10 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi Novels We Can't Wait to Read

Five years ago, Kel Garda was Kelan Gardavros. Now, she’s a refugee living on the edge of an isolated solar system. No one knows who she was. That she was a member of an Order of the military who fought against the Pale Empire. Or that her enemies would destroy worlds to kill her. But when a Pale war machine is activated, Kel’s past hurtles into her present. Offering to serve as a guide, Kel and a friend help two strangers traverse deadly swamps and avoid nefarious bandits to deactivate the machine. Survival is the easy part. If Kel reveals her secrets to anyone, she may doom the very people she’s trying to save.

After all military installations on Earth were destroyed in a mysterious event called the Ninety-Nine, humanity built Andrones. These bipedal android drones mean no soldier will ever have to be on the battlefield again. But they’re fighting an enemy no one understands and no one has ever seen. Sergeant Paxton Arés is one of these new pilots, send to patrol an unidentified desert. The longer he patrols, the more he questions the strange invisible war he’s fighting. Because there’s something in the shifting sands of the dunes. Something inexplicable. if Paxton can’t figure out the truth, that indomitable force is going to win.

The last thing Charlie expects when his mysterious uncle dies is to inherit his supervillain business. But that’s exactly what happens. Some of it is alright. There’s the volcano lair underneath the ocean. And the minions. The plots to take over the world can be a lot. As can the international network of rivals always trying to kill him. But no one prepared him for management. Or, the sentient, language-adept, computer-savvy cats. 

Charlie has a lot to learn if he wants to stay alive.

Shantiport is floundering. What was once meant to be a gateway to the stars is a now a sinking city. And the rulers are only interested in helping themselves. Lina doesn’t want to escape. She’s too much like her failed-revolutionary parents and would do anything to save Shantiport’s people. Her monkey bot brother has other ambitions. He’ll do anything to leave, even if that means abandoning his family. But when the city’s tech billionaire convinces Lina to find an artifact that can allegedly reshape reality, everything changes. Forces converge, power plays emerge. And what’s that about off-world tech that grants wishes? The city won’t know what hit it.

The entire city of San Siroco is sinking, and no one knows that better than Dr. Tamsin Rivers, an arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the problem. Her basement is somehow sinking faster. As the dimensions of the room distorts, her obsession grows, until she finds a door that didn’t exist. B it, she finds an exact replica of herself. Except, where Tamsin is calculating and cruel, this new version is kind and sweet. But the longer Tamsin works with her double, the more of her life starts falling apart. Tamsin has to figure out what her doppelganger wants from her and where the mysterious door leads before she loses pieces of herself forever.

In 2018, Colony Ship Voyager set out with 18,000 of Earth’s best and brightest. Their destination is Promissa, a planet that promises to be a haven for humanity. 250 years later, things are dire. The colony isn’t responding, and the planetary probe readings leave more questions than answers. 

Things aboard Voyager aren’t great either. Some want to change the rules governing the ship. Others want things to stay the same, and a few want the change to seize power. But in all their fighting and machinating, no one stopped to ask the most important question of all: What if the alien planet doesn’t want to be colonized at all?

System Collapse picks up right after the events of Network Effect, the first full-length novel and fifth installment of The Murderbot Diaries. The Barish-Estranza is sending rescue ships to a newly colonized planet. But the odds that they’re doing it out of the kindness of their corporate hearts are low. And there’s something not quite right with Murderbot. If it wants to protect the colonists, it has to figure out what’s wrong—stat.

Fans of this incredibly popular series will be delighted that System Collapse is not just the seventh book but another full-length novel. 

Spensa has been through a lot. She escaped the Nowhere, saw the space between the stars, and even got answers about her own Cytonic powers. But some things stayed the same. The Superiority still clamors for galactic domination. And time is running out. Even with the allies the Skyward Flight team was able to gather, defeating the Superiority will take everything Spensa has—and then some. In the final book of the Skyward series by Brandon Sanderson, Spensa has to decide how far she’ll go to win, how much she’s willing to sacrifice, and if the price is worth saving humanity or seeing it fall forever.

When humanity asks a powerful Artificial Intelligence to find an answer to out-of-control climate change, it comes up with an extreme one: remove humans from the ecosystem. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project began. Now, she’s the last human on Earth. She’s tasked with documenting the changes in the environment as humans are uploaded and saved on Maia, their new virutal home. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is the AI assigned to document Sen’s life. (Yes, that's really its name.) Using novels as its roadmap, it begins piecing together Sen’s narrative. But as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc studies Sen, it increasingly becomes aware of an alarmingly human problem—it may be in love.

In 2050, the environment has finally collapsed. Sure, it isn’t too bad now, but soon, the only people who will survive will be the people who are accepted to be part of the Inside Project, a series of weather-safe, city-sized structures around the world. Thanks to a generous donation, the Manhattan project is now being headed by Jacqueline Millender, a reclusive billionaire and women’s rights advocate. She’s unorthodox and wants to build around the idea of empowerment, not control. But while the idea is alluring, the reality is different. The more people question her system, the more unhinged she becomes until it’s no longer obvious how far she’ll go or who she’ll sacrifice to see her dream come to life.

The Megagalactic Grand Prize is more than a gladiatorial contest. More than a beauty pageant. More than a concert extravaganza. It’s also a continuation of all the wars of the past. Now, the fate of the Earth is once again under attack. The greatest contest in the galaxy is back, and the stakes have never been higher.