During the 21st century, we’ve seen the science fiction genre expand and evolve in new and exciting ways.
Authors are pushing boundaries, mixing genres, revisiting classic themes with new eyes and perspectives.
You are reading: Best new sci fi books
There’s a lot to get excited about when it comes to modern science fiction novels.
essential modern science fiction novels
Whether you’re a fan of classic science fiction and want to know what modern authors are about, or you’re new to the genre and want to start with the contemporary and work backwards, this is what you need to read.
These authors from around the world are redefining the genre and writing some of the best modern science fiction novels you can read right now.
Disclaimer: For a book to be part of this list of modern science fiction novels, it must have been published this century.
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how high we got in the dark by sequoia nagamatsu
It’s no exaggeration to call high that we arrived in the dark the next step in science fiction.
This is one of the best modern science fiction novels you’ll ever read; a bold new take on the science fiction genre.
remember the narratives and themes found in the works of emily st. john mandel, with a dash of black mirror, sequoia nagamatsu’s first novel is essential reading.
We start with a scientist whose daughter, also a scientist, recently and tragically died during an expedition to the Batagaika crater in Siberia.
Cliff heads to Siberia to continue his daughter’s work, with the support of his colleagues.
The job is to investigate melting permafrost to see if potentially long-frozen diseases can be discovered and spread around the world.
This is a very real problem that scientists fear, and that’s part of what makes How High We Go in the Dark so compelling and chilling.
and of course a virus is discovered and spreads. From here on, we follow a series of different first-person narratives in a world where infected children’s organs slowly mutate until they fail completely.
Multiple sci-fi themes and tropes are explored here in new ways, including the question of human intelligence when a pig that was being used to grow human organs develops advanced intelligence and even speaks telepathically.
These disparate themes and narratives all work together so beautifully, like an orchestra of sci-fi concepts. it’s beautiful and it’s a very addictive read.
Buy a copy here!
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adrian tchaikovsky’s children of time
British author Adrian Tchaikovsky first rose to fame as a fantasy author, but it’s his first science fiction novel, Children of Time, that made readers sit up and pay attention.
Following its publication in 2015, it won the prestigious Arthur C. clarke the following year, and deservedly so.
We begin with a scientist who, along with a small team, ventured out to experiment and terraform a distant planet for humans to colonize.
However, things went awry, and this eventually leads to the dominant sentient race on that planet being spiders instead of apes.
Fast forward to the moment when humanity’s last surviving arch has left earth and heads to this new land, hoping to find a new home.
What’s so exciting about the children of time is their wonderful world-building.
The spiders themselves are also protagonists, and we get to see Tchaikovsky’s mind at work as he imagines what a society of advanced spiders with human-like intelligence would look like.
then there’s how the surviving humans arc works and the issues that arise on board.
This is a novel that leans into hard science fiction, bringing us things that are potentially possible, or at least feasible, but also full of imagination and big themes to chew on.
children of the time is almost perfect; one of the most exquisite modern science fiction novels you’ll ever read.
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hao jingfang wanderers
translated from the chinese by ken liu
As things stand right now, Hao Jingfang’s Tramps feels like the definitive sci-fi novel of the decade.
This is a grand, ambitious, and thoughtful philosophical masterpiece of political science fiction, and one of the best modern science fiction novels.
Set in 2201, Vagabonds is set on Mars and focuses on the tensions between Mars and Earth. Similar to the timeline of the early United States, Mars was colonized (although unlike the United States, it was not lived on and therefore nothing was stolen).
After its colonization, Mars depended on Earth for supplies, but eventually wanted to strike out on its own and a war for independence ensued. after the war, earth resembles the extremes of capitalism and mars is something of a communist utopia.
forty years after the war, our protagonist, luoying, is a young martian who has returned to mars after years of living and studying on earth as part of the mercury group (a group of young people sent to learn and improve relations interplanetary).
The big question posed by vagabonds concerns the meaning of freedom. each planet looks with pity on the inhabitants of the other, seeing the other as less free.
Terrans are free to look for different jobs, move between cities and countries, and spend their money as they please. Martians are free from the stress of money, poverty, corporate pressure, unemployment, and dissatisfaction.
Because of their unique freedoms, both planets have their own drawbacks and restrictions. feeling that he belongs to both cultures, luoying is to search for answers to the question of what freedom is really like.
beyond all this is the construction of the world. Hao Jingfang gives us such a detailed and exciting version of Mars, mechanically, politically, and economically. it’s dense but endlessly fascinating.
