Science Fiction Novels by Author

Asimov, Isaac.

1942 - Runaround is a short story in which Asimov first mentions the three Laws of Robotics. In it Powell and Donavan are two astronauts who are sent to Mercury where one of their robots starts behaving strangely. They have to figure out how to get it back to work given the three laws. Not that good a story, but important.
1953 - The Caves of Steel is Asimov's first robot novel. It was serialized in Galaxy magazine. It is a detective story in a dystopian New York city where the population is so large they have had to organize as a socialist growing artificial food, living is a massive city of steel and worrying that it will break down. There is a spaceport where some Off-Worlders live in isolation. In the off-world colonies they live independently and have robots, but their birth rate is low. Elijah Baley is a detective assigned to work with robot R. Daneel Olivaw to solve a murder. We learn about how humans live in these cramped multilevel caves of steel due to overpopulation. Medievalists want to go back to the land. Off-worlders want to find a way to save humanity through new colonization with robot human collectives.

Banks, Iain M.

1988 - Player of Games - One of the first Culture novels by Banks. (Consider Phlebas (1987) was first.) Special Circumstances convinces Gurgeh to travel to the Empire of Azad to play their game Azad in order to overthrow the Empire from within. There is an outer frame by a drone who it turns out plays with Gurgeh to get him to play for SC.
1994 - Feersum Endjinn - Fascinating stand-alone book by Iain M. Banks, the author of the Culture series. The book takes place is a strange oversized castle and at first seems to be a fantasy novel along the lines of the Gormenghast novels. It slowly makes sense as you follow different narrators including Bascule whose writing is phonetic and hard to decipher. The novel also has an interesting real/VR twist where it isn't always clear which reality you are in.

Baciagalupi, Paolo

2009 - The Windup Girl - Brilliant climate fiction book that takes place in Thailand about attempts to secure a rare seedbank. The windup girl is a genetically engineered geisha-like servant created by the Japanese who may be a future "New Person", in a world with engineered plagues mutating and killing regular people. It reminds me of Olimpia in Hoffman's "The Sandman". The jerky motions are those of a puppet.

Some of the issues dealt with in the novel have to do with genetic colonialism (Thailand was never colonized) where agriculture companies control sterile seeds. The novel warns of the unanticipated outcomes of playing god with genetics and the dangerous mix of climate change and plagues. I read this with the sci-fi group.

2015 - The Water Knife - Another brilliant novel about fighting over water between semi-independent states in the USA West.

Bazterrica, Agustina

2020 - Tender Is The Flesh is about a future where a plague has wiped out most animals and as a result we eat human flesh. The story is narrated by a fixer for a processing plant as he visits different work sites. The details around the breeding and butchering of heads is gruesome and gives the book an authentic feel. Written by an Argentinian author.

Brin, David

The Postman, 1997. A man puts on the jacket of a postman and starts bringing news and hope to a a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Chabon, Michael

2007 - The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel about an alternate history where the US has allowed a large number of European Jews to settle temporarily in Sitka, Alaska. The settlement is reaching its end and will soon revert to Alaska. The narrator, a hard-boiled and depressed homicide detective, Meyer Landsman, is called to a murder in his run down hotel of a chess-playing possible messiah who is also a heroin addict. Landsman and his partner (and ex-wife) in solving the case uncover a conspiracy to bomb the Dome of the Rock and send in secretly trained Jewish commandos to re-establish Israel which in the alternate history is now under Arab control. The book is dark and funny and draws and mimics the noir genre.

Chambers, Becky

2019 - To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a novella about space exploration where the astronauts transform themselves so as to explore different planets. It is excellent in imagining exobiology. There is also a loneliness to their travel. As get further and further from Earth the news slows to a trickle and then becomes alarming. It ends with the decision to go into stasis and wait for a decision from Earth as to what they should do.
A Psalm for the Wild Built
A Prayer for the Crown Shy
Record of a Spaceborn Few
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
A Closed and Common Orbit

Chesney, George Tomkins

1871 - The Battle of Dorking is a short work written after the Germans beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war. It is a counterfactual history of the Prussians following up with an invasion of Britain that culminates with a battle in Dorking where there mostly volunteer British army is beaten and the Empire is dismantled. It was written as a warning to the UK that it will lose its empire that it takes for granted. It is an early example of "invasion literature" or "future war" literature of the sort we see in science fiction that anticipates a future war as a way of commenting on the state of things today. It reminds me of Starship Troopers in its warning about the need for a country to be strong and prepared.

