10 fresh sci-fi novels to read in 2026, from Martha Wells to George Saunders

Children of Strife continues the conceptual arc of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series through a parallel narrative strand set aboard a research vessel that rediscovers a long‑forgotten terraforming outpost. Centuries earlier, a renegade group of scientists played at being gods on a distant planet, reshaping biology and ecology with a mix of ambition and spite; what they unleashed lives on in ways they never fully predicted.

The novel follows Alis, a tormented scientist who wakes from her own nightmares to find most of the crew missing, leaving only the belligerent mantis‑shrimp‑like captain Cato and the ship’s AI Kern. As Alis and Cato descend to the planet’s surface, they encounter a world where the consequences of past interventions have spiralled into new forms of intelligence and conflict, and where the last surviving crewmember may pose a greater threat than the environment itself. Sci‑fi novels built around uplift and post‑human evolution often lean into spectacle, but Tchaikovsky keeps the focus on the moral and psychological toll of such experiments across generations.

Vigil is more literary fiction with speculative mechanics than as a traditional sci‑fi novel, but its structure is science‑fictional in its way. The story centres on Jill, a kind of supernatural figure or angel who enters the minds of the dying in order to offer solace and a kind of moral uplift before judgment. Having died young herself, Jill now inhabits a liminal space between life and death, gifted with a delicate yet expansive voice and an uncanny ability to grasp the moral contours of others’ lives.

The narrative follows her as she presides over the deathbed of K J Boone, an oil tycoon and planet‑level despoiler whose actions have left behind a shattered environment and a legacy of corporate harm. Through their interactions, the novel interrogates questions of free will, culpability and the possibility of forgiveness in the face of clear‑cut moral wrongs. Even if Vigil does not read like a space‑opera or cyberpunk text, it fits within a broader field of sci‑fi novels that use speculative scenarios to test the ethics of power and responsibility.

Broken Dove is the sequel to the dystopian romance Silver Elite and returns to the same fractured continent where a rigid, media‑centred hierarchy known as the Primes controls information, movement and desire. Wren Darlington, having blown her cover as a double agent within the Silver Elite, has now crossed over to allied territory and is trying to use her inside knowledge to help the Uprising overthrow the regime once and for all. As she settles into this new base, she must navigate suspicion, hidden agendas and the tentative trust of comrades who have their own histories of loss.

Meanwhile, her former commander and lover Cross Redden remains embedded in Prime‑controlled space, feeding information from within while also withholding secrets that threaten to blow the entire operation. The novel turns on loyalties strained by ideology, personal attachment and the constant risk of betrayal, as Wren’s reunion with the hotshot pilot and undercover operative Grayson Blake complicates her emotional and tactical calculus. In this way, the book behaves like a tightly wound political thriller dressed in the language of sci‑fi novels that foreground surveillance, propaganda and the weaponisation of identity.

Ian McDonald’s Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur is a short, tightly constructed novella that leans into the carnivalesque logic of near‑future spectacle. The protagonist, Tif Tamim, is an orphan who dreams of becoming a dinosaur buckaroo, riding engineered prehistoric beasts under the glittering lights of a big‑top. As he drifts from circus to circus in search of work and a place to rest his head, he eventually lands in a troupe where the bond between human and modified dinosaur is not just performance but a kind of precarious symbiosis.

McDonald keeps the narrative light on exposition, instead using the dynamic between Tif and his chosen dinosaur to explore questions of belonging, exploitation and what it means to be “useful” in a world that treats both humans and animals as interchangeable assets. The book’s tone is wry and its stakes are intimate, yet it still fits comfortably within the contemporary wave of sci‑fi novels that treat engineered life forms as characters in their own right rather than as background set‑dressing.

Thomas Elrod’s debut The Franchise is a science fiction novel that uses the machinery of entertainment and franchise culture as its primary speculative device. Set in a universe where media empires and intellectual‑property conglomerates have effectively become planetary‑scale governments, the story follows a protagonist described as “the least curious man in the world” who is nonetheless pulled into a crisis that reveals the full extent of the franchise’s grip on identity and narrative. As the central character is forced to navigate the inner workings of a multi‑platform, cross‑media universe, the narrative interrogates how stories are manufactured, commodified and weaponised, and how audiences are both flattered and infantilised by the systems that feed them those stories.

