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Top 100 Most Popular Science Fiction Books

This is a list of the most popular sci-fi books of 2018 and 2019 according to readers.

The list was created by parsing comments on the r/books subreddit, and takes into account both number of mentions and the comment scores.

Some of the best science fiction books written are on this list. Hopefully it can help you find your next read.

    1. Dune
    Frank Herbert
    Set in the far future amidst a sprawling feudal interstellar empire where planetary dynasties are controlled by noble houses that owe an allegiance to the imperial House Corrino, Dune tells the story

    2. The Handmaid's Tale
    Margaret Atwood, Valerie Martin
    Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are

    3. Fahrenheit 451
    Ray Bradbury
    Sixty years after its publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown m

    4. 1984
    George Orwell
    In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory st

    5. Brave New World
    Aldous Huxley
    Brave New World is a dystopian novel written in 1931 by English author Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State of genetically modified citizens and an intelligenc

    6. Armada
    Ernest Cline
    Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming

    7. Slaughterhouse-Five
    Kurt Vonnegut
    Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-sc

    8. The Stand
    Stephen King
    Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.

    9. The Three-Body Problem
    Cixin Liu
    1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. <br

    10. The Fifth Season
    N. K. Jemisin
    Original cover edition here THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. AGAIN.Three te

    11. Annihilation
    Jeff VanderMeer
    Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.The first expedition returned with reports of a pris

    12. Artemis
    Andy Weir
    The bestselling author of The Martian returns with an irresistible new near-future thriller—a heist story set on the moon.Jazz Bashara is a criminal.Well, sort of

    13. Leviathan Wakes
    James S. A. Corey
    The first novel in James S. A. Corey's SF New York Times bestselling Expanse series. Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars

    14. Dark Matter
    Blake Crouch
    From the author of the bestselling WAYWARD PINES trilogy, a brilliantly mind-bending science-fiction thriller in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious—and awakens in a world inexp

    15. Authority
    Jeff VanderMeer
    The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach TrilogyAfter thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X--a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounde

    16. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
    Becky Chambers
    Follow a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe—in this light-hearted debut space op

    17. Never Let Me Go
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by K

    18. Red Rising
    Pierce Brown
    Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable

    19. Station Eleven
    Emily St John Mandel
    An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group

    20. The Obelisk Gate
    N. K. Jemisin
    THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS... FOR THE LAST TIME.The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, sav

    21. A Clockwork Orange
    Anthony Burgess
    A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the cent

    22. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
    Philip K. Dick
    It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment--find them and then..."retire" the

    23. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Douglas Adams
    Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Gu

    24. Hyperion
    Dan Simmons
    On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who ha

    25. The Stone Sky
    N. K. Jemisin
    THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS... FOR THE LAST TIME.The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.Ess

    26. The Man in the High Castle
    Philip K. Dick
    In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick's alternate history classic, the United States lost World War II and was subsequently divided between the Germans in the east and the Japanese in t

    27. Borne
    Jeff VanderMeer
    In a ruined, nameless city of the future, a woman named Rachel, who makes her living as a scavenger, finds a creature she names “Borne” entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic, despotic bear. Mord on

    28. The Dark Forest
    Cixin Liu
    This is the second novel in the "Remembrance of Earth’s Past" near-future trilogy. Written by the China's multiple-award-winning science fiction author, Cixin Liu. In Dark Forest, E

    29. 11/22/63
    Stephen King
    On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King's heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man

    30. Foundation
    Isaac Asimov
    For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age

    31. The Martian
    Andy Weir
    Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him an

    32. Children of Time
    Adrian Tchaikovsky
    A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?WHO WILL INHERI

    33. 1Q84
    Haruki Murakami
    “Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream

    34. Jurassic Park
    Michael Crichton
    From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm.An astonishing technique for recovering a

    35. The Library at Mount Char
    Scott Hawkins
    A missing God.A library with the secrets to the universe. A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away.  Carolyn's not so different from the o

