Worlds of science fiction

Orson Scott Card

A gifted boy is trained through brutal war games to save humanity — but the games are not what they seem.

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician foresees the fall of a galactic empire and builds a secret plan to shorten the dark age to come.

William Gibson

A burned-out hacker gets one last job jacking into cyberspace — a word this book invented.

Ursula K. Le Guin

An envoy arrives on a frozen world whose people have no fixed sex, and must unlearn everything he knows.

Emily St. John Mandel

A flu wipes out most of humanity, and a troupe of actors keeps Shakespeare alive in the ruins.

Frank Herbert

The most influential sci-fi world ever built.

Andy Weir

A lone astronaut must save humanity.

Douglas Adams

The funniest book in the galaxy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

A boarding school with a terrible secret.

N.K. Jemisin

On a world wracked by apocalyptic earthquakes, a woman searches for her stolen daughter as civilization ends, again.

Neal Stephenson

A pizza-delivering hacker named Hiro Protagonist races a drug-slash-virus through a corporate future and its virtual twin, the Metaverse.

Liu Cixin

During China's Cultural Revolution, a secret signal is sent to the stars — and something out there answers.

R.F. Kuang

A war orphan aces the empire's hardest exam, discovers a lethal shamanic power, and is swept into a genocidal war.

Pierce Brown

A lowly miner on Mars discovers his caste has been enslaved by a lie, and infiltrates the academy that breeds the ruling elite to bring it down.

Ernest Cline

In a bleak future, a teenager hunts for a dead billionaire's fortune hidden inside a vast virtual universe built from 1980s pop culture.

Blake Crouch

A physics professor is abducted, wakes in a life that isn't his, and must fight across infinite versions of his own world to get back to the family he chose.

Andy Weir

Stranded and presumed dead on Mars, an astronaut has to science the hell out of everything, one problem at a time, to stay alive long enough to be rescued.

H.G. Wells