Baker, Kage    

Category: Time travel
Summary: The Company is Dr. Zeus, Inc; by the year 2335, it owns nearly everything. How? Well, it invented time travel and a flawed type of immortality. So Dr. Z sent operatives back into prehistoric times to gather up some promising children, make them immortal, and form them into a secret network that will make all the right investments--and preserve species that, according to history, will become extinct. The other Company novels are uneven in quality, though Sky Coyote is very funny.

Brunner, John    

Category: Dystopian future
Summary: Brunner tells of a future filled with environmental horrors, the reemergence of obscure diseases, and a vast eco conspiracy. Very prophetic--many of the things he wrote about are now coming true. His novel Stand on Zanzibar is also very good.

Butler, Octavia    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: A collection of 3 novels known as the Xegenesis series consisting of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. I highly recommend everything she has ever written.

Card, Orson Scott    

Category: Science fiction
Summary: Ender Wiggin is a very bright young boy with a powerful skill. One of a group of children bred to be military geniuses and save Earth from an inevitable attack by aliens, known here as "buggers," Ender becomes unbeatable in war games and seems poised to lead Earth to triumph. Meanwhile, his brother and sister plot to wrest power from Ender. It won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. There are two more in the trilogy, which I didn't like as much, and then a second trilogy with Bean as the main subject.

Card, Orson Scott    

Category: Time travel
Summary: In a thought-provoking work that is part science fiction, part historical drama, Orson Scott Card writes about scientists in a fearful future who study that tragic past, then attempt to actually intervene and change it into something better.

Cherryh, C.J.    

Category: Far future
Summary: Cyteen was originally published as a trilogy, but this link takes you to an omnibus version. It is about a geneticist who is murdered by an adviser, but the scientist is replicated in the lab, leaving a prodigy who attempts to chart a different fate. I recommend all of her books that take place in the Merchanter universe (same as Cyteen), including Downbelow Station, RimRunners, Heavy Time, and others.

Effinger, George Alec    

Category: Near future
Summary: Excellent novel. Almost everyone is trans.

Freireich, Valerie J.    

Category: Far future
Summary: Simply because he is genetically altered, an academic researcher is banished to the unknown enemy worlds of the Emirates--a place of barbaric culture ruled by the Sons, descendants of human men and holy Houris. I recommend her work in general.

Ghosh, Amitav    

Category: Near future
Summary: The main character is a man named Antar, whose job is to monitor a somewhat finicky computer that sorts through mountains of information. When the computer finds something it can't catalog, it brings the item to Antar's attention. A string of these seemingly random anomalies puts Antar on the trail of a man named Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995 while searching for the truth behind the discovery of the cure for malaria. This search for Murugan leads, in turn, to the discovery of the Calcutta Chromosome, which can shift bits of personality from one person to another.

Kessel, John    

Category: Humorous Science Fiction
Summary: As the calendar counts down the months to the year 2000, millennial fever takes hold in the United States. George Eberhart, reporter for the biggest tabloid in the world, is on the track of what might be the story of the century--he has evidence that there really are aliens on planet Earth.

Kingsolver, Barbara    

Category: Literary fiction
Summary: A story told by the wife and four daughters fo Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist preacher who takes his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They are rather unprepared for the realities of life in that part of the world.

LeGuin, Ursula K    

Category: Utopia
Summary: Unwilling to accept that his anarchist world must be separated from the rest of the civilized universe, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, risks his life by traveling to the mother planet of Urras.

Lerner, Lisa    

Category: Literature
Summary: Edie Stein may be a 14-year-old with common adolescent concerns, but the rites of passage in the world she lives in are even more warped than the ones we know. Set in a dystopic American suburbia of the near future, this inventive comic novel opens just six months before Edie is scheduled to compete in the annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant a public ritual in which girls must not only display "Better Person Skills" and their knowledge of chemical substances but also simulate sex with the Electric Polyrubber Man and sacrifice trained rabbits and sew them into muffs.

