Best Sci Fi Books 2025: The Novels That Turned Help Into Horror

A chip, a contagion, and a sky that has been mined

June's science fiction arrived with an unusual amount of engineering in it. The monthly round-up in New Scientist led with a neural chip that switches off the need for sleep, then a virus rewritten to make its hosts kinder, then a future Australia where the koalas are gone and a mining accident on the Moon has knocked the Earth's rhythms out of true. Nobody in these books is menaced by an alien. They're menaced by a solution.

Four of the five picks are by women, which is worth mentioning only because the received story about science fiction is still that it belongs to men with engineering degrees and a grudge against the present.

Two of the books run on the same engine. Something is introduced to make life easier, and the ease turns out to be the trap. Elliott's chip was going to give people back a third of their lives. Carver's virus was going to give them back their better natures. Both end up taking everything.

Science fiction has never been much good at predicting the future. It is very good at describing the present in clothing the present can bear to look at, and this year's clothing is technical, well-funded, and already strapped to your wrist.

The chip that ended sleep

Laura Elliott's Awakened is a debut, published in June by Angry Robot, and it arrives with the assurance of a fourth book. The narration is a diary kept inside the Tower of London by Dr Thea Chares, one of the scientists who built the implant that broke the world, and the Tower is doing what towers do in British fiction: holding a small, guilty group of people while the country outside becomes something else.

The chip was designed to cut the hours a body needs to sleep. It also lifted metabolism and made its wearers stronger, more productive workers, which is how it got into so many heads in the first place. Users were advised to power it down for a few hours a week. Those who didn't became the Sleepless: fast, feral, no longer quite people. The scientists who made the thing are now hunting a cure from behind the battlements, which is where the two strangers come in. One of them appears to be Sleepless, and is unnervingly in possession of himself.

What gives the horror a floor is the ground under it. Thea's mother had post-viral fatigue, and the novel is soaked in the particular misery of an illness that doctors decline to believe. The British Fantasy Society's review called it, plainly, a book about people with ME and long Covid and the effort of being taken seriously. The Guardian heard Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper in it.

Readers divide on the execution. Several found the middle slower than the premise deserved, and the ending has defenders and exasperated alike. What holds is the inversion: a novel about people who cannot sleep turns out to be about people whose exhaustion nobody would credit.

Kindness, weaponised

Will Carver's Kill Them with Kindness (Orenda, June) starts from a plague and a press office. A virus has already killed half the population of China and is heading for Britain. The government's answer is a "Dignity Pill" — one last night with the people you love, then sleep, then nothing — because the alternative is worse and the polling says so.

Dr Haruto Ikeda, a Japanese virologist working in Wuxi, has a different idea. He can mutate the virus so that instead of attacking the lungs it works on the brain and raises the host's capacity for compassion. Rather than killing people, it makes them nice. SciFi Now's reviewer found the first half hard going precisely because it hews so close to 2020 that the dread has nowhere to land.

Then the book changes gear into open science fiction, and the twist that comes with it reframes everything before it. The virus is not Carver's target. His target is the machinery that would rather govern frightened people than reasonable ones, and the prime minister he builds to make the point is a caricature drawn with a very thick pen.

The joke lands on anyone who assumed kindness was the safe option.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

An eclipse, and a country running out

Inga Simpson's The Thinning appeared in Australia late in 2024, was longlisted for the Stella Prize, and reached British readers in paperback in June. Its narrator is Fin, a teenager living off-grid in the Warrumbungle National Park on Gamilaraay Country with her mother Dianella — an astrophotographer turned activist — and a shifting band of outliers who keep their bags packed. Her task, handed to her by people she only half trusts, is to reach a particular peak before a solar eclipse.

The country she crosses is thinner than it should be. Koalas are extinct in it. A mining accident on the Moon has altered the rhythms the living world runs on, and something described only as a new disaster is closing in. Her companion is Terry, one of the Incompletes: a generation whose bodies have adapted to screens, distrusted by everyone, wanted by officials who would like to study them.