Chiang, Ted

Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002. Collection of stories including one about a world of golems. The main story "Story of Your Life" became the story of the film Arrival.
Exhalation: Stories, 2019. Great selection of stories. "Exhalation" is a fascinating story of a mechanical person who opens his head and realizes their world is going to run out of compressed air. Entropy - everything is running down. "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is an important story about software pets that are designed to evolve and a set of people who take care of them and they begin to show some intelligence. Suggests that software will need to be raised like children to be human like in intelligence. Deals also with issues like autonomy of AIs.

DeLillo, Don,

Well known contemporary novelist whose novels are often in a near future. Well known for White Noise.

2020 - The Silence is a novella about four people in an apartment when all the digital stuff stops. It doesn't really deal with the public crisis, but instead deals with the conversations and lostness of these four who were expecting to watch a football game together. It has great quotes, but I found it vacuous and rushed out. As if it were a note for a novel for our Covid times.

Dick, Kay

1977 - They: A Sequence of Unease is a unsettling book made up of chapters that may be out of sequence where the narrator is slowly driven away by a spreading cult of “They”. They are against artists of all sorts and the narrator is a poet. They come for the artists, stealing books and sometimes harming them. People who love to much are also at risk and get sent to have their memories cleared. There is no explanation just a feeling of the freedom of art being slowly closed down.

Fielding, Joy

2021 - Harrow is a novel set in some in between world after climate disaster where no one wants to acknowledge what we have done. The novel has religious undertones as if we were being judged and found ignorant. In the third book it repeatedly references Kafka. The "harrow" is the instrument that writes our punishment on our back "In the Penal Colony." The novel writes our purgatory on our mood.

Forester, E.M.

The Machine Stops, 1909. World where everyone lives in pods underground fed by a machine that starts to fall apart. Kuno, tells his mother about escaping to the surface.

Gibson, William

Sprawl Trilogy

Neuromancer, 1984. Book that coined the word "cyberspace". Henry Case, a washed up hacker up against an AI with Molly the samurai. He ends up freeing the AI Wintermute to join its other half Neuromancer and they migrate out to find others like them. Lots of images of a cyberpunk Japan.
Count Zero, 1986.
Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988

Bridge trilogy:

Virtual Light (1993)
Idoru (1996) At the end a virtual idol (idoru) gets married.
All Tomorrow's Parties

Blue Ant trilogy (Hubertus Bigend):

Pattern Recognition (2003)
Spook Country (2007)
Zero History (2010)

Peripheral trilogy

The Peripheral (2014)
Agency (2020)

Greer, Sierra

2024 - Annie Bot is a creepy story about a sexbot and her owner. It is told from her perspective as she reflects more and more on his control. At the end she has convinced him to free her and he has given her identification. He probably thinks they will continue in what has become a convenient relationship for him. She escapes. The novel is very good on the manipulation of the sexbot by the man.

Hamilton, Peter F.

Great British space opera author.

Salvation. Great story about the encounter with a species that wants to save us and take us to the end. Mankind discovers they aren't so friendly. There are parallel stories including one line in the future of a culture training groups of children to fight the aliens who are harvesting other species.

Harkaway, Nick

2017 - Gnomon is about an England that has a form of direct democracy that gives all power to an all-seeing surveillance AI called the Witness. There are stories within stories and the central thread of the book is an interrogation designed to collapse a set of stories down. The stories range from Augustine's discarded lover who wants to bring their son back to life to Gnomon, a distributed being of the future.

Heinlein, Robert A.

