On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied droid, a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself as "Murderbot." Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. The first in the multiple award winning SF series, Murderbot.
The first book in the Imperial Radch series, it follows Breq, a single human body formerly the AI of a massive starship, seeking vengeance against an empire. Leckie burst on the scene with this debut novel, which is the only novel to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C.Clarke awards.
In the wake of interplanetary war, former commander Cordelia Naismith has deserted her own planet to marry the leader of the defeated enemy, Aral Vorkosigan. When a palace coup endangers the government, their lives, and her unborn son, Cordelia takes action to secure the safety of her new family and new home. Winner of both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1992.
A master of world-building, Cherryh won a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1989 for this tale of the assassination of a genius scientist and politician who runs the cloning research laboratory of Union, a breakaway planet from the Earth Alliance.
For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study the Black Death, one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history, was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her.
Another blend of fantasy and science fiction, Dragonflight is the first novel in the author’s Dragonriders of Pern series, published in 1968, which tells the story of Lessa, an outcast on the planet Pern, who Impresses a golden queen dragon to fight an ancient, deadly threat called "Thread" that falls from the sky.
The story is structured around four parallel worlds, each representing a different societal outcome for women, from a stagnant past to a female utopia and a future of gender war. Considered a classic in the literature of feminist science fiction, this book was very influential in its use of non-linear structure and shifting perspectives.
Widely considered as one of the world's first works of science fiction, Frankenstein is a chilling tale of creation, isolation and the haunting price of unchecked ambition. Adapted and remade as a film many times, most recently in the Academy Award nominated movie directed by Guillermo del Toro.
In this dystopian political satire, future environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. which results in a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Followed by a 2019 sequel, The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize.
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition putting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place. This immensely popular best-seller spawned both the Hunger Games series of novels and films.
One of the first major works of feminist science fiction, and winner of both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, this novel is the beginning of Le Guin’s loosely connected Hainish series. The series explores the widely disparate social and political structures, as well as a range of biological differences that have developed among the colonized planets of Hain.
The first novel in Becky Chambers' Hugo Award-winning Wayfarer series, it follows a motley crew on its initial exciting journey through space and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe.
When everything goes wrong on a trip to the local market, AO, a woman with a ton of significant and necessary body augmentations, must race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman named DNA in a world where everything is streamed. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. An African futurist and cyber-punk thriller set in the near future.
In 2025 California, a time of urban squalor, rampant violence, and deadly decay, anarchy rules. An eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward with a small band of followers. This book, and its follow-up, Parable of the Talents, brought fame to the Pasadena born Butler.
Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz leads the first human mission to make contact with an alien civilization, resulting in a catastrophic and tragic misunderstanding. The story continued in the sequel, Children of God (1998). Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree Jr. Award, and British Science Fiction Association Award.
A brutal and innovative book that deals with creation, life and death. Amnesic Zan and her lover Jayd are trapped in an endless,cyclical war, on a planet that is also a ship and is slowly dying. The world they inhabit is strange, fearsome and awe inspiring.
A finalist for the National Book Award, this post-apocalyptic novel follows a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians traversing the Great Lakes region 15 years after a pandemic killed millions of people, causing civilization’s collapse. The book inspired an HBO miniseries, which ran in 2021.
A classic children's science fiction/fantasy novel which follows siblings Meg Murry and Charles Wallace, along with their friend Calvin O'Keefe, on a journey through space and time to rescue their missing father from an evil force known as the "Dark Thing." They travel using a "tesseract," a wrinkle in time and space, to the planet Camazotz, where they must confront the evil entity known as "IT" in a battle between good and evil. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal for children's literature.