The Stella Prize judges called it "an electric and melancholy tale, disturbingly believable but ultimately — and surprisingly — hopeful," and the surprise is genuine. Simpson is a nature writer before she is a novelist, and what she is really writing about is the loss of dark skies: light as a form of colonisation, extinction as a kind of forgetting. Of the five books here, it is the one most openly in mourning.

The two that are allowed to be fun

Not everything on the list is a warning. Megan E. O'Keefe's The Two Lies of Faven Sythe is a standalone space opera with a ghost ship in it. Faven is crystborn, a near-human trained from childhood to chart starpaths between stations, and when her mentor vanishes leaving a route that terminates in the Clutch — a cosmic graveyard — she has to deal with the one person who knows what is out there: the pirate Bitter Amandine, who would rather die than go back. Publishers Weekly starred it and called it superior. Locus settled for "good plain fun", which from Locus is praise.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's Atmosphere reaches for a similar pleasure from another direction. It opens with a shuttle in trouble in December 1984 and rewinds to 1980, when Joan Goodwin, an astrophysicist, joins the first cohort of women in the American shuttle programme and falls in love with a fellow astronaut, Vanessa Ford, an engineer and pilot. Both careers would end if anyone found out. The book doesn't pretend otherwise.

Reid spent months inside Johnson Space Center and worked on procedures with the NASA flight director Paul Dye, and the training sequences carry the weight of that research. Laika Studios holds the film rights, with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck attached. Most shops will file the novel under romance, which is a useful reminder that the border between science fiction and everything else is drawn by a marketing department, not by physics.

The prizes were reading a different list

The 39th Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, announced in London on 25 June, with the prize money set at £2,025 in keeping with the award's habit of rising by the year. Chair of judges Andrew M. Butler called it "a tightly-focused first person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion, who struggles to become free," and the jury preferred it to novels by Julia Armfield, Kaliane Bradley, Ian Green, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Maud Woolf. The award announcement noted that the shortlist ran on planetary crisis, non-human intelligence and technology run amok.

Days earlier, the Locus Awards had given their science fiction novel prize to The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar, about a man who can see five seconds into branching futures and work backwards from the one he wants. It came from Clash, a small press, against a shortlist crowded with Tor and Orbit titles, and it has collected a prize for satire as well — which tells you how the book is being read.

At the Hugo Awards in Seattle in August, best novel went to The Tainted Cup, a fantasy. That isn't a scandal; the Hugos have always covered both shelves. But it makes the point that "best science fiction" is a phrase with several incompatible definitions, depending on whether you are asking a monthly reviewer, a jury, or a convention.

The lag is the interesting part. Annie Bot was one of New Scientist's top five reads of 2024, a full year before the Clarke jury got to it. Columns reward what startles. Prizes reward what survived twelve months of other people's attention. Both are doing their jobs.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

What turns up late, and what to actually buy

The same column's end-of-year round-up, by Emily H. Wilson, made a different argument. Its picks included Jacek Dukaj's Ice, an alternative history in which a winter-stricken Europe of the 1920s is frozen into something unrecognisable, and Iida Turpeinen's Beasts of the Sea, which circles the extinction of the Steller's sea cow. Neither was written in English. Both arrived in translation during the year, which is how a genre actually builds its history: not from the month's new releases but from mail that takes a decade to reach the door.

There were more, among them Claire North's Slow Gods, Hal LaCroix's Here and Beyond, and Ian McEwan's What We Can Know, set in a drowned England. For readers who have never tried science fiction, the column's own advice was to go backwards — Christopher Priest's The Prestige and William Gibson's Neuromancer — which is either an admission that the classics still do the work better or a compliment to the people who keep returning to them.

So which of June's five do you buy? Take Elliott if you want to be frightened by something plausible, and O'Keefe if you want to be charmed by something impossible. Simpson's book will hurt more than either, which is the point of it. Reid's is for the friend who insists they don't read science fiction, and who will finish it in two days and then argue that it isn't.

Read these lists for the books. Read them again in a decade and you'll notice they were never really about the books: they are the minutes of a meeting at which one year decided what to be afraid of, then hired novelists to make the fear entertaining.