Liss, David    

Category: Literary fiction
Summary: When is it okay to murder people? Why do we have prisons? Are encyclopedias a worthwhile investment? These questions and more are tackled in this entertaining novel about when Lem Altick, a college student selling encyclopedias door-to-door to earn his next year's tuition, accidentally meets assassin Melford Kean, and becomes embroiled in Kean's peculiar world-view.

McIntyre, Vonda N.    

Category: Alternate history
Summary: The Moon and the Sun, which won the 1997 Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is the story of Marie-Josèphe, a young lady in the court of Louis XIV. When her brother Yves returns from a naturalist voyage with two sea monsters (one live, one dead), Marie-Josèphe is caught up in a battle of wills involving the fate of the living creature.

Mistry, Rohinton    

Category: Literary fiction
Summary: This is the story of four people, thrown together by fate during the Emergency in India in the mid seventies. It's a tragic novel, showing both the best and worst of humanity.

Morgan, Richard    

Category: Near Future science fiction
Summary: Thirty years from now the big movers in global capitalism have found the big money is in Conflict Investment. They keep a careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution that burn constantly around the world. They gauge who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence, and power. The reward for the investors? A stake in the new nation. Chris Faulkner has just landed the job of his life at Shorn Associates, the market leader in Conflict Investment. But has he got what it takes to make a real killing?

Nagata, Linda    

Category: Nanotech
Summary: At the center of her brilliantly original first novel is a powerful, illicit device known as the Bohr Maker, a microscopic factory full of self-replicating machines programmed to transform a human host into a genius-level nanotech engineer. Nikko, a genetically altered resident of a space colony, is reaching the end of his built-in life span and is eager to procure the Bohr Maker, as much to save his own life as to break the stranglehold of Earth's ruling Commonwealth. Before he can lay hands on it, however, the Bohr Maker's earthbound owner is killed and its tiny machinery injected into the body of an ignorant, poverty-stricken woman named Phousita, which changes the destiny of everyone in unforeseeable ways.

Ore, Rebecca    

Category: Dystopian future
Summary: The twenty-first century Ore imagines contains bioengineered nanoviruses that keep the rich perpetually young, and mandatory cyberspace brain hookups for the poor (for human brains, it turns out, are cheaper than computer brains for running menial programs). Meanwhile, a ruthless caste of eco-terrorists has come into being whose latest strike wipes out a score of oil refineries with a miniature nuclear bomb.

Preuss, Paul    

Category: Bioengineering
Summary: Two programmers invent a cunning process to develop the world's first biological computer that is capable of independent learning & problem solving. Then the biochips get loose....

Reynolds, Alastair    

Category: Space-based
Summary: This distant-past/far-future, hard sci-fi tour de force probes a galaxy-wide enigma: why does spacefaring humanity encounter so few remnants of intelligent life? Excavating the 900,000-year-old Amarantin civilization on its home world, Resurgam, archaeologist Dan Sylveste discovers evidence of a splinter cult that abandoned Resurgam for the stars but returned, only to be swallowed up by a mysterious cataclysm that destroyed all the Amarantins. Everything he writes is awesome: read it all!

Roessner, Michaela    

Category: Near future
Summary: ter an inexplicable incident during which ninety percent of the human population disappeared without a trace, the survivors make peace with each other, defending themselves against roving fanatics and investigating the Vanishing. (Note: this book is not about the Rapture).

Russell, Mary Doria    

Category: First contact
Summary: Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist, heads a team of scientists and explorers on an expedition to the planet Rakhat, where contact has been established with two apparently primitive races, the Runa and the Jana'ata. The narrative shifts back and forth between 2016, when contact is first made, and 2060, to a Vatican inquest interrogating the maimed and broken Sandoz. A paleoanthropologist, Russell makes the descriptions of the inhabitants of Rakhat both convincing and unsettling. The sequel, Children of God, is equally good.

Russo, Richard Paul    

Category: Space-based
Summary: The starship Argonos has wandered without purpose through space for hundreds of years when it receives a transmission from a strange planet. For the first time in memory, the crew must make decisions that could change their lives forever. Really suspenseful.

