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Sci-Fi for people who think they don't like Sci-Fi 🚀

15 items

Nikolay Kolev

I've always been the guy who said 'I don't really read sci-fi.' Then I read The Martian in one sitting. This list is for everyone who thinks the genre isn't for them. These books read like thrillers, feel like real life, and just happen to involve sp...

Sections

Start Here - Gateway Books

Quieter & More Literary

Mind-Bending Concepts

Start Here - Gateway Books

Start Here — Gateway Books

The book that turned me into a sci-fi reader. An astronaut gets stranded alone on Mars and has to science his way to survival using nothing but math, potatoes, and an insane amount of dark humor. It reads like a thriller, not a sci-fi novel - you for...

The Martian by Andy Weir

You've probably already seen this on my other list and yes, it's here again because it belongs on every list I ever make. A physicist wakes up in a life that isn't his, and the explanation for why is genuinely mind-bending. The science is real enough...

Dark Matter: A Novel: Crouch, Blake - Books

The same guy who wrote The Martian somehow topped himself. A lone astronaut wakes up with no memory in deep space and has to figure out who he is and why he's there - while also trying to save humanity. I don't want to spoil anything but there's a fr...

Project Hail Mary- Andy Weir

Crouch again because the man clearly has a deal with the universe. A neuroscientist builds a machine that lets people relive their memories - and accidentally breaks time itself. The concept sounds complicated but the execution is razor sharp. Every ...

Recursion by Blake Crouch

A socially anxious robot who calls itself Murderbot and just wants to watch TV shows - that's the premise and it's completely wonderful. The first Murderbot Diaries book is short enough to read in an afternoon and funny enough that you'll immediately...

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1) by Martha Wells

Quieter & More Literary

Sci-fi disguised as literature. No spaceships, no laser guns - just quietly devastating stories about what it means to be human, set slightly outside our world. These will wreck you in the best way.

Technically apocalyptic literary fiction, technically sci-fi, technically a masterpiece. A flu pandemic wipes out most of civilization and the story jumps between before, during, and twenty years after. It's quiet and beautiful and devastating and so...

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Written by a Nobel Prize winner, told from the perspective of an artificial friend - a solar-powered robot companion for a sick teenage girl. It's quiet and strange and deeply moving. Ishiguro never explains the world, he just lets you piece it toget...

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

A man with an intellectual disability undergoes an experimental procedure that makes him a genius - told through his own journal entries as his intelligence grows and then begins to fade. One of the most emotionally devastating books I've ever read. ...

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Technically post-apocalyptic, technically one of the most brutal and beautiful books ever written. A father and his young son walk south through a burned-out America after an unspecified catastrophe. No sci-fi jargon, no explanation, just survival an...

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Second Ishiguro on this list because he belongs here twice. Students at an elite English boarding school slowly realize their entire existence has been planned for them by society - and the way they respond to this discovery is heartbreaking in its q...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Mind-Bending Concepts

For when you're ready to go deeper. These books take a big idea - spiders that evolve intelligence, robots that watch TV, the heat death of the universe - and build an entire world around it.

If you want sci-fi that feels like a warm blanket rather than a puzzle to solve, this is your book. A crew of misfits travel across the galaxy in a tunneling ship and most of the novel is just... them living together, cooking food, having feelings, f...

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Already on my other list because I can't stop recommending it. The Earth gets demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. One very confused Englishman survives and goes on to have the most absurd adventure in the universe. The answer to life, the...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This one is slightly more ambitious than the others on this list but I had to include it. Humanity is dying and a generation ship is searching for a new planet - only to find one already inhabited by a civilization of hyper-intelligent spiders. The s...

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A Victorian scientist builds a time machine and travels to the year 802,701 to find humanity has evolved into two separate species. It's only 100 pages, it invented the time travel genre, and it still hits hard as a piece of social commentary about c...

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Short stories, but each one is a fully formed philosophical universe. Ted Chiang writes about free will, memory, language, and consciousness in ways that stay with you for weeks. His story "Story of Your Life" became the film Arrival. If you've seen ...

Exhalation by Ted Chiang