20 Must-Read Genre-Bending Sci-Fi Books

Mack is a robot who was originally designed to be a war machine, hulking and intended for nothing but destruction. He wants to show he’s more than he was built to be and earn his citizenship — easier said than done. But when his neighbors are kidnapped, it becomes his opportunity to show his worth as a detective who can save lives as well as take them. But what he’s investigating is no ordinary crime, and the future of the Empire he lives in might be at stake.

A young man is found dead, locked alone in a room at a virtual reality parlor, his throat slashed. When Detective Dore Konstantin is called in to investigate, she finds the victim died the same way in the real world as he did in artificial reality, and she realizes the key to the mystery will be in investigating the lives he lived outside of the so-called “real world.”

Humanity and aliens have formed a loose alliance, upon the condition that humans are subjected to the laws of the aliens when they are on alien soil. It seems fair, but to humans, the laws are nonsensical and the punishments capricious. Miles Flint is an investigator whose job is to enforce these laws that seem to him to be unjust, and it’s something he must grapple with as three of his cases collide. This is the start of a 15-book series of space mysteries!

The Kettle is home to a crew of three misfits: Wheel, a cybernetic pilot on the run from her past; Lahra, a warrior of a nearly extinct species who wield a musical and deadly combat magic; and Max, a xeno-archaeologist from Earth who is stranded a long way from a home planet that still doesn’t know aliens exist. Together, they have to eke out a living, dodge the empire, and try to find Max a way home, even if he’s starting to think Earth isn’t home any longer. But when they pick up a job that puts them squarely in the crosshairs of imperial agents, suddenly it’s just them between entire planets and total annihilation.

Thirteen-year-old Min is one of a family of fox spirits, and her parents have long since drummed it into her head that she must appear human at all times and never use fox magic. All she wants to do is get away from Jinju and her overbearing family so she can live her life — ideally by following her older brother Jun into the Space Forces. But when word arrives that Jun is missing and accused of leaving his post to search for the fabled Dragon Pearl, Min knows that there must be something else afoot. She runs away, wanting to find him and clear her name…and in so doing, she goes on an adventure that will require all the magic she’s always hidden.

In a universe where space ships are run and repaired by powerful techno-mages, being one of the few people in the galaxy with no magic is a real bummer. Boots is doing her best, but between being a disgraced soldier from the losing side of a war and being a washed up treasure hunter, she’s got some problems. When her former captain shows up, looking for a legendary ship, she tries to squirm out of it. But this treasure is real, and dangerous. It also involves a famous race car driver named Nilah who just saw her main opponent get assassinated…and Nilah and Boots are next.

Humanity is under constant attack by alien invaders; the only solution they’ve found is to repurpose the husks of the alien machines into Chrysalises, massive mecha that can only be piloted by a male and female team. Male pilots are considered heroes…and female pilots are ultimately sacrifices, most of whom are doomed to have their energy drained by the men they are paired with. Then Zetian joins up with the express intention of having revenge on the pilot who killer her older sister…and succeeds.

House of Wisdom was once a massive, state of the art exploration vessel; now it’s a salvageable hulk that’s been abandoned in space for a decade after a viral outbreak killed its entire crew in mere hours. It’s a prize ripe for the taking by a crew with the guts to do it, and Zahra’s fits the bill. All they have to do if they want access is kidnap the sole survive of the disaster so they can get on the ship. But Zahra can’t begin to imagine what is waiting for her the House of Wisdom, and what the government might do to keep the secret buried.

A man wakes up alone and cold in a ship hurtling through space toward a destination he doesn’t know and for a purpose he cannot remember. But the halls of the spaceship aren’t empty — they’re populated by a monsters and by other survivors who might be even more dangerous. If he wants the answers to who he is and what has happened, he must survive the ship.

After an Earth-like planet is discovered orbiting around a nearby (“near” being relative in terms of space) star, ten astronauts are dispatched to find and explore it. Six of them are teenagers who have trained for this mission all their lives; the other four are veterans astronauts. The journey will take them 23 years of being locked in very claustrophobic quarters, with no one to rely upon but each other. And in space, something going wrong is inevitable.

The greatest medical advancement humanity has made in recent years is the repurposing of a humble parasite, the tapeworm, into a genetically engineered symbiont that protects us from illness, secretes medication, and heals injuries. Now, almost every human on earth has a custom-made, friendly tapeworm. But the parasites might not be the dumb organisms they were engineered to be…and they might want their own lives.

The illegal and experimental nano-drug Nexus can link human minds together, and it’s changed the face of the world. There are those who want to press the bounds of how far this connection can go, those who believe it must be stopped, and those who wish simply to exploit it. A young scientist trying to improve the effects of Nexus finds himself in the middle of a quiet war of international espionage, and the stakes are far greater than someone’s next high.

It’s a bad sign when Maria Arena wakes up in a cloning vat — it means that she’s died. And while every other time she’s come to in a new clone body, her last memory has been of her death, this time she can’t remember what killed her. Even more worrying is that she finds herself streaked with blood, and none of it is hers. The other six vats on the ship hold clones for her crewmates, and she soon finds she’s not the only one who has died recently….

In a world where memory is severely limited by how many days you can recall, society has been divided into the majority Monos, who have only a single day worth of memory, and the elite Duos who can recall two days. Monos are generally excluded from demanding jobs and holding important positions, and mixed marriages are rare. But one such marriage, between a Duo named Mark and a Mono named Clare seems to be an exemplar for how equality can be achieved…until Mark’s mistress is found murdered, and he’s considered the prime suspect.

Hana has been hidden in a secret room on the bioship Cyclo for her entirely life, cared for by her mother…until one day her mother and the rest of the crew disappears without warning. Cyclo tells her that she was abandoned…but the bioship itself has been abandoned in space to die. A mercenary named Fenn and his crew have been hired to monitor the ship’s death in a suicide mission, but when he meets Hana, he wants to find a way to save them both.