Ryman, Geoff    

Category: Near future
Summary: This book is close to perfect. I'd give it six or even seven stars; it's that good. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere, with out power lines, computers, or machines. The technology is Air. But what impact will it have on the rural village of Chung Mae? Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. award in 2006.

Stephenson, Neal    

Category: Cyber-punk
Summary: It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue.

Stephenson, Neal    

Category: Nanotech
Summary: John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.

Sterling, Bruce    

Category: Bioengineering
Summary: I an era when life expectancies stretch 100 years or more and adhering to healthy habits is the only way to earn better medical treatments, ancient "post humans" dominate society with their ubiquitous wealth and power. By embracing the safe and secure, 94-year-old Mia Ziemann has lived a long and quiet life. Too quiet, as she comes to realize, for Mia has lost the creative drive and ability to love--the holy fire--of the young. But when a radical new procedure makes Mia young again, she has the chance to break free of society's cloying grasp. I recommend Sterling's work in general.

Swanwick, Michael    

Category: Far future
Summary: In a world of plug-in personalities and colonized asteroids, daring fugitive Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark seeks refuge on Earth orbiting settlements, where evil, self-interest, and greed flourish in the vacuum of space.

Tepper, Sheri S.    

Category: Humans on another planet
Summary: Humans are scattered over several planets, one being Grass, which is a backwater planet with an odd collection of so called "elites" living in a cultural milieu copied from English manors. The "commoners" are gathered in a large town and make a living mostly through trade with other planets. Meanwhile, a deadly plague threatens to wipe out humanity. But the plague has not touched Grass, so enter Lady Marjorie Westriding and her family, sent by the hierarch of the church to find a cure for the plague, believed to exist on Grass.

Tepper, Sheri S.    

Category: Far future
Summary: bbs Land was a quiet agricultural colony, a peaceful planet where men and women worked together as equals to provide food for other worlds. Once it had been the home of the alien Owlbrit, who left behind only the temples where their strange gods had lived. But then the gods awoke.

Tevis, Walter    

Category: First contact
Summary: T.J. Newton is an extraterrestrial who goes to Earth on a desperate mission of mercy. But instead of aid, Newton discovers loneliness and despair that ultimately ends in tragedy.

Thomas, Maggy    

Category: Time travel
Summary: Wow. Silence of the Lambs meets the Time Machine.

Waitman, Katie    

Category: Alien society
Summary: Mikk of Vyzania, the galaxy's greatest performance master, commanded stages on all the myriad worlds with his sublime and ethereal performances. But when the Somalite songdance--the extraordinary dance form Mikk treasured to the point of obsession--was banned, he was devastated, until his sense of justice forced him to defy the law.

Wells, Catherine    

Category: Humans on another planet
Summary: Religious leaders hide bounty of another continent from followers. One woman finds the truth with the help of battling zoology professors.

Willis, Connie    

Category: Time travel
Summary: Connie Willis labored five years on this story of a history student in 2048 who is transported to an English village in the 14th century. The student arrives mistakenly on the eve of the onset of the Black Plague. Her dealings with a family of "contemps" in 1348 and with her historian cohorts lead to complications as the book unfolds into a surprisingly dark, deep conclusion. The book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Willis is an awesome writer.

Willis, Connie    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: A sociologist who studies fads and a chaos theorist are brought together by a strange misdelivered package. Willis is an awesome writer.

Willis, Connie    

Category: Science Fiction
Summary: Joanna Lander is a medical researcher specializing in Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and how the brain constructs them. Her partner in this endeavor is Richard Wright, a single-minded scientist who induces NDEs in healthy people by injecting a compound that tricks the brain into thinking it's dying. Joanna and Richard team up and try to find test subjects whose ability to report their experiences objectively hasn't been wrecked by reading the books of pop-psychologist and hospital gadabout Maurice Mandrake. Willis is an awesome writer.

Zettel, Sarah    

Category: Artificial Intelligence
Summary: Transporting a freight of information between two human colonies in the far-flung reaches of the universe, Katmer Al-Shei is accused of smuggling artificial intelligence, and stumbles upon a nest of conspiracies. This was one of the most complex stories I've ever read. I recommend Zettel's work in general.