to other planets? Other types of speculative fiction include fantasy, horror, and magical realism. What sets science fiction apart from the other types of speculative fiction is that science fiction is usually grounded in science.
What happens in Science Fiction?
Almost anything can happen in science fiction stories, thanks to the eager willingness of science fiction fans to suspend their disbelief. Settings include planets of all varieties, alternate versions of Earth, as well as stories that take place in Earth’s past, present, and future. Science fiction plotlines often derive from historical events, discoveries, observable trends, and even far-fetched possibilities. Groundbreaking advances in science and technology continually pave the way for authors to explore exciting storylines that feature artificial intelligence, faster-than-light travel, parallel worlds, futuristic weaponry, and more.
Science fiction plots often revolve around: - Remarkable discoveries including intergalactic travel, artificial intelligence, and time travel.
- Startling revelations involving alien life, parallel worlds, conspiracies, and ancient secrets.
- Unique capabilities such as shapeshifting or psychic abilities in humans or other terrestrial life forms.
- Frightening predictions involving future catastrophes or dystopian societies are often based on real-world trends.
Themes found in Science Fiction
Themes are popular, recurring, and recognizable elements found in fiction. Here are some popular themes you will find in science fiction. - Boldy go: Humans set out to explore the cosmos, seeking greater understanding rather than new homes or resources.
- Climate change apocalypse: Characters in these stories must weather devastating changes in temperature as access to food or land is impacted by rising sea levels or spreading ice.
- First contact: Humans discover they're not alone in the universe after all.
- Human 2.0: Whether these characters sport engineered enhancements or are part of the next evolutionary leap forward, they're a distinct upgrade from your run-of-the-mill human.
- Rise of the machines: Robots and computers turn on their creators.
- Time slip: Characters find themselves suddenly somewhen else -- past or future. They may manage to adapt, or discover how to return to their original time.
Source:
Cavitt, Alicia (2022, September). "Genre Guide: Science Fiction for Adults." NoveList Plus. Retrieved April 4, 2024.
Find the complete Genre Guide "Science Fiction for Adults" and other genre guides in our Novelist Plus database! |
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| Andy Weir | Stranded on Mars by a duststorm that compromised his space suit and forced his crew to leave him behind, astronaut Mark Watney struggles to survive in spite of minimal supplies and environmental challenges that test his ingenuity. |
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| | Becky Chambers |
Centuries after disappearing into the wilderness en masse, the sentient robots of Panga return to visit with a tea monk and answer their burning question,“What do people need?” in the first novel of a new series. |
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| | Kazuo Ishiguro |
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?"
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| | Amal El-Mohtar |
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters and soon fall in love, even though the discovery of their bond could mean death for each of them. |
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| Micaiah Johnson |
."A multiverse-hopping outsider discovers a secret that threatens her home world and her fragile place in it-a stunning sci-fi debut that's both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. CARA IS DEAD ON THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR WORLDS. The multiverse business is booming, but there's just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying-from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn't outrun. But on this earth, Cara's survived. And she's reaping the benefits, thanks to the well-heeled Wiley City scientists who ID'd her as an outlier and plucked her from the dirt. Now she's got a new jobcollecting offworld data, a path to citizenship, and a near-perfect Wiley City accent. Now she can pretend she's always lived in the city she grew up staring at from the outside, even if she feels like a fraud on either side of its walls. But when one ofher eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined-and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse"
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| | Ernest Cline |
Immersed in a mid-21st-century virtual utopia to escape an ugly real world of famine, poverty and disease, Wade Watts joins a violent effort to solve a series of puzzles by the virtual world's wealthy creator, who has promised that the winner will be his heir, in a book that is the basis for the forthcoming film. Reprint. Movie tie-in. A New York Times best-seller. |
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| Binti | Nnedi Okorafor |
When Binti is offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy, she must rely on the gifts of her people and the wisdom found within the school |
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| All Systems Red | Martha Wells |
A hardcover rerelease of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning debut finds a team of scientists and their self-aware droid fending for survival on a distant planet when a neighboring mission goes dark. By the New York Times best-selling author of The Wizard Hunters. |