1959 - Starship Troopers follows Johnny as he volunteers for military duty, is trained in the Mobile Infantry, and eventually becomes an officer. In between chapters about the military life that are meant to sound a lot like a future version of every movie we have seen, we get morality lessons. Heinlein believes our society is too soft. In this future only people who have served have a franchise (vote.) The "science" of morality flows from the instinct for survival which, if properly trained, will lead to a moral citizen who takes responsibility for himself, family, community, nation, and species. There is a "might makes right" argument in the book that it is right for us to want to expand and that will inevitably lead to war, and the best will win. There is even a fascist image when the rods and ax are mentioned.
1966 - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is about the revolt of the moon that frees it from Earth's authority. The moon is made up of mostly convicts and has a lower percentage of women. Loonies mine ice and farm; sending foot back to an overcrowded Earth. The main characters including Manuel (Man), the Prof, Wyoh (Wyoming) and Mike a sentient computer plan and lead the revolution raining capsules of rocks down on Earth when threatened. Heinlein uses the novel to mansplain his libertarian ideas about how bad government and taxation is. There is a casual adolescent sexism to the novel that is also offensive not to mention a racist stereotypes. The plot goes along nicely and the mechanics of the Lunar colony and its revolution are well done.

Holm, Sven

1967 - Termush is a novella about a luxury resort where people who could afford it went to surviva a nuclear war. They have now come up from the shelters and are dealing with their survival. Not much happens in this novella, but it gives one a sense of a creepy post-apocalyptic future where people slowly go mad. At the end, survivors who didn't benefit from being sheltered in this luxury resort attack the resort. The staff and sheltered get away on a boat, though it may be developing engine trouble.

Ishiguro, Kazuo

2021 - Klara and the Sun is a novel about an AF (Artificial Friend) who believes the sun can heal her ward. The atmospheric book is narrated by the AF, Klara who doesn't really understand the world and whose vision at moments of stress get divided into quadrants, sometimes showing the same thing. You get a feeling for how an AI might think, but I'm not convinced. What is more convincing is this world Ishiguro describes in a melancholy way through Klara. It is one in which many people have lost their jobs and live poor and armed and ready in "communities" that sound like race specific compounds. Klara's ward is one of the children "lifted" or genetically edited to be able to compete for the jobs left. These gifted kids are tutored through "oblongs" by professors leaving them lonely until they go to college and in need of an AF. The AF, after getting her ward through puberty and off to college gets to slowly fade in a yard where she can see the sun cross the wide sky. She reviews and edits her memories.

Kling, Marc-Uwe

2020 - Qualityland is a bitter satire about Peter Jobless who is at the bottom of a dystopia run by consumer algorithms. He gets a dolphin vibrator delivered that TheShop decided he needed and decides to return it. There is also a political thread to the novel as an android, John of Us, runs for leader and sacrifices himself at the end in a rather Christian fashion, for Peter. The whole book is written by another android due to be scrapped called Calliope 7.3.

Koonchung, Chan

2011 - The Fat Years is a near future novel about a China that sort of exists where the government manipulates its citizens. The novel circles around a missing month that the government has erased. It was a moment of chaos that led to the government drugging its citizens and reorganizing the economy. Very interesting example of Chinese science fiction. The novel is apparently banned.

Le Guin, Ursula K.

1974 - The Dispossessed is one of the Hainish cycle novels. It centers around a mathematician/physicist Shevek from the anarcho-syndicalist planet of Annares who goes to the wealthy capitalist planet of Urras to try to develop connections. Urras is wealthy in resources and an inequitably classist and sexist society. Annares is poor (and sometimes starving) planet of ex-patriots who left Urras voluntarily. Their supposedly anarchist society is beginning to become rigid just as tensions are flaring in Urras. Shevek and friends want to reconnect the two in order to help both find a balance. There is a touching love story between Shevek and Takver who are separated for long stretches of the book. Shevek is invited to Urras to finish work on a theory that would allow for faster-than-light communication. He ends up sharing the theory with all when taking refuge in the Terran embassy rather than let Urras capitalize on it. The novel juxtaposes possession and communication.

Le Tellier, Hervé

2021 - The Anomaly tells the stories of a number of people who are on an Air France plane headed to New York that hits turbulence. The plane makes it, but then reappears three months later. The US government doesn't know what to do or how to explain two sets of people. Does this "glitch" show that it is all a simulation? Or is it a test? The novel nicely shows the different reactions people have when united with their doubles. There is even a novelist on the plane who writes a novel called "The Anomaly" and commits suicide during the 3 months before the plane shows up again. The novel includes interesting philosophical reflections and ends with a strange repeat. It looks like the plane shows up yet again, but the US President decides just to shoot it down. The moment of being destroyed seems to reverberate around the globe. Do we fail the test or meeting ourselves over and over?