Although it is a long and slow book, Vagabonds is one to get lost in. a great work of Chinese science fiction and one of the best modern science fiction novels.
Buy a copy here!
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apple seed by matt bell
The Phenomenal Apple Seed is a slow-burn ecological novel that spans multiple timelines and genres, and one of the most groundbreaking modern science fiction novels ever written.
matt bell expertly blends folklore with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic themes with a finale that ties three disparate narratives together in ways you simply can’t predict.
We spend most of our time as readers in 18th century Ohio, as two brothers follow in the footsteps of the legendary Johnny Appleseed, planting apple orchards in the United States.
As the brothers traverse settlements and forests steeped in myth, their bond is tested again and again.
The second narrative is set fifty years after our present, in the second half of the 21st century, when climate change has devastated the earth.
Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. but a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power.
You follow one of the company’s original founders as he returns to headquarters intent on destroying what he helped build.
The final narrative takes place a thousand years in the future, when North America is covered by a massive ice sheet. a lone sentient being inhabits a technology station on top of the glacier.
You follow him as he sets out to follow a search beacon across the continent in hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.
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There are few novels as imaginative and beautifully plotted as appleseed, a novel of big ideas to pay attention to.
This is one of the best science fiction novels on the shelves, especially for fans of the subgenre of ecological novels.
Buy a copy here!
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to be shown if lucky by becky chambers
To be taught if lucky is an original science fiction novel by becky chambers. while his celebrated series of travelers is a space opera, this is a harder, calmer and more serious story.
this is one of the best modern science fiction novels; set in a future where a new public space program has been launched thanks to funding from ordinary people, with a specific vision to explore, discover, and expand human understanding of the cosmos.
A crew of four has been sent to a distant solar system to examine planets and moons thought to harbor life.
Let Them Teach You If You’re Lucky is another novel that tests Becky Chambers’s imaginative muscles.
she repeatedly considers what might reasonably be found on certain worlds with certain climates.
It’s not about imagined civilizations but about biodiversity and small discoveries, about the beauty of life and the magic of exploration.
This is a book that celebrates science and what it can do.
Easily one of the most shocking and heartwarming little science fiction books written by women that you will probably read in your life.
Buy a copy here!
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klara and the sun by kazuo ishiguro
Written by one of the modern world’s best and most beloved authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun is easily one of the best modern science fiction books of recent years.
this is a science fiction masterpiece that tells the story of klara, an artificial friend (or af). the purpose of an af is to be a companion to the teen who selects them.
klara begins her story in a store in an unspecified American city. she puts herself on display and, through her eyes, we learn about the world, or, at least, the world as she sees it. Klara is soon chosen by a teenage girl named Josie who takes Klara home to live with her in the country.
This is a novel about love and hope. Klara’s relationship with Josie, and Josie’s relationship with Ella’s own mother Chrissie and Ella’s best friend Rick, is the glue of this book.
what makes this almost an elevation of ishiguro’s unreliable narrator trope is klara’s unique perspective on the world (literally how her robot eyes see things and metaphorically how she learns and comes to understand others). people and their relationships).
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This is a very sweet and tender novel full of love in all its forms.
considers class and social groups, but also deals heavily with love, religion, superstition, and most importantly, how we hope; how we use hope as a method of survival.
along with never let me go, klara and the sun demonstrate that ishiguro’s greatest strength is observing human relationships through a variety of lenses; and he’s at his best when he uses science fiction as a tool to explore that to the fullest.
Buy a copy here!
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Agustina Bazterrica’s meat is tender
translated from Spanish by sarah moses
Blurring the lines between science fiction and dystopian fiction, tender is the flesh brings us something completely new.
Living in a world that is either a bit of a future or a possible parallel to our own, our protagonist Tejo works in a slaughterhouse that deals exclusively in human flesh.
a disease is said to have contaminated, and mostly wiped out, most non-human animals, and thus came a period known as the transition, in which the production of human flesh became an accepted norm in everyone.
Humans raised for slaughter are not considered persons, they are referred to as “heads” and are kept in the same conditions as cattle today.
Therein lies the first clear message of the book: consider how today’s battery farming and meat and dairy production treat non-human animals: the conditions in which they are kept; the ways they are raised, tortured, abused, and ultimately killed.
If this were the only message the book carried, it would not be adding anything new to the popular discourse. Fortunately, tender is the meat offers a broader scope than that.
While the meat is tender, it comes perilously close to wanton and needlessly violent at times, and its exposition never fails to feel disconnected from the plot.
