Looking for your next great read? This list features 14 of the best science fiction books of 2025, chosen from award lists, reader ratings, and recommendations from trusted sources like Goodreads and Storygraph.
You’ll find stories about strange new worlds, clever robots, daring adventures, and big questions about the future. Whether you enjoy funny space stories, exciting mysteries, or thoughtful tales, this list can help you find your next book.
Death of the Author mixes science fiction with realistic stories about life and African cultures. It features robots, artificial intelligence, and an imagined future. Its main themes include family, creativity, living with a disability, and finding your own voice.
Zelu has always felt like the odd one out in her big Nigerian family. She has a disability, does not want to get married, and loves writing stories instead of trying to become a doctor or a lawyer.
At her sister’s big wedding, things go from bad to worse: Zelu gets fired from her teaching job, and a publisher rejects her book. With her dreams crushed, she decides to write a story just for fun.
She writes an epic science fiction tale called Rusted Robots, set in a ruined future where robots and artificial intelligence are at war.
When Zelu finally shares her wild new story, she becomes famous. But fame might ruin the true meaning of her book.
This is a story about a woman who risks everything to share her voice, human imperfection, and the power of storytelling.
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky is science fiction, featuring space travel, alien life, and a strange, dangerous moon. Its main themes include survival, teamwork, understanding beings different from ourselves, and how powerful companies treat people.
A group of space explorers looking for valuable resources finds a distant, pitch-black moon named Shroud. It is an extremely dangerous place: there is no oxygen to breathe, the air pressure is super high, and the gravity is very heavy. No human is supposed to ever set foot on it.
Then, a terrible accident happens. Two explorers, Juna and Mai, are forced to crash-land on this deadly moon in a small, beat-up vehicle. Cut off from their spaceship with no way to call for help, they are running out of time.
To survive, they must travel across Shroud’s dangerous land, seas, and skies. Along the way, Juna and Mai discover the strange creatures that rule the moon—and while the humans try to figure out this alien species, the aliens start figuring them out, too.
The Compound by Aisling Rawle blends dystopian and psychological thriller elements with a speculative fiction twist on reality TV. Its main themes include competition, greed, power, and how the desire for prizes and fame can change the way people treat one another.
Lily wakes up in the middle of a desert with nineteen other people to compete on a huge reality TV show. The rules are simple: be the last person to leave the locked compound to win the game.
Along the way, the players compete in challenges to win fancy prizes and basic things they need to survive, like food, appliances, and even a front door.
Cameras watch Lily's every move, but she does not want to leave because the world outside is a total mess.
As the game goes on, the secret TV producers make the challenges harder, scarier, and much more dangerous. Soon, Lily isn't just trying to win a game show—she's trying to survive it.
This book offers a dystopian satire of what can happen when entertainment goes too far.
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami blends science fiction, dystopian fiction, and psychological thriller. It imagines a world where people’s dreams are monitored to predict crime. Its main themes include privacy, freedom, unfair treatment, and the dangers of letting technology control people’s lives.
Sara is arriving at the airport to go home when government agents stop her. They tell her that a super-smart computer program has been studying her dreams, and it predicts she will soon hurt her husband.
Even though she hasn't done anything wrong, the agents lock her up for twenty-one days to keep him safe.
Sara is taken to a special holding center filled with other women who are also trapped because of what they dreamed. The guards make super-strict rules that keep changing, and breaking any rule means staying locked up even longer.
Months go by, and Sara still cannot leave.
Everything changes when a new woman arrives and stirs up trouble. With her help, Sara decides to fight back against the powerful tech companies that stole her freedom just because of what was inside her head.
The story shows how technological dominance can happen when powerful people let computers make choices for everyone.
The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso blends science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. It features time travel and a mysterious library that holds people’s memories. Its main themes include love, loss, the power of memories, and the dangers of controlling history.
When she is eleven years old, Lisavet Levy gets trapped in a magical library called the "time space," where the memories of people who have died are turned into books.
As she grows up inside the giant library, she discovers that secret government agents are sneaking in and destroying books to change real-world history.
To save the truth, Lisavet writes her own book of memories—until an agent named Ernest Duquesne arrives to stop her, sparking a battle that could change the past.
Years later, in 1965, a sixteen-year-old girl named Amelia is searching for her missing uncle, Ernest. A secret CIA agent asks Amelia to help find the memory book her uncle was chasing.
Amelia enters the magical library herself. She discovers that the past and the truth are more twisted than she imagined.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi blends science fiction, humor, and satire. It imagines what happens when the Moon suddenly turns into cheese. Its main themes include coping with unexpected change, searching for answers, and how people react differently to the same strange event.
The moon has just turned into actual cheese, and the entire world has to figure out what to do next. The moon's sudden change becomes a strange lunar catastrophe that affects people in many different ways.