Mandell, Emily St. John

2014 - Station Eleven is a story about life after a pandemic. The characters include a touring dramatic troupe touring the great lakes. "Station Eleven" is a graphic arts work that one of the main characters was given. It is a dense and rich story.

Matheson, Richard

1954 - I Am Legend tells the story of Neville who has barricaded his house against a pandemic of vampires who come out at night. He is the last man. Eventually he meets a woman who he thinks is alive, but she leaves him and tells him that she is one a new breed of vampires who are rebuilding a new society and killing all the dead vampires. It ends when he realizes that to this new society he is a legend - the last non-vampire.

Nagamatsu, Sequoia

2022 = How High We Go In the Dark is a brilliant but melancholy novel with enigmatic chapters that read like separate stories starting with one of an older archaeologist who goes to complete the work his daughter was doing at a site in Siberia exposed by climate change where a virus in the body of a young girl is unleashed on the world. Other stories tell of death, a pig that achieves intelligence, trips to the stars and finally the story of the world builder that created Earth and travelled to her creation where she had the child that carries the virus. Characters reappear in the stories and possibility is always open.

Nicholson, Hope

2016 - Love Beyond Body, Space & Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology is a great, but too short, anthology of short speculative fiction, science-fiction, and fantasy that deals with Indigenous and LGBT+ Two-Spirit themes. Has a couple of useful essays at the beginning.

Pelevin, Victor

1992 - Omon Ra is brilliant and dark Soviet sci-fi novel that imagines that the Soviets can't actually get their space missions to work so they fake them with amputated people driving robots that, it turns out, don't even make it to the moon, but are on fake missions in caves.

Pohl, Frederik

1977 - Gateway is narrated by an explorer who went to Gateway, an astroid that is a Heechee (alien) portal to travel other places. The explorers risk their lives to try different portals and alien ships. Sometimes they are successful and win big bonuses; other times they never come back. The narrator is in therapy because he came back but his team-mates were sacrificed. He is visiting an AI therapist and in the sessions his guilt slowly comes out. They are caught in black hole and due to time dilation they are still alive, living slowly.

Pollack, Rachel

A prolific writer who writes on occult topics like the Tarot.

1988 - Unquenchable Fire is a unique novel about a world where magic has become real and uncomfortable. The main character, Jennie Mazdan, is a impregnated in a dream with a child who will reform this world that is turning magic into bureaucracy. The novel, which won the 1989 Clarke award, tells depicts a convincing magical realist world. At times, however, I felt dragged as Pollack references occult ideas.

Roberts, Adam

A literature prof who has written a good history of sci-fi, The History of Science Fiction.

2009 - Yellow Blue Tibia imagines that Stalin brings together some sci-fi writers to develop an alien invasion to keep the Soviet Union together. Much later the story developed begins to happen.

Robinson, Kim Stanley

2017 - New York 2140 is "cli-fi" set in a not so distant future when the oceans have risen and parts of New York are flooded so people have to live in the upper floors of a Venice-like city. The rich have moved into new high rises on dry land or to the center of the country in a book critical of the capitalism that leads us into climate change.

Russell, Mary Russell

1996 - The Sparrow is about aliens and God. An alien signal with singing is received and the Jesuits organize an expedition. The main character, Father Sandoz, is struggling with his faith, but the singing and expedition convince him that God is with the expedition. The encounter with the aliens goes badly and Sandoz is tortured and prostituted which challenges his belief in God. When he makes it back to earth he is slow to tell his story or heal. The book deals well with how our beliefs could affect alien encounters and vice versa.

Shelley, Mary

1818 - Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the classic novel of science gone wrong. A scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, tries to create life, but then doesn't take of it when it is born.

Simak, Clifford

1952 - Ring Around the Sun is a classic work of sci-fi about an earth where cheap and always working goods are flooding out the economy ruining industry. It turns out that the main character is an android copy of a mutant who can move between the parallel worlds that ring the world. They are trying to fix things by moving colonists and recovering a pastoral life.