The book’s speculative logic is less about technology per se and more about the architecture of belief and consent, treating fandom, licensing and origin‑story mythology as the operating system of the world. In that sense, The Franchise stands as one of the year’s more pointed sci‑fi novels about the way stories function as infrastructure in the twenty‑first century.

Ann Leckie returns to the world of the Imperial Radch in Radiant Star, a standalone space‑opera that centres on the religious and political significance of a site called the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star on the planet Ooioiaa. The site is revered as a sacred space by the local population, but the Radch empire regards it as an inconvenient relic soon to be absorbed into its own bureaucratic and cultural grid. As food shortages, riots and a communication blackout from the wider empire intensify, the local politics of Ooioiaa grow increasingly complex.

The novel introduces a religious savant who begins to experience visions of a “living saint” who will be allowed one final time to join the mummified bodies enshrined at the Radiant Star, a concession that the Radch have granted only as a symbolic retreat. Through this convergence of theology, imperial administration and local resistance, Leckie dissects the mechanics of cultural erasure and the stubborn persistence of belief in the face of overwhelming power. The novel thus reads as a finely tuned example of sci‑fi novels that treat empires as both material and ideological superstructures.

Platform Decay is the next instalment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, and it continues the adventures of the self‑aware SecUnit technically known as Murderbot. The plot begins when Murderbot volunteers to run a rescue mission that quickly spirals into a situation requiring prolonged interaction with unfamiliar humans, including minors. As the mission unfolds, Murderbot is thrust into a scenario that feels closer to a novella in structure, with tight pacing and a compressed timeline that mirror the urgency of the rescue itself.

The narrative centres on Murderbot’s discomfort with social expectations and its reluctant embrace of the role of protector, even as it wrestles with the fact that having others back up its bad decisions can feel oddly reassuring. Platform Decay also functions as a kind of inter‑series crossover that nods to elements of Wells’ other work, bringing Murderbot into contact with younger characters and new political configurations on the Corporation Rim. The book is a compact, highly efficient demonstration of how ongoing series‑adjacent sci‑fi novels can maintain both continuity and narrative freshness.

Underlake is a far‑future, ice‑bound sci‑fi novel whose cover copy and promotional blurbs sketch a world where survival is organised around a vast, frozen lake and the fragile infrastructure built upon it. The plot follows a small community of scientists, engineers and exiles who live on or near the under‑lake platforms, using the ice as both shield and stage for their experiments and conflicts. When a long‑dormant signal or anomaly from deep beneath the ice surface reignites, the characters must confront not only the physical dangers of the environment but also the ideological and psychological fault lines within their own group.

The book’s narrative splits between engineers trying to maintain the platforms, biologists probing the alien life associated with the lake, and political operatives who want to exploit the discovery for their own ends. The result is a genre‑hybrid that mixes body‑horror and climate‑anxiety tropes with more traditional space‑adjacent sci‑fi logic, producing a novel that feels like a cold‑war thriller set in a world that has already frozen over.

The Photonic Effect is a galaxy‑spanning space opera that focuses on the crew of the starship Horizon, which has spent ten long years trapped across the expanse of space and separated from the cluster of worlds they once called home. When they finally return, they find that the peaceful coalition known as the Cluster has fractured into civil war, with old alliances broken and new factions vying for control. Captain Demora Kim, known to her crew simply as Demi, is determined to protect the survivors who have endured years of instability and terror, but the war refuses to allow neutrality. After a devastating attack on a mining station leaves thousands dead, every ship is pressed into frontline service, dragging Demi deeper into a conflict she barely understands.

The novel charts her struggle to keep her promises to the crew while also weighing the consequences of a bold strategic move that might preserve them but could tip the galaxy further into chaos. In style and scope, The Photonic Effect is a direct counter‑balance to more intimate, character‑driven sci‑fi novels, instead foregrounding the weight of command and the way decisions scale up from individuals to star systems. Sci‑fi novels of this stripe remain essential precisely because they force the reader to see how small choices can avalanche into universal recalibration.

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