For some people, a giant cheese moon is a huge business opportunity. For others, it makes them question science, religion, and how the world even works.
While some try to keep normal life going, billions of people just look up at the night sky in total shock at the impossible thing hanging above them. Some panic, some make plans, some laugh, and some pray.
It is a funny, wild, and totally unpredictable story about what happens when the universe does the craziest thing imaginable.
Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey blends science fiction, adventure, and Western fiction. It follows a woman seeking freedom on a planet controlled by powerful corporations. Its main themes include rebellion, identity, unfair treatment, and standing up to those who hold power.
This is the story of a woman named Bess, who goes by the nickname "Dog-Bitch Bess."
It is the story of her special gun, named Wakeful Slim, and the dead man who owned it before her—leaving a part of his spirit trapped inside the weapon. It is also the journey of how Bess starts out as a simple teacher, turns into an outlaw, and finally becomes a hero.
Set during the violent final battles of a massive war fought across different dimensions, Bess discovers the harsh truth about her world through dangerous fights, pain, and loss. Once she realizes that powerful people have been using and lying to her, she decides to fight back and set things right.
Slow Gods by Claire North blends science fiction, space opera, and horror. It follows a pilot who returns from the dead in a galaxy shaped by powerful artificial intelligence. Its main themes include identity, survival, power, and what it means to be human.
My name is Mawukana, and I am only a shadow of who I used to be.
If I wanted you to think I was a hero, I’d lie. I’d tell you I never ran away, never left anyone behind, and never let powerful people use me. But I’m going to tell you what really happened.
Way out in deep space, sitting in the pilot's seat of my ship, I died. But I didn't stay dead. I came back as something changed—something no longer fully human that can speak to the dark, empty void of space. And I swore to make the people who hurt me pay for what they did.
This is the story of a cosmic explosion that destroyed whole worlds and wiped out entire civilizations. It's also the story of every life I’ve lived since that first death.
Are you listening?
The Poppy Fields by Nikki Erlick blends speculative fiction and science fiction. It imagines a treatment that lets people sleep for a month to ease their grief. Its main themes include loss, healing, forgiveness, and the importance of human connection.
Imagine if there was a way to just turn off your sadness.
Deep in the California desert, a strange clinic called the Poppy Fields claims it can cure heartbreak. The treatment is simple, but risky: patients are put into a super-long, deep sleep until their emotional pain is gone.
When they wake up, their grief is supposedly cured—as long as they can live with some dark, hidden side effects.
Four total strangers, each carrying their own deep sadness, team up with a little dog named PJ for a long road trip from the Midwest to find the clinic and the mysterious person who built it.
Everyone in the car is hiding secrets about why they really want the cure, and those secrets threaten to mess up the whole trip before they even get there.
It’s a road-trip story about hope, pain, and how far people will go just to stop
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey blends speculative fiction, alternate history, and psychological suspense. It imagines a different version of 1970s England, where three brothers live in a mysterious home with unsettling rules. Its main themes include identity, belonging, control, and how people decide who deserves care.
In an alternate 1979 where World War II ended very differently, a cruel and secretive government rules over England.
Deep in the countryside, thirteen-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence, and William are the only kids left at their boarding home.
Every day, they are forced to take strange pills to protect them from a sickness that already made all their friends disappear.
The staff claims that the boys who recovered got sent to Margate, a wonderful seaside paradise—but the triplets are starting to doubt that place even exists.
Nearby, a thirteen-year-old girl named Nancy lives a completely isolated life. Her parents adore her, but they keep her locked inside and never let her see the outside world.
When Nancy and the brothers cross paths, they uncover a chilling secret about who they actually are and what the adults are planning to do to them.
To survive, the four kids must band together and pull off a desperate escape.
Sunward by William Alexander blends science fiction, mystery, and adventure. It follows a robot who becomes caught up in a murder investigation in the solar system. Its main themes include family, freedom, belonging, and what it means to be a person.
Captain Tova Lir could have had an easy, powerful life in politics like the rest of her family. Instead, she chose a spaceship and freedom, working as a space courier who delivers top-secret messages between planets in the far future.
On the side, Tova acts like a foster mom to "baby bots"—young artificial intelligences that basically act like moody, learning teenagers.
She helps them figure out who they are and how to live among humans. Her newest trainee is a spunky AI who proudly named herself Agatha Panza von Sparkles.
Everything goes sideways on a trip between moons when they stumble across a creepy, abandoned spaceship and an assassin waiting in the shadows.
To save Agatha, Tova has to pull off a dangerous move that glitches the young bot's digital brain.
Now, with enemies chasing them across the solar system trying to wipe them out, Tova has to track down her older robot "kids" for help.
