6 Creepy Sci-Fi Books to Make Your Skin Crawl
Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.
Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism?
Science fiction, like horror, is an excellent venue for capturing an era’s fears. Especially now, when technological process happens at a pace beyond what feels safe or ethical, and you wonder whether it’s “progress” at all. Blending both genres can make for particularly eerie reads. Their stories can feel possible—if not now, then in an undetermined future. It could be centuries away, or it could be tomorrow.
Whether set in a distant world or one not so different from our own, these six creepy science fiction recommendations are perfect for when you’re in the mood to be unsettled. Some retell a classic novel or examine a historical event with prescient social commentary. Others imagine characters who, though centuries or even millennia away from the present, are facing similar conflicts to our own (if through a speculative lens).
If you’re on a sci-fi kick, look out for these Genre-Defying Sci-Fi Books at your local bookstore or library. Contributor Rachel Brittain shares 20 books that can’t be neatly categorized into one genre, like Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Each one make for an incomparable reading journey.
Now, onto six of the creepiest science fiction books!
Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
Halley Zwick is searching for a place to lay low following a political scandal, and she finds it at Elysian Fields. Once home to a cryogenic program for the wealthy, the spaceship is long-abandoned. Her only job is to push a button every three hours and go on rounds to make sure the bodies stay undisturbed. But if she is the only living being on the ship, then what keeps scratching at the walls?
Esperance by Adam Oyebanji
Detective Ethan Krol is called to Chicago to investigate a seemingly impossible crime: a medical school student and his newborn son, both found dead in their apartment with seawater in their lungs. Forensic clues lead Krol on a search across continents and through history, with ties to the brutal murders of enslaved people on a sunken 18th-century ship.
We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen
Dr. Grace Park is a behavioral psychologist assigned to watch a team of scientists bound for the remote planet Eos. After a radiation storm thrusts the ship into isolation, with no way to send a distress call, the crew quickly falls into paranoia. If Dr. Park cannot find the source of their madness and treat it before it claims her, too, every person in the ship will be doomed to a violent death.
The Way Up is Death by Dan Hanks
Think LitRPG-meets-horror for this next book, in which a levitating tower appears in London and summons 13 people at its base. Their only instructions come at the entrance: “ASCEND.” Not such an easy task when they face horrors on every floor whose sole purpose is to kill them off before they can reach the top.
Overgrowth by Mira Grant
As a child, Anastasia received a message from outer space. She belonged to an alien world, it said, and they would come back for her someday. Nobody, not even her parents, could convince Anastasia that her imagination was to blame that day. And when the invasion begins decades later, they’ll realize with dread that she was right.
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Raised by her scientist father, Carlota Moreau has never known a world outside of their remote estate. His creation of animal-human hybrids, while strange, are simply a part of her life. But the arrival of their patron’s son, Eduardo Lizande, leads Carlota to uncover the dark secrets behind her father’s experiments.
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