8 Fantasy Recs Based on Your Favorite Science Fiction Book

Who doesn’t love Murderbot? Martha Wells’s multi-award-winning sci-fi novella series was recently turned into a TV show for Apple TV+, captivating a whole new legion of fans. Don’t believe the name: Murderbot may have been programmed to be a heartless killing machine, but since gaining autonomy, all he wants to do is watch TV and be left alone. Unfortunately, pesky humans keep getting in the way and ruining all of his plans.

In Made Things, the puppet-like creatures made by a street thief and con-artist Coppelia are also not keen to follow orders. They don't trust one another, but their uneasy alliance has made them excellent crooks. After a surprising discovery shakes their world to the core, Coppelia and her friends must reexamine everything they thought they knew about their world.

The Expanse is one of the most thrilling and propulsive sci-fi sagas of the past 20 years. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the double team behind James S.A. Corey, offered a thoroughly modern space opera centred on the warring factions of Mars, the Moon, and the mining rigs of the Asteroid Belt. It made for one hell of a TV series on SYFY. 

In Marcedes Lackey's Sacred Ground, Jennifer Talldeer, the granddaughter of a powerful Medicine Man, tries to find her own power and purpose amid tribal custom. A freelance private investigator, Jennifer spends hours tracking down stolen Indian artifacts. The construction of a new mega-mall reveals fragments of human bone connected to the possible desecration of an ancient burial ground. Jennifer must stand between the darkness of man and magic alike to uncover the truth.

Sci-fi and fantasy are full of alternate histories. What would happen if one moment in our past changed and radically altered our futures? In Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis won the Second World War and now rule over the USA. The worldbuilding is densely layered, with Dick laying out a convincing “what-if?” version of our world. In Connie Willis’s work, time travel is a little more funny but no less dramatic.

At the Oxford University of Doomsday Book, history students have the chance to travel to the past and study their chosen subjects first-hand. For Kivrin, preparing to travel back to the 14th century is just another part of her academic life. She must create a whole new identity for herself so that she can wander the land without a male companion and not draw attention to herself, all while her professors back in the 21st century keep a close eye on her. But then Kivrin finds herself stranded in the Middle Ages. While her fellows try desperately to rescue her, she must navigate a time of superstition and death.

Douglas Adams was the king of comedic sci-fi. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy remains a laugh-out-loud saga of intergalactic drama, two-headed presidents, and the importance of always knowing where your towel is. Adams’ influence can be felt in many SFF novels, and in 2026, there’s no bigger example of that than one of the biggest hits in fantasy of the 2020s.

The chances are you’re already familiar with Dungeon Crawler Carl, and for good reason. Matt Dinnaman’s litRPG epic went from a serial story published on Royal Road to a multi-million bestseller that’s set to be adapted into a TV series by Peacock. It’s a sprawling and hilarious tale of a one-time coastguard named Carl who, along with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, finds himself forced to compete in an alien reality TV show created in the ruins of the Earth’s surface. Expect meth-dealing llamas, evil circuses, and cocktail-drinking talking felines. 

One enterprising social media user shared their adoration of This is How You Lose the Time War, a sci-fi time-travelling romance by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and helped it to go viral. The Hugo Award winning novella imagines two warring soldiers on opposites sides of a seemingly never-ending war who go from taunting one another to falling in love and risking everything to be together. But if we’re going to talk about time travel romance, we have to jump back to The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Clare loves Henry. They met when Clare was six and Henry was 36, and were married when Clare was 22 and Henry was 30. He suffers from a rare condition that causes him to, without warning, be thrown through time. Throughout it all, he has been aided by Clare. Their love is strong, but is time stronger?

In the realm of dystopian fiction, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a defining novel, as important to the genre as 1984. In the future, everyone is genetically engineered and trained to be a passive part of the machine that keeps the authoritarian regime running. Being controlled by the state is the price one must pay for paradise, but is it really worth it?

I Who Have Never Known Men, which experienced a recent resurgence in popularity thanks to BookTok, imagines a strange place where control is done without reason or explanation. Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. They have no memory of how they got there or what their lives were like before. They are watched over by male guards who never speak to them. A young girl, the 40th prisoner, wonders about escape. Surely whatever is out there cannot be any worse than this?

The legendary Ursula K. Le Guin created groundbreaking works of sci-fi and fantasy that defined generations of the genre. The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an world where the residents live without a gender for most of their lives. It's a prescient and still urgent novel that is light years ahead of its time in terms of gender fluidity. Another woman leading the way in this realm is Anne Bishop, beloved for her woman-driven high fantasies where the expected hierarchies of power are forever subverted.

The Dark Kingdom is preparing itself for the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy: the arrival of a new Queen whose powers will rival those of the High Lord of Hell himself. In a world where the ladder of power is broken down by gender in surprising ways, the arrival of a new leader who breaks all the rules threatens to overthrow everything. Whoever controls the new Queen controls the Darkness.

Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi works are, all puns intended, foundational texts in the genre, creating a world and rulebook for the co-existence of robots and humans, and, with his Foundation saga, a vast-reaching tale of the hunt to preserve our species’ knowledge in the face of utmost destruction. If you want a fantasy story about the perils of trying to construct a utopia, Jo Walton’s Thessaly saga is for you.

One day, the Greek goddess Athena grows bored and decides to create the Republic as envisioned by Plato. It will be populated by a few hundred Plato devotees and ten thousand children plucked from time. They will live on an island set to be destroyed by a volcano in the far future. Robots will do the grunt work. Can this theory of the perfect life exist in reality, or are humans and gods alike too messy to pull it off, especially with Athena's brother, Apollo, now living as a human among the city?