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| Blake Crouch | Kidnapped and drugged at gunpoint for inexplicable reasons, physics professor Jason Dessen awakens in a lab and is informed that his entire life has been an illusion and that he is being hunted by a deadly adversary. By the best-selling author of the Wayward Pines trilogy. |
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| | N. K. Jemisin |
After Yeine Darr is summoned to the majestic city of Sky and named an heiress to the king of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, she is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had, drawing ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. Original. |
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| Leviathan Wakes | James S. A. Corey |
After Captain Jim Holden discovers a derelict, abandoned spaceship, he unearths a secret that threatens to throw the entire solar system into war and a vast conspiracy that could mean the end of the human race |
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| | Isaac Asimov |
Republished to coincide with the movie adaptation's release, a collection of tales chronicles the near-future development of the robot and features models that have the ability to read minds, experience human emotions, and take over the world. Movie tie-in. |
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| Douglas Adams | Escaping Earth just before it is demolished to make way for a new galactic highway, reluctant galactic traveler Arthur Dent embarks on a series of off-beat and occasionally extraterrestrial journeys, accompanied by a variety of unusual companions. |
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| | Kurt Vonnegut |
Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present. |
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| Dune | Frank Herbert |
Frank Herbert's classic masterpiece--a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. A mythic and emotionally charged hero's journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man borninto a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet's exclusive supply of the most previous resource in existence -- a commodity capable of unlocking humanity's greatest potential--only those who can conquer their fear will survive. |
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| Neuromancer | William Gibson |
Case, a burned-out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system, in a special twentieth anniversary edition of the influential Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel. |
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| Neal Stephenson | With the strange new designer drug, Snow Crash, making zombies of nearly everyone and a deadly computer virus striking down hackers, Hiro Protagonist, the last of the free-lance hackers, comes to the rescue. |
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| | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley |
Presents the text of "Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus" from 1818 that was published anonymously by the author. |
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| Ender's Game | Orson Scott Card |
An expert at simulated war games, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin believes that he is engaged in one more computer war game when, in truth, he is commanding the last Earth fleet against an alien race seeking Earth's complete destruction. |
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| The Time Machine | H. G. Wells |
In the Time Traveller's miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morlocks; forward again by a million years or so to glimpse adying world of blood-red beaches and menacing shapes; and on again to the last days of our planet, a remote twilight where nothing moves but darkness and a cold wind. |
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May the Fourth Be With You!
Celebrate May 4th, by checking out these science fiction books from the Star Wars franchise. |
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| | Timothy Zahn |
Five years after they defeated Darth Vader and the Emperor, Princess Leia and Han Solo are married and expecting children, and Luke is a Jedi knight, and all are unaware that the last of the Emperor's warlords plan to reclaim the empire. |
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| Ahsoka | E. K Johnston |
A tale spanning former Jedi apprentice Ahsoka's story between The Clone Wars and Rebels finds her struggling to find her place after the devastating events of Order 66, describing how her resolve to fight the Empire leads her to Bail Organa and the Rebel Alliance. 125,000 first printing. TV tie-in. |
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| Lost Stars | Claudia Gray |
"The reign of the Galactic Empire has reached the Outer Rim planet of Jelucan, where aristocratic Thane Kyrell and rural villager Ciena Ree bond over their love of flying. Enrolling at the Imperial Academy together to become fighter pilots for the glorious Empire is nothing less than a dream come true for the both of them. But Thane sours on the dream when he sees firsthand the horrific tactics the Empire uses to maintain its ironclad rule. Bitter and disillusioned, Thane joins the fledgling Rebellion --putting Ciena in an unbearable position to choose between her loyalty to the Empire and her love for the man she's known since childhood. Now on opposite sides of the war, will these friends turned foes find a way to be together, or will duty tear them -- and the galaxy -- apart?"--Page [4] of cover
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