    36. Neuromancer
    William Gibson
    The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the bu

    37. Oryx and Crake
    Margaret Atwood
    Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a wo

    38. Frankenstein
    Mary Shelley
    Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein</

    39. The Sirens of Titan
    Kurt Vonnegut
    The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant wo

    40. The Power
    Naomi Alderman
    In The Power the world is a recognisable place: there's a rich Nigerian kid who lounges around the family pool; a foster girl whose religious parents hide their true nature; a local American po

    41. Cat's Cradle
    Kurt Vonnegut
    Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...Dr F

    42. Old Man's War
    John Scalzi
    With his wife dead and buried, and life nearly over at 75, John Perry takes the only logical course of action left: he joins the army. Now better known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF), Perry's ser

    43. Metro 2034
    Dmitry Glukhovsky
    The basis of two bestselling computer games Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the Metro books have put Dmitry Glukhovsky in the vanguard of Russian speculative fiction alongside the creator of Night Wa

    44. Iron Gold
    Pierce Brown
    They call him father, liberator, warlord, Reaper. But he feels a boy as he falls toward the pale blue planet, his armor red, his army vast, his heart heavy. It is the tenth year of war and the thir

    45. All Systems Red
    Martha Wells
    In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own saf

    46. The War of the Worlds
    H. G. Wells
    With H.G. Wells’ other novels, The War of the Worlds was one of the first and greatest works of science fiction ever to be written. Even long before man had learned to fly, H.G. Wells wrote thi

    47. Something Wicked This Way Comes
    Ray Bradbury
    One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.<b

    48. Morning Star
    Pierce Brown
    #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Red Rising thrilled readers and announced the presence of a talented new author. Golden Son changed the game and took the story of Darrow to the next level. Now comes th

    49. I Am Legend
    Richard Matheson
    THE LAST MAN ON EARTH IS NOT ALONERobert Neville may well be the only survivor of an incurable plague that has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal

    50. Kindred
    Octavia Butler
    Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the

    51. The Gunslinger
    Stephen King
    In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbindi

    52. The Traitor Baru Cormorant
    Seth Dickinson
    The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms meets Guns, Germs, and Steel in Seth Dickinson's highly anticipated debut novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant.Baru Cormorant believes any pr

    53. A Closed and Common Orbit
    Becky Chambers
    Lovelace was once merely a ship's artificial intelligence. When she wakes up in an new body, following a total system shut-down and reboot, she has no memory of what came before. As Lovelace learns to

    54. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    Arthur C. Clarke
    The year is 2001, and cosmonauts uncover a mysterious monolith that has been buried on the Moon for at least three million years. To their astonishment, the monolith releases an equally mysterious pul

    55. Skyward
    Brandon Sanderson
    Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living a

    56. Gravity's Rainbow
    Thomas Pynchon
    Winner of the 1974 National Book Award “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discove

    57. Snow Crash
    Neal Stephenson
    In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's strikin

    58. American War
    Omar El Akkad
    -An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle--a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its mos

    59. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
    Claire North
    Harry August is on his deathbed. Again.No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life

    60. Cloud Atlas
    David Mitchell
    Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer A postmodern visionary who

    61. Stories of Your Life and Others
    Ted Chiang
    Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore

    62. Sleeping Giants
    Sylvain Neuvel
    A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate car

    63. The Left Hand of Darkness
    Ursula K. Le Guin
    A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose -and change - their gender. H

    64. Golden Son
    Pierce Brown
    As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants. But the Society he fai

    65. Vicious
    V. E. Schwab
    Victor and Eli started out as college roommates?brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adren

    66. Ancillary Justice
    Ann Leckie
    On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking th

    67. Acceptance
    Jeff VanderMeer
    It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tas

    68. Altered Carbon
    Richard K. Morgan
    In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have

    69. The Martian Chronicles
    Ray Bradbury
    In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America's preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor; of crystal pillars and fossil seas, where a fine dust settles on the great em