Together, this unusual family has to stick up for each other and outrun the bad guys before they get erased for good.
Luminous by Silvia Park blends science fiction, family drama, and mystery. Set in a future Korea where humans and robots live together, it explores the bonds between human and robot siblings. Its main themes include family, identity, belonging, and what it means to be human.
In a future Korea, eleven-year-old Ruijie spends her days picking through piles of trash in a massive robot junkyard. She’s sick and desperately hunting for spare machine parts to help her failing body keep going.
But while digging through the scrap metal, she finds something unbelievable: a robot boy who looks so real and lifelike, he almost seems human.
Years ago, brother and sister Jun and Morgan had another brother named Yoyo. But Yoyo wasn't a regular kid—he was an advanced robot boy built by their inventor father.
One day, Yoyo vanished without a trace, and the family fell apart.
Today, Jun and Morgan haven't talked in ages. Morgan builds robots for work and is about to lose control of her biggest project, while Jun works as a detective investigating crimes involving machines.
When Ruijie pulls Yoyo out of the trash heap, she sets off a chain reaction. To solve the mystery of what really happened to their robot brother, the separated family is forced back together—and into some very dangerous secrets.
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory blends science fiction, humor, and road-trip adventure. It follows two friends exploring strange sights after discovering that their world is a computer simulation. Its main themes include friendship, faith, free will, and finding meaning when reality isn’t what it seems.
JP and Dulin have been best friends forever. But when JP gets really sick again, Dulin refuses to just sit around and be sad. Instead, he books them on one last, totally wild road trip.
Seven years ago, the whole world found out a crazy secret: planet Earth isn’t actually real. It’s just a giant computer video game, and humans are basically living inside it.
Ever since that day, real-life "glitches" have started popping up everywhere—weird spots where the laws of science completely break down.
So, the two friends hop on a slightly beat-up tour bus to go see these impossible sights for themselves.
The other people on the bus are total weirdos, too. With every mile, the tour stops get freakier.
They visit a spooky tunnel where time stands still, water geysers where gravity doesn't work, and the home of a talking digital cartoon. But the big finale is a place called Ghost City.
The passengers don’t know it yet, but that’s where they might finally find out the biggest secret of all: who is actually playing this game, and who is pressing the buttons?
When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift blends science fiction, climate fiction, and near-future drama. It follows two women whose lives unfold as Britain faces environmental change. Its main themes include hope, activism, protecting nature, and the power of individual choices to shape the future.
Many years in the future, two old friends sit by a warm campfire, watching the sparks fly into the night sky and sharing memories from their long lives.
Lucy remembers being a kid back during the 2020 pandemic. Stuck inside with her grandparents, she learned to tell every bird apart just by its song, sparking a fire in her to protect the outdoors.
Hester’s story started on a much darker day: she was born at the very moment a nuclear power plant exploded in Ukraine.
When she grew up, Hester grabbed a movie camera and walked right into the empty, radioactive ruins to film the packs of stray dogs surviving there.
In that lonely place, she met a wild wolf-dog named Lux—an animal that gave her life a true purpose.
For the next fifty years, Lucy and Hester's lives shows ecological stewardship and climate evolution across the world. They faced angry protests, family fallouts, and terrible losses.
Lucy fought to rescue sick forests and bring vanished animals back to the British countryside, while Hester made movies that spoke up for creatures without a voice.
More Books for Science-Fiction Fans
Want to keep exploring? Here are a few more titles to look up:
A scientist starts looking into some strange things that don’t seem to make sense. He finds a mysterious video game connected to an alien world. But as he learns more, it starts to look like contacting aliens might have been a very bad idea.
Breq used to be an AI that controlled a huge spaceship and lots of human bodies at the same time. Now she’s down to one body, and she wants revenge. Along the way, she has to figure out who she can trust and where she belongs.
The world is struggling with climate disasters, and people are choosing a new leader with a lot of power. One choice is a human. The other is an AI. Reporter Marcus Tully is looking into a mystery, and what he finds could change who wins.
An archaeologist is trying to find out why an alien civilization disappeared almost a million years ago. His search gets mixed up with an assassin and the crew of a strange spaceship. But finding the answer could mean waking up a danger that should have been left alone.
These books are not part of the main list because they didn't either come out in 2025 or make award lists, but are sci-fi fan favorites. They may be worth exploring if you enjoy stories about strange worlds or future technology.
Explore Diverse Sci-Fi Worlds and Choose Your Next Adventure
From a moon made of cheese to a dangerous alien world, these 15 sci-fi books offer something for every kind of reader. Some are funny, some are thrilling, and others explore what it means to be human.
Ready for your next adventure? Choose a book from the list and buy a copy today. Then settle in and discover a new world, one page at a time.