Absolute Best SCIENCE Fiction
Discover the absolute best science fiction books of all time! Explore our curated list of top sci-fi reads that will take you on thrilling interstellar adventures and futuristic journeys.
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Great Sky River
by Gregory Benford
The third novel in the award-winning author's classic Galactic Center series is available once again. "A challenging, pacesetting work of hard science fiction that should not be missed."--"Los Angeles Times."
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Tides of Light
by Gregory Benford
The sensational sequel to Great Sky River, this is the story of a small band of humans at the center of the galaxy who come face to face with an awesome alien intelligence.
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Dune
by Frank Herbert
• DUNE: PART TWO • THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert • Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, with Stellan Skarsgård, with Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition mankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.
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Startide Rising
by David Brin
David Brin's Uplift novels are among the most thrilling and extraordinary science fiction ever written. Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War--a New York Times bestseller--together make up one of the most beloved sagas of all time. Brin's tales are set in a future universe in which no species can reach sentience without being "uplifted" by a patron race. But the greatest mystery of all remains unsolved: who uplifted humankind? The Terran exploration vessel Streaker has crashed in the uncharted water world of Kithrup, bearing one of the most important discoveries in galactic history. Below, a handful of her human and dolphin crew battles armed rebellion and a hostile planet to safeguard her secret--the fate of the Progenitors, the fabled First Race who seeded wisdom throughout the stars.
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The Smoke Ring
by Larry Niven
The Citizens Tree people rescue a family of loggers and learn for the first time of a society known as the Admiralty, which may have maintained intact the original computer library of the ship Discipline
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Summertide
by Charles Sheffield
It was just before Summertide, the time when the twin planets, Opal and Quake, would orbit closest to their sun, subjecting both -- but Quake in particular -- to vast tidal forces. And it was to be the most violent Summertide ever, due to the Grand Conjunction of the system's stars and planets, something that happened only every 350,000 years. Access to the unstable Quake was supposed to be prohibited, but some very insistent travelers were determined to make the trip. Professor Darya Lang, who had made a career studying artifacts left by the long-vanished aliens called the Builders, had a hunch that during this unusal Summertide she might find the Builders themselves. Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H'sial had their own interests in Quake, and would do anything to get there. And Councilor Julius Graves was hunting murderers -- if they were hiding on Quake, he needed no one's permission to search for them. Planetary Administrators Hans Rebka and Max Perry had no choice but to go to Quake themselves -- risking their lives to protect the others -- and to learn, just maybe, the secret of Summertide and the Builders . . . "A well-made puzzle story in the manner of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama books." -- The New York Times
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A Fire Upon The Deep
by Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization. A Fire Upon The Deep is the winner of the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
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The Legacy of Heorot
by Larry Niven
Light years from Earth, on Tau Ceti Four, two hundred colonists have created a thriving community, not realizing that they have upset a delicate ecological balance and have unleashed an unbelievable nightmare - NoveList.
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Rendezvous With Rama
by Arthur Charles Clarke
During the twenty-second century, a space probe's investigation of a mysterious, cylindrical asteroid brings man into contact with an extra-galactic civilization
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The Andromeda Strain
by Michael Crichton
"Relentlessly suspenseful...A hair-raising experience." THE PITTSBURGH PRESS The United States government stands warned that sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. When a probe satellite falls to the earth two years later, and lands in a desolate area of northeastern Arizona, the bodies that lie heaped and flung across the ground, have faces locked in frozen surprise. The terror has begun....