    70. Cryptonomicon
    Neal Stephenson
    With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with d

    71. Recursion
    Blake Crouch
    Memory makes reality. That’s what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction

    72. Breakfast of Champions
    Kurt Vonnegut
    Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controver

    73. Senlin Ascends
    Josiah Bancroft
    The first book in the word-of-mouth phenomenon debut fantasy series about one man's dangerous journey through a labyrinthine world. "One of my favorite books of all time" - M

    74. The Dark Tower III
    Stephen King
    Soon to be a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris ElbaThe third volume in the #1 nationally bestselling Dark Tower Series, involving the enigmatic Roland (the

    75. Redshirts
    John Scalzi
    Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all

    76. The Giver
    Lois Lowry
    Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a seemingly ideal world. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind this fragile community.

    77. Trail of Lightning
    Rebecca Roanhorse
    “Someone please cancel Supernatural already and give us at least five seasons of this badass indigenous monster-hunter and her silver-tongued sidekick.” —The New York Times“A

    78. The Long Walk
    Stephen King
    In this #1 national bestseller, “master storyteller” (Houston Chronicle) Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, tells the tale of the contestants of a grueling walking competition where ther

    79. Seveneves
    Neal Stephenson
    What would happen if the world were ending?A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to

    80. Consider Phlebas
    Iain M. Banks
    The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought

    81. Nemesis Games
    James S. A. Corey
    The fifth novel in James S.A. Corey's "New York Times" bestselling Expanse series.Now a Syfy Original series, coming December 2015!A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush

    82. I, Robot
    Isaac Asimov
    The three laws of Robotics:1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm2) A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except

    83. The Deep
    Nick Cutter
    From the acclaimed author of The Troop—a book that is “utterly terrifying” (Clive Barker). “Fans of unflinching bleakness and all-out horror will love this novel….Each new shock is freshly dist

    84. The Fall of Hyperion
    Dan Simmons
    In the stunning continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, Simmons returns us to a far future resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tomb

    85. The Andromeda Strain
    Michael Crichton
    The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncon

    86. The Illustrated Man
    Ray Bradbury
    The Illustrated Man, a seminal work in Ray Bradbury’s career, whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time’s passage, is available from Simon &amp; Schuster for the firs

    87. Perdido Street Station
    China Miéville
    British author China Miéville's highly praised first novel, King Rat, was a lively debut and one of the most adv

    88. The Doomsday Book
    Connie Willis
    For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of 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

    89. A Canticle For Leibowitz
    Walter M. Miller Jr
    Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle fo

    90. A Wrinkle in Time
    Madeleine L'Engle
    It was a dark and stormy night.Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a

    91. World War Z
    Max Brooks
    “The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie WarThe Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand exp

    92. The Year of the Flood
    Margaret Atwood
    Set in the visionary future of Atwood’s acclaimed Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is at once a moving tale of lasting friendship and a landmark work of speculative fiction. In this

    93. The Time Machine
    H.G. Wells
    The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701: th

    94. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    Douglas Adams
    Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a craving for tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as the

    95. Ender's Game
    Orson Scott Card
    Andrew "Ender" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military geniu

    96. A Fire Upon the Deep
    Vernor Vinge
    Alternate Cover Edition can be found here. A Fire upon the Deep is the big, bre

    97. Space Opera
    Catherynne M. Valente
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Eurovision in an over-the-top science fiction spectacle from bestselling author Catherynne Valente has galaxies competing for glory in a universe-wide

    98. Rendezvous With Rama
    Arthur C. Clarke
    Rama is a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly, racing through space, Rama is a technological marvel, a mysterious and de

    99. Cibola Burn
    James S. A. Corey
    The fourth novel in James S.A. Corey’s New York Times bestselling Expanse seriesThe gates have opened the way to thousands of habitable planets, and the land rush has begun. Settler

    100. The Hunger Games: Special Edition
    Suzanne Collins
    In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line