Books like The Year's Best Science Fiction

Le Guin is a literary force, and this is her most emotionally elegant work.

The political subtlety, the blizzards, the alien humanity—it all works together in perfect cold harmony. It reshaped how I think about empathy and otherness. I reread it any time I start to lose faith in quiet stories.

This brilliant collection of interlinked urban fantasy short stories makes use of a variety of magical devices to change the lives of the featured characters. Each story is from a different character viewpoint, each character connected with the others in some way, and each story moves the narrative forwards to its heartfelt and dramatic conclusion.

Turner brings together a group of young, and young-at-heart, individuals all attempting to find themselves, and struggling with the circumstances they are in. Gradually, as the narrative progresses, they discover each other and help each other towards a powerful and profound intervention that showcases the best of human kindness, community, and acceptance.

This book moved me. After going through the different character stories building towards the end, the finale with an assemble moment of courage between many of the characters is such an empowering and cathartic moment. When I read it, I was listening in… show more.

Tangle’s Game is a clever examination of the near future with an exploration of prejudice that is massively relevant in today’s society. The very best science fiction offers us a mirror to our own circumstances and situations. In the world of Tangle’s Game, we see the cultural behemoths of blockchain technology and social media as even more dominant forces than they are today.

Hotston uses this story to offer an informed and nuanced perspective on the world. Amanda’s descent from conformity highlights the ways in which we are measured and judged.

I was hooked from the first pages and couldn’t put the book down. The story is set in a cyberpunk world, where advanced technology permeates every aspect of human life, making life easier at the cost of privacy and independence. 

I loved the world-building and the protagonist, raged at the injustices with him, and hated the antagonist. The mystery kept me invested and intrigued, and I reached for the book whenever I had a moment. I didn't expect the ending and was a bit heartbroken. I also loved the way it was written—it was so clear and easy to read that I was completely immersed in the narrative with nothing to pull my attention away.

This is book 2 of the Planetfall series, but it’s perfect as a standalone. I started the series with it.

More a space opera than a full-fledged Cyberpunk story, Schismatrix is a masterpiece with incredible worldbuilding and socio-political commentary. This book impacted mine on many levels; it features an initially hopeless protagonist who eventually fights for a cause, a revolution with struggling factions, a dystopian tyranny, futuristic pirates. It’s a visionary book permeated with deep reflections on human essence and transhumanism, one that’ll make you wonder where humanity is heading, what our purpose is, and what our search for growth and change will entail.

This book takes the tired and worn trope surrounding mankind’s search for the fountain of youth, twists it violently, and asks, “What if this were viable, although exorbitantly expensive, tech?” I loved not only this fresh, original angle, but Morgan’s thoughtful treatment of it.

With immersive world-building and a gritty protagonist, Altered Carbon dragged me through a truly surprising and original murder mystery that kept me guessing through the final reveal – though it wasn’t the murder plot that kept me hanging on.

Morgan’s not-particularly-likeable protagonist not only darkened the story, he pressured me to revisit difficult moral questions and to reconsider them from his perspective. He pulled me into the story, shook my moral compass, and then made me believe that perspective was standard in his world.

I fell for this book from startup. I had never read an android-themed romance novel until I discovered Roxie McClaine. Seeing a futuristic world that's not too different from ours but with lots of interesting nuance and action was fun.

I enjoyed the many ways the android Codi becomes human through a different lens.

William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’

Bubbles in Space couldn’t be more different than the two books above. It features a humoristic approach to the genre and doesn’t take itself too seriously. We follow Bubbles, a pink-haired detective on her adventures in Holo City. Like me, S.C. Jensen is one of the very few female authors in the cyberpunk genre. I recommend checking her books out if you’re looking for something not as grim and dramatic as most cyberpunk books.

So often overlooked by cyberpunk aficionados, Streetlethal is the first of the Aubrey Knight novels by Steven Barnes.

Published in 1983, Streetlethal is a story of betrayal, corruption, criminal syndicate politics, and the dichotomy between the obscenely wealthy and the outcast poor. The gritty look at power from below—as Aubrey is set up, almost shanked in prison, and then on the run in the city’s literal underworld—is the novel’s major draw, but the most interesting part, looking back, is that both it and City include psychic elements. 

Hard as it is to believe now, in the ‘80s, psychic powers were considered science. Really. Even mainstream TV shows like Magnum PI and Miami Vice regularly employed psychic powers as plot movers. Bizarre, but true.