It’s worth sitting down and pondering the questions and warnings it raises as our planet continues to shrink in a multitude of terrifying ways.
yew’s personal story is also aggressively compelling and expertly conveys the book’s messages and moral. It is ultimately those messages that make this book worth reading and what makes it one of the best modern science fiction novels.
Buy a copy here!
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the long land of terry pratchett and stephen baxter
what do you get when you cross the political wisdom and limitless imagination of terry pratchett with the knowledge and experience of stephen baxter?
one of the most essential modern science fiction novels on the shelves, that’s what.
One of the simplest pleasures a good science fiction novel can provide is to elicit that feeling of surprise when confronted with a great idea or event.
the long earth is full of these moments:
- when you follow the protagonist joshua to his first parallel world
- when you learn that there are no people in any other world
- when you learn that they are potentially infinite
- when you find out about a strange human race of natural “stepping stones” that move between parallel worlds
- when you find out that a catastrophe is ending these worlds
There’s a healthy dose of surrealism here, as well as a heavy dose of political intrigue. but there’s also that wonderful wide-eyed sense of discovery and adventure.
the long earth is a novel in which terrifying and dangerous ideas come together with the human drive for adventure, discovery, and doing something risky for the sake of it.
While it lacks the wit of Pratchett’s Disc World Series, it makes up for it with an eye-opening sense of discovery and intrigue.
Buy a copy here!
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the employees by olga ravn
translated from danish by martin aitken
shortlisted for the international booker prize 2021, The Employees is a science fiction novella by Danish author Olga Ravn.
Set on a massive spaceship in the 22nd century, this is a satire on hyper-capitalist workplace culture. is one of the best modern science fiction novels.
employees is structured as a series of testimonials from interviews with various workers about a ship that has just picked up a collection of unknown objects from a newly discovered planet.
objects are slowly and subtly changing the minds and feelings of workers, both human and humanoid (robot ai).
and the company is monitoring these changes through a series of interviews with both groups.
This Danish science fiction novel explores the subject of artificial intelligence and the meaning of life in truly fresh and original ways. it also satirises the cold and uncaring relationship between a company and its workforce.
the company sits silent and unseen as its human employees become increasingly nostalgic about life on earth, while its robot employees feel lost, melancholic and even angry because they too become nostalgic, but what for?
The concept of artificial intelligence and the ethics behind it are considered from new angles, such as when a humanoid observes that he has been programmed to behave faithfully, but all he sees are hypocritical and unfaithful humans around him.
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the employees is one of the most original and unique science fiction novels in recent years, and an absolute must-read among science fiction books written by women authors.
Buy a copy here!
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tower by bae myung-hoon
translated from Korean by sung ryu
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tower is a truly unique and boundary-pushing piece of modern science fiction.
As the name suggests, this Korean sci-fi piece is set entirely in a huge tower. this titular tower is a nation unto itself, home to 500,000 people.
bae implies that it was built on Korean soil, but this is never explicitly stated.
The book is divided into a series of interconnected speculative stories, all set within this lonely tower nation known as beanstalk.
The world building is fantastic as the tower needs to be a believable place for the author’s disparate stories to work. infrastructure, economics, politics and daily life must be taken into account and designed in a way that the reader can understand and appreciate.
The six floors of the tower are linked by the place itself and by recurring characters and events. and each story serves to further build the world while telling a completely self-contained story.
In that sense, this is a unique piece of Korean fiction that combines the concepts of the novel and the short story collection.
and each story also, like all good science fiction, poses an ethical, political or philosophical dilemma for us to ponder.
what an amazing book among the best modern science fiction novels.
Buy a copy here!
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the wife cast by sarah gailey
The Echo’s Wife is a work of grounded speculative science fiction. a deeply personal and human story of love, loss, betrayal, despair and death.
Our protagonist, Evelyn, is a research biologist who has seen advances in the field of human cloning. Her ex-husband, a fellow biologist named Nathan, has recently remarried.
After receiving an award for their work, Nathan’s new partner, Martine, invites Evelyn over for tea, who turns out to be a clone of Evelyn, raised by Nathan.
martine is also pregnant, something that evelyn, the leading cloning expert, thinks is impossible.
to say more would be to spoil a novel full of twists and turns. this is an intimate sci-fi thriller, a real page turner.
what makes this novel so sharp and tight, however, is evelyn herself. Written like a true scientist, she is clinical and logical in her view of people. she is kind and helpful, but not warm or passionate.
The world of the echo wife is also wonderfully well done. while it may not be hard science fiction, it’s grounded enough to seem believable, or at least conceivable.
