As one of the most popular franchises in movie and TV history, Star Trek is not lacking for extensive and thoughtful source material.
As of November 2019, approximately 850 novels, short story anthologies, novelizations, and omnibus editions have been published.
Star Trek books are often ignored (sometimes rightly so) by review sites like Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, so you’ll have to decide for yourself if a certain book sounds like your cup of Earl Grey tea (hot).
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This YA book has a great premise: on a distant planet, in a town with only men, everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts. Todd, the youngest person in town and a month away from manhood, slowly learns that everyone is keeping a horrible secret from him. He is forced to flee with his only friend, a talking dog. They discover the most surprising thing Todd’s ever seen: a living girl.
The excellent books of The Expanse series are full of mystery, space battles, a strange alien material, and interplanetary politics. If you’ve burned through them (like I have) and want more, here are some books that might help scratch that itch.
If you haven’t read The Expanse, you’re in luck: you have lots of books in your future.
Max Brooks wrote my two favorite zombie books: The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. He did an amazing job of really thinking through what an actual zombie attack would look like, and how to defend against it. Neither of his books has a central narrative or protagonist, but they were still fascinating.
I believe this is from the Starfinder role-playing game.
It takes a deft hand to combine advanced technology and magic in a way that isn’t embarrassingly silly. These books do exactly that, or something close enough to earn a place on this list.
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Six Wakes is a good old-fashioned murder mystery in space that starts with everyone on the ship being murdered. Everyone’s backup clones then wake up to the bloody massacre and have to figure out who killed everybody and why. Any one of them could be the killer, and not even know it. As the clones appear to work together to piece together clues, secrets and ulterior motives slowly come to light.
The word “terraforming” was first coined by Jack Williamson in a science-fiction short story (“Collision Orbit”) published during 1942 in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Deliberately altering an entire planet’s atmosphere and environment would be, of course, the largest engineering achievement in the history of humankind, but science fiction excels at looking at such impossibly bold ambitions.
Sometimes, you’re just in a Dune mood, whether that means palace intrigue, epic quests, scheming villains, hostile planets, tough native populations, or wild aliens.
Recursion is a fun page-turner, but it’s a little too similar to the author’s previous (and excellent) book, Dark Matter. (My review here) Author Blake Couch seems particularly interested in the problem of experiencing alternate lives.
There’s a special, deep satisfaction when a great science fiction book becomes a great movie.