Lovelace was once a ship's artificial intelligence. After a shutdown and reboot, she starts again in a synthetic body, a form of existence that is illegal in her world. Pepper, an engineer involved in her new beginning, helps her adapt to changed ways of perceiving and acting. Becky Chambers places support, embodiment and belonging at the centre of a self-contained story in the Wayfarers setting. First published in 2016, this is the series' second book and can be read independently. Its starting premise reveals a change from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which readers can read first to discover events in order.
David and the Reckoners confront an exceptionally powerful Epic as they seek a way to save Prof. The trilogy’s final instalment turns their fight against superhuman tyranny into a test of whether someone they love can still find redemption.
Darrow's years of infiltration give way to open rebellion against the rulers of the solar system. To turn resistance into a chance of freedom, he must rebuild alliances and persuade divided people to risk their lives for a future beyond the caste system.
In a society that has eliminated ordinary causes of death, selected scythes must control the population. Two reluctant apprentices learn what this responsibility demands, confronting the moral consequences of a system that places other people’s lives in their hands.
After the battle for Newcago, David follows unanswered questions to the flooded city once known as Manhattan. Finding Firefight means entering the territory of another powerful Epic, where his experiences with tyranny may no longer explain everything he encounters.
Established among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his attempt to dismantle the Society from within. Ambition, family rivalries and shifting alliances give him opportunities to advance the rebellion, but each step deeper into elite life threatens the identity he keeps hidden.
Whenever Harry August dies, he begins his life again as a child, carrying the knowledge of his previous lifetimes. Near the end of his eleventh life, a girl arrives with a message that interrupts this recurrence. Harry must consider how his accumulated experience connects the past he remembers to a future in danger.
Darrow believes his work beneath Mars is preparing the planet for future generations, until he discovers the deception sustaining his caste's servitude. A revolutionary group offers him a way into the rulers' elite training institute, where infiltration demands a transformed identity.
Breq was once the intelligence of the warship Justice of Toren, linked to thousands of soldiers serving the Radch empire. Following a betrayal, that expansive existence has been reduced to a single human body, and a search for vengeance drives her forward. Ann Leckie's science-fiction novel makes the change from distributed consciousness to individual vulnerability part of a story about identity and imperial power. Ancillary Justice opens the Imperial Radch trilogy, followed by Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. Its original publication was in 2013; later translations and cover editions have their own dates.
After Steelheart kills his father, David spends years investigating the weaknesses of the superpowered rulers known as Epics. His memory of the tyrant’s vulnerability becomes the foundation of a revenge plan against a figure everyone else considers invincible.
At sixteen, Beatrice must choose the faction that will define her place in society. Her aptitude test reveals that she does not fit its categories, and a demanding initiation forces her to conceal that difference while discovering cracks in the system around her.
Avice Benner Cho returns to a distant settlement where humans coexist with the Ariekei. Only specially altered human Ambassadors can speak the Hosts' Language. Avice cannot speak it herself, although she has become one of its living similes. When a new Ambassador arrives, the arrangement that sustains communication is disrupted, threatening a community whose survival depends on its interpreters.
An abandoned ship puts Jim Holden and his crew on the trail of a secret capable of provoking war across the solar system. Their search for answers intersects with a larger conspiracy, as mistrust between rival powers makes every discovery politically explosive.
Wade Watts spends much of his life in the OASIS, a virtual world whose deceased creator has hidden the key to an immense inheritance inside a series of puzzles. Finding the first clue makes Wade a contender and a target in a competition that reaches far beyond the game.
Left alone on Mars after his crew believes him dead, astronaut Mark Watney must turn a temporary habitat into a means of long-term survival. Food, equipment and communication become problems to solve while any possibility of rescue remains far beyond his reach.
Humanity and Trisolaris maintain a fragile peace through deterrence and exchanged knowledge. When aerospace engineer Cheng Xin awakens from hibernation, information from an earlier era returns with her, unsettling the balance on which two civilizations have come to depend.
Having escaped the arena, Katniss Everdeen faces a rebellion that wants to make her its public symbol. As the conflict with the Capitol intensifies, survival demands new choices about trust, responsibility and the people she is determined to protect.
Katniss and Peeta return from the Hunger Games to a victory that has stirred unrest rather than brought safety. Forced to perform for the Capitol again, they discover that their public story has become bound to a rebellion they cannot simply control.
Humanity prepares for an alien invasion while the enemy can observe almost every plan it makes. Four people receive extraordinary freedom to devise secret strategies, including an unassuming scholar who does not understand why he has been chosen.
In Panem, the Capitol forces each district to send two young people to a televised fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen volunteers in place of her sister and enters an arena where survival depends on practical skills, uncertain alliances and the image she presents to viewers.
