2008

Michael Chabon. The Yiddish Policeman's Union

A murder mystery based on the premise that a Jewish settlement was created in Alaska following World War II. In the small town of Sitka, Alyeska, Detective Meyer Landsman finds the body of a prominent town figure who has ties to organized crime. As Landsman digs deeper, he discovers that this is only the tip of the iceberg--and all signs point to a greater danger lurking in the shadows.

2007

Verner Vinge. Rainbows End

With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to retrain at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.

2006

Charles Stross. Accelerando

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.

2005

Neal Stephenson. The Baroque Cycle: The Confusion; The System of the World

Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.

2004

Dan Simmons. Ilium

A powerful epic of high-tech gods, human heroes, total war, and the extraordinary transcendence of ordinary beings.

2003

Kim Stanley Robinson. The Years of Rice and Salt

With the same visionary scope that brought his now-classic Mars trilogy to life, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson constructs an alternative history of the last 600 years--a history where the Black Death kills nearly everyone in Europe and where China, India and the nations of Islam control the world.

2002

Connie Willis. Passage

A story that examines one of the toughest issues of all: death. Part medical thriller, part literary exploration, Willis plunges readers into a bizarre and fascinating world.

2001

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Telling

In this highly anticipated addition to her acclaimed Hainish cycle, Le Guin offers the tale of the planet Aka and a group of outcasts who live in the wilderness, believe in the old ways, and practice its lost religion--the Telling.

2000

Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon

The adult grandchildren of two men once involved in code-breaking espionage in World War II find a sunken Nazi submarine that leads to a massive conspiracy, the effects of which can either enhance freedom--or subjugate the world.

1999

Connie Willis. To Say Nothing of the Dog, or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last

In the grand tradition of her bestselling "Doomsday Book", Connie Willis once again takes on the subject of time travel, this time to Victorian England, with a sweeping tale of romance, history and misadventure that combines everything Willis's readers have come to know and love.

1998

Dan Simmons. The Rise of Endymion

The conclusion of the author's Hugo Award-winning Hyperion series--which includes Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Endymion -- follows Aenea's emergence as a messiah and her relationship to Raul Endymion and the poet Martin Silenius.

1997

Kim Stanley Robinson. Blue Mars

On the brink of completing the terraforming effort on Mars, colonists find their work complicated by a crisis on Earth, new colonization projects on Jupiter and Saturn, and the onset of a Martian ice age.

1996

Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age

The story of an engineer who creates a device to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself reveals what happens when a young girl of the poor underclass obtains the device.

1995

Lois McMaster Bujold. Mirror Dance: a Vorkosigan Adventure

Injured in his mother's womb, Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, born a dwarf with brittle bones, faces off against his brother, a cloned stranger created to murder Miles and replace him.

1994

Kim Stanley Robinson. Green Mars

One generation after the first pioneers begin to transform Mars into an Earthlike planet, the first grown children born on Mars, led by Peter Clayborne, rebel against colonization in an effort to preserve Mars's natural state.

1993

Connie Willis. The Doomsday Book

A time-traveling history student is trapped in the Middle Ages, dangerously close to the onset of the Black Plague. Her rescuers in 21st-century Oxford battle their own deadly epidemic to reach her in time.

1992

Lois McMaster Bujold. Barrayar

Believing her warship days are over after she defeats the Barrayaran militarists and marries their leader, former commander Cordelia Naismith is astounded by the role her unborn son will play in a world on the brink of civil war.

1991

Dan Simmons. The Fall of Hyperion

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 Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing -- nothing anywhere in the universe -- will ever be the same.

1990

Dan Simmons. Hyperion

Hyperion is the tale of seven people who make a pilgrimmage to a terrifying creature called the Shrike in an attempt to save mankind. Stunningly written and beautifully crafted, Simmons's Hyperion resonates with technical achievement and the excitement and wonder found only in the best SF.

1989

C.J. Cherryh. Cyteen

In a futuristic world of cybernetics, two young friends become trapped in an endless nightmare of suspicion, surveillance, programmable servants, a centuries-old ruling class, and an enigmatic woman who rules them all.

1988

David Brin. The Uplift War

As galactic armadas clash in quest of the ancient fleet of the Progenitors, a brutal alien race seizes the dying planet of Garth. The various uplifted inhabitants of Garth must battle their overlords or face ultimate extinction. At stake is the existence of Terran society and Earth, and the fate of the entire Five Galaxies.

1987

Orson Scott Card. Speaker for the Dead

Years after the terrible war, only the Speaker for the Dead has the courage to confront the truth when a second alien race is discovered.

1986

David Brin. The Postman

He was a survivor, a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.

1985

Larry Niven. The Integral Trees

In this novel, Niven presents a fully-fleshed culture of evolved humans who live without gravity in the gas cloud surrounding a neutron star. In this Smoke Ring, free-floating life forms flourish, and all of them, from fish to fowl, can fly...

1984

David Brin. Startide Rising

The Terran exploration vessel Streaker has crashed on the uncharted water world of Kithrup, bearing one of the most important discoveries in galactic history. Below, a handful of her human and dolphin crew battles a hostile planet to safeguard her secret--the fate of the Progenitors.

1983

Isaac Asimov. Foundation’s Edge

Tells the futuristic story of galactic history in the time between the two empires.

1982

Julian May. The Many-Colored Land

When a one-way time tunnel to Earth's distant past, specifically six million B.C., was discovered by folks on the Galactic Milieu, every misfit for light-years around hurried to pass through it. Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years....

1981

Joan D. Vinge. The Snow Queen

The tale of the ageless, corrupt Snow Queen and her wish to control Tiamat forever. But her rule is quickly coming to an end unless she can find a young mystic named Moon--the Snow Queen's clone.

1980

John Varley. Titan

The first book of the Gaian trilogy.  Titan introduces the characters of the series as they go on a quest to discover the nature of Gaia.

1979

Vonda N. McIntyre. Dreamsnake

An award-winning novel set in the post-apocalyptic future follows a young woman who travels the earth healing the sick with the help of her alien companion, the dreamsnake, pursued by two implacable followers.

1978

Frederik Pohl. Gateway

The first book of the Heechee saga. Gateway opens on all the wealth of the Universe--and on reaches of unimaginable horror. The humans who rode the alien Heechee spacecraft stored on the planetoid couldn't know whether the trip would make them millionaires or corpses!

1977

Kate Wilhelm. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

The story of an isolated post-holocaust community of clones who are determined to preserve civilization.

1976

Joe Haldeman. The Forever War

Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict.  Although he never wanted to go to war, he performs his duties without rancor.  The true test will come when he returns to Earth.  While he's been aging months, centuries have passed on Earth.

1975

Ursula K. LeGuin. The Dispossessed

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 utopian mother planet of Urras.

1974

Arthur C. Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama

When a space probe confirms that the celestial object, that astronomers dubbed Rama, is an interstellar space craft, Earth prepares for it's first encounter with alien intelligence.

1973

Isaac Asimov. The Gods Themselves

In the twenty-second century, Earth obtains limitless, free energy from an alien source. But the process will eventually lead to the destruction of Earth.

1972

Ursula K. LeGuin. The Lathe of Heaven

In the year 2002, George Orr discovers that his dreams are changing the world, and when he falls into the hands of a power-mad psychiatrist, he counters by dreaming up a perfect world that can overcome his nightmares.

1971

Larry Niven. Ringworld

A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed. We can start again!