Reading lists · August 9, 2026

The Best Science Fiction Books to Read in 2026

From accessible entry points to hard SF, the best science fiction books to read in 2026 — including where to start if you have never read the genre.

Start here if you have never read SF

• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir. Funny, warm, and the best first SF novel in years.
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet — Becky Chambers. Low stakes, high feeling.
• Klara and the Sun — Ishiguro. Literary, gentle, quietly gutting.
• Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John Mandel. Time travel without the homework.

If you want scale

• Dune — still the mountain.
• The Expanse (Leviathan Wakes) — nine books, consistently excellent.
• Children of Time — Tchaikovsky. Spiders. Trust the premise.
• Hyperion — Canterbury Tales in space, and it works.

If you want to be unsettled

• Annihilation — VanderMeer. The definition of weird.
• Blindsight — Peter Watts. Hard SF that argues consciousness is a mistake.
• Roadside Picnic — the Strugatskys. Bleak and brilliant.
• The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu. Enormous ideas, cool prose.

Newer and much recommended

• The Will of the Many — technically fantasy, adopted by SF readers wholesale.
• Some Desperate Glory — Emily Tesh. Sharp and angry.
• Translation State — Ann Leckie.

A note on difficulty

SF asks you to hold unfamiliar terms until they resolve, which is why people bounce off it. Reading in longer sessions rather than ten minutes at a time makes a disproportionate difference — the genre rewards momentum more than most.

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