Tightly plotted, elegantly written, and populated with sharp and unique characters, Echo’s Wife is a modern masterpiece of speculative science fiction that explores big moral and ethical questions, as all good speculative science fiction should.
Buy a copy here!
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i’m waiting for you for kim bo-young
translated from the korean by sung ryu and sophie bowman
kim bo-young is a legend of korean literature, and even worked as a script editor on oscar-winning director bong joon-ho’s snowpiercer.
With I’m Waiting For You, readers get to see firsthand why she’s such a special sci-fi author. This collection of four stories is essential reading among modern science fiction novels.
The four stories in this collection actually function as two pairs. The first and fourth stories, I am waiting for you and on my way to you, are the same story told from two perspectives: a bride and a groom heading home to earth for their wedding ceremony.
The second and third stories, The Prophet of Corruption and That One Life, which are also the longest and shortest stories respectively, are a mix of religion, mysticism, and science fiction.
In these two middle tales, the characters are an ensemble of gods, and it is quickly revealed that they created the earth as a school in which they themselves can learn and grow.
the main character of the prophet of corruption, naban, is a single god whose prophets, disciples and sons separated from him like cells.
individually, they spend lifetimes on earth, learning, experimenting and dying.
naban believes in asceticism as a school of learning; his children are reborn in low roles; they suffer and toil and eventually return home. But some rebel against this live-and-learn approach.
What makes these stories so tantalizingly addictive is both Kim’s world-building and her attempt to write gods as characters, with different motivations and behaviors than our own.
The stories that frame this collection are each written in an epistolary way, like letters to each other. In I’m Waiting For You, our nameless boyfriend is trying to get down to earth and is updating his girlfriend every time something goes wrong (and a lot goes wrong).
The same thing happens on my way to you, only here the bride has her own obstacles to overcome. these two stories are heartbreaking.
You’ll root for them, you’ll cry for them, you’ll hope against hope that things will work out for them.
Buy a copy here!
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liu cixin’s three body problem
translated from the chinese by ken liu
The three-body problem raises familiar questions in science fiction:
- Can science be a path to truth?
- Do humans deserve to occupy a planet, essentially a spinning Eden in a barren universe, that they are unnecessarily destroying?
- what would it take for a single person to betray the entire human race?
The questions are familiar, but the execution is a uniquely Chinese page-turning epic and one of the best modern science fiction novels out there.
The Three Body Problem is the first Chinese science fiction novel translated into English for Western audiences.
The author, Cixin Liu, is an engineer who worked as a writer for more than three decades while working at a power plant in China’s Shanxi province.
Liu’s knowledge of science and engineering permeates the Three-Body Problem, which is packed with detailed explanations of astronomy and abstract physics – challenging yet illuminating passages well worth the effort to read.
is, without a doubt, one of the most mind-boggling, contemplative, and inspiring pieces of fiction you will ever read.
The Three Body Problem, appropriately enough, contains three interlocking plotlines: the first, in the early 1970s during China’s Cultural Revolution; the second, in the early 2000s; and a third set within a virtual reality game centered on an alien world terrorized by its three-sun system.
The protagonist of the early 2000s plot is Wang Miao, a well-to-do nanomaterials scientist who teams up with loud-talking, chain-smoking police officer Shi Qiang to investigate the mysterious deaths of scientists. local, premeditated events that they will discover are inextricably linked to the tragedies of the cultural revolution.
This is a science fiction revolution and one of the most essential modern science fiction novels on the shelves.
Buy a copy here!
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the space between worlds by micaiah johnson
the space between worlds is the first novel by the author micaiah johnson; a journey of mystery and discovery spanning multiple universes, and one of the most original and moving modern science fiction novels on the bookshelves.
Our protagonist is Cara, a young wanderer who moves through 380 different versions of the earth to observe and collect data.
Your job is simply to report on what makes each version of the land unique.
what makes this premise fun is that a traveler can only set foot in a land if that land’s version of them is dead, and face is dead in all but eight lands, due to the difficult circumstances of his birth and youth.
despite its impressive and ambitious worldbuilding, the space between worlds is actually a fairly intimate character-focused science fiction novel.
Throughout this science fiction novel, Johnson offers us questions and answers on the themes of identity, nature versus nurture, and the lasting impact of trauma. she provides us with satisfying character writing, powerful plot twists, and enjoyable genre bending.
face itself is the engine of this novel. a damaged and angry young woman with too much on her shoulders.
Tragically relatable and someone to stare at unblinkingly as her journey of discovery becomes more personal than professional.
Buy a copy here!
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