Themes
Books About Science
The human side of discovery — scientists, breakthroughs and their consequences.
20 books · ranked
-
1
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
-
2
Cosmos
A poetic tour of the universe and our place in it; science writing with a sense of wonder.
-
3
Persepolis
A girl grows up during and after the Iranian revolution; a witty, moving graphic memoir.
-
4
Exhalation
Beautifully reasoned science-fiction stories about time, free will and meaning; cerebral and humane.
-
5
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai, an envoy from a galactic confederation, is sent to the planet Gethen — where all humans are ambisexual, able to be either male or female — to persuade the planet to join the confederation. Le Guin's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel is a sustained thought experiment about gender, society and what we assume to be natural that remains one of the most important works in speculative fiction.
-
6
Braiding Sweetgrass
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves together Indigenous plant knowledge, scientific botany and memoir to argue that plants are not passive objects but beings with gifts to offer, and that reciprocity — not extraction — is the proper relationship between humans and the living world. One of the most-read works of nature writing in recent years.
-
7
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
-
8
On the Origin of Species
Darwin presents his evidence for natural selection — the mechanism by which species evolve through variation and survival of the fittest — drawn from his voyage on the Beagle and years of observation. The most consequential scientific book of the 19th century, it permanently changed how humans understand their place in nature.
-
9
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Earth is demolished for a bypass and an ordinary man hitchhikes the cosmos; the funniest book in science fiction.
-
10
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
-
11
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student talks himself into murder, then has to live inside his own conscience — the original psychological thriller.
-
12
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
-
13
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
-
14
Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and abandons it, with consequences for both — the founding myth of science fiction, written when the author was barely twenty.
-
15
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
-
16
To Kill a Mockingbird
A child's-eye view of race, courage and conscience in the American South, anchored by one of fiction's great fathers.
-
17
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.
-
18
The Last Cuentista
Petra Peña, one of the children chosen to journey to a new world after Earth's destruction, wakes from cryosleep to find her memories have been erased by the ship's new ruling order — except for the stories her grandmother told her, which become the only thing she has left of where she came from. Higuera's Newbery Medal-winning novel uses science fiction to explore cultural erasure, memory and the power of storytelling to preserve identity.
-
19
Tenth of December
Ten stories in Saunders's distinctive voice — comic, tender, formally inventive, morally serious — about ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations: a man contemplating suicide, a test subject for experimental mood drugs, a child imagining a rescue fantasy. One of the most celebrated short story collections of recent decades.
-
20
The Kaiju Preservation Society
Jamie Gray, laid off at the start of the pandemic, takes an unusual job that turns out to involve travelling to an alternate dimension where enormous kaiju — Godzilla-scale creatures — live in a vast wilderness that needs protecting from both the kaiju and the humans who'd exploit them. Scalzi's Locus Award-winning novel is fast, funny science fiction adventure, written partly as what he's called 'a pop song' after a difficult creative period.