Sci-fi is in a good place right now. It’s unsurprising: issues like social media, artificial intelligence, and deep fakes give them a lot of material to work with. Authors like Andy Weir and Ted Chiang explore these issues with insight and imagination. The best sci-fi helps us see them from a new perspective while also serving an engrossing story.
Redditors on big subreddits like r/printSF and r/books have repeatedly discussed the best sci-fi of the last decade. Here are some of the picks that came up again and again. These books should make for an entertaining escape to another world, perfect for a holiday read.
Table of Contents
‘Dark Matter’ (2016) by Blake Crouch
“Are you happy with your life?” While walking home one night, physicist Jason Dessen is kidnaped and transported to a parallel universe. In this timeline, Dessen made a different choice on a fateful day fifteen years ago, reshaping his life and the world.
The book explores the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, which claims that every time an event occurs, new universes come into existence based on every possible outcome. But here, the focus isn’t on dry science. “That wasn’t my goal, to have readers looking at equations and things like that,” Crouch has said. “I wanted to get the gist of what quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory say about our world and where we live and the idea of choices.”
‘All Systems Red’ (2017) by Martha Wells
All Systems Red is the first entry in the Murderbot series, which revolves around a security robot that overrides its programming and becomes independent. The machine spends more time around humans and begins to develop emotions – which is very inconvenient for a killing machine.
Before this, author Martha Wells had primarily written fantasy. “I just always conceived it as a sci-fi story,” she says, explaining her decision to switch genres. “Some of the key elements — such as the corporate control of the society and the idea of entertainment media as comfort — could only work in a story with modern technology. I could have done a fantasy version of the concept, but it would probably have turned into a very different story.”
‘Recursion’ (2019) by Blake Crouch
This sci-fi thriller follows a police officer investigating a strange phenomenon sweeping the country: people claim to have memories of things that never happened. In some cases, these memories drive them to madness. As the cop digs deeper, he suspects that new technology may be to blame. However, it might not be altering people’s minds but rather the past itself…
Crouch says he was heavily influenced by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. “The way he would pick a scientific topic, whether it’s Chaos Theory or DNA manipulation, in each book he did he was tackling a piece of science. I feel a lot of inspiration from his body of work,” he says.
‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’ (2014) by Becky Chambers
This quirky space opera follows Rosemary Harper, a Martian-born human who escapes her life by joining the crew of the spaceship Wayfarer as a file clerk. Onboard, she meets a host of interesting characters and joins them on missions across the galaxy. It’s enjoyable for offering a more optimistic take on the future than most recent sci-fi.
‘Wool’ (2013) by Hugh Howey
“If the lies don’t kill you, the truth will.” Wool, the first story in the Silo series, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where most of humanity lives in a giant underground city. Holston, the city sheriff, is given a protective suit that allows him to explore the surface, but he’s not prepared for what he finds there.
“I also noticed how much social media we were starting to consume and how much our view of the world was suddenly coming from screens rather than going out and seeing things with our own eyes,” Howey says. “The story reflects my opinion that the world is best known through direct interaction, and we should dare to hope that it’s better than what we see on our screens.”
‘Red Rising’ (2014) by Pierce Brown
Red Rising takes place on Mars, where a dictatorship divides society into castes. Darrow, a member of the lowest caste, infiltrates the Institute, the training ground for the tyrannical Gold caste. He wants revenge on the Golds – even if he has to become one to get it.
“Adversity sparked Red Rising,” Pierce Brown says. “I lived in eight states before I graduated high school […] I wanted to capture that feeling of social anxiety and oppression, and combine [it] with the Greek play Antigone and Dumas’ perfect work, The Count of Monte Cristo.”
‘Exhalation’ (2019) by Ted Chiang
This one is technically a collection of short stories, but it’s too good to leave out. Arrival author Ted Chiang tackles a lot of big ideas here, but always through an engaging story. Highlights include ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’, a clever time travel tale, and ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’ about digital entities and the people who train them.
“The universe of Exhalation is one in which all the principles of thermodynamics as we know them apply, but certain aspects of them are more readily visible than in our universe,” Chiang explains.
‘We Are Legion’ (2016) by Dennis E. Taylor
This comedic sci-fi centers on Bob, a wealthy software engineer who gets hit by a car while crossing the street. He wakes up a century later to find that his consciousness is now the property of the government. They plan to upload him into a spaceship to serve as the craft’s AI. It makes for a unique (and often hilarious) adventure.
Author Dennis E. Taylor has a background in programming and never set out to be a writer. “My wife basically dared me to try writing a novel, based on a conversation we were having. And I started writing Outland,” he says. “And I figured worse comes to worst, I’ll stop after a couple of chapters. But I kept going and going and going, and suddenly I had a novel.”
‘Children of Time’ (2015) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In the far future, the Earth is dying, so a team of scientists terraforms a distant planet. They release a genetic virus there that is meant to accelerate the evolution of monkeys. However, the plan goes wrong, and the virus instead begins affecting spiders. Meanwhile, a ship full of people heads toward the planet, expecting paradise, completely unaware of the evolving arachnids.
“There is a SF tradition where aliens are just humans, when you scratch the surface, save that they are humans with a more limited emotional palette,” Tchaikovsky says. “I wanted to present a species that was complex, nuanced, non-human and yet comprehensible to human readers. “
‘Project Hail Mary’ (2021) by Andy Weir
Project Hail Mary is the most recent novel by the author of The Martian. It follows an astronaut who wakes up from a coming with amnesia. He slowly pieces his memories together and realizes he was sent on a mission to save humanity by traveling to a distant star. The book is set to be adapted into a movie starring Ryan Gosling.
Project Hail Mary is kind of like a companion piece to The Martian. “The stakes of The Martian are a single person’s life. And, he wants to survive, and a lot of people want to help him survive,” Weir says. “[The protagonist in Project Hail Mary] is the opposite. He is on a mission where, it’s okay if he dies, but he needs to complete his mission, or everyone else on earth will die, so it’s kind of the exact opposite.”
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