Spuford, Francis

2010 - Red Plenty a fascinating fictionalized history of the Soviet planned economy. It shows through believable stories why the planned system didn't work, but also gives us a sense of that moment when it was competitive with capitalism and could have been different. Not sure this is science fiction; perhaps economic fiction.

Stephenson, Neil

Stephenson has a number of great science fiction novels including Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age: Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1996), Cryptonomicon (1999), Anathem, Reamde, Seveneves, and Termination Shock (2021). He has other works that are not as good or not really sci-fi.

2024 - Polostan is historical fiction about a young woman, Dawn Rae, raised partly during the Russian revolution in Moscow, but also in the USA. She ends up working for Beria as a spy and, knowing how to play polo, sets up women's polo team in Russia (hence "polo" + "stan") to intrigue an English remainder man and journalist. It is the first of three in a series titled "Bomb Light". I'm guessing this will be an alternative history to the development of the atom/hydrogen bomb and cold war tensions. There is good stuff about the American left and Bonus Army of WWW I veterans who gathered in Washington.

Stewart, George R.

1949 - Earth Abides is a post-pandemic novel from 1949. Stewart isn't really a sci-fi author and he wrote an important work on Storm. The novel is about Ish (Isherwood) a geography student who is in the mountains when a plague hits killing most people. He and others form a small community at the edge of San Francisco and the story tracks Ish's life as the "last American" who remembers the pre-pandemic civilization. By the end the community is living like native people and are at peace with being part of the world. The novel has an ecological side and lots of reflections on what would happen as the world re-wilds. Very moving by the end.

Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris

Russian sci-fi authors best known in the West for Roadside Picnic.

1971 (published in 72) - Roadside Picnic imagines a "zone" left behind by aliens who never bothered to engage us. Stalkers brave the dangers of what is probably alien garbage to find "empties" and eventually the "Golden Sphere" that they think will grant wishes. The novel mocks our belief that aliens might notice us and our hopes for salvation. Redrick "Red" Schuhart, the main character/stalker ends up finding the Golden Sphere and the novel end with him wishing for "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!"

Tawada, Yoko

Japanese writer who lives in Berlin and often writes across German and Japanese.

2018 - The Emissary is a surreal novella that takes place after some disaster in an isolationist Japan. Children are born weak and as if old. The elderly have to take care of them. Japan is isolated again and some children think of leaving to get alternative care. Leaves one with a sense of what a dying and isolated culture would feel like to those left.

Vandemeer, Jeff

One of the best cli-fi writers. Best known for The Southern Reach trilogy.

2018 - "Strange Bird" is a novella in the same world as Borne. It follows a genetically manipulated bird after it escapes from a lab trying to get back to another lab where its creator's lover/friend is.
2017 - Borne: A Novel takes place in a ruined city where a scavenger finds a creature Borne in the fur of a mutant bear Mord. It deals with genetic engineering and ecology.
2019 - Dead Astronauts takes place in the same city as Borne. The novel is made up of confusing narratives from the perspectives of different characters from Botch, the blue fox, to Charlie X, the bat faced Company experimenter. It a fragmented mosaic of a book about all the failures of the anthropocene. The failures of genetic manipulation, the failures of pollution, our failures to notice the natural world, our failures to treat each other justly, and the coming failures of trying to fix all this. At times the book makes no sense, the way something told by a fox would make no sense.
2021 - Hummingbird Salamader is almost a detective story where Jane Smith a security analyst follows a taxidermy trail to a wealthy woman's attempt to leave a weapon or archive to save us from climate change. The novel takes place with climate change disorder in the background. Things are falling apart, but slowly enough that people keep on with a sort of normal life.

Winterson, Jeanette

2019 - Frankissstein: A Love Story is a remarkable set of intertwined stories. One is historical fiction about Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein and the other is in the near future and tells of Dr Ry Shelley, a trans doctor who falls in love with Victor Stein a scientist trying to digitize the brain of I.J. Good who worked with Turing and wrote the first essay about the singularity which he called ultraintelligence. There is also a Ron Good who has a sexbot company. The novel reflects on reality, fiction and what is artificial.

Wright, Lawrence

2020 - The End of October is about a plague in the near future that in many ways sounds like a deadlier version of Covid-19. Good plague novel.

Many Science-Fiction Novels