Award
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are one of the most prestigious honors in science fiction and fantasy. Presented annually since 1953 by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), they recognize outstanding works from the previous year and reflect the evolving tastes of the genre’s global community. Earlier works—or years without awards—are recognized through the companion Retro-Hugo Awards.
2024
Best Novel
Some Desperate Glory
While we live, the enemy shall fear us.
Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the...
2023
Best Novel
Nettle & Bone
Marra never wanted to be a hero. As the shy, convent-raised, third-born daughter, she escaped the traditional fate of princesses, to be married away for the sake of an uncaring throne. But her sister wasn’t so fortunate—and after years of silence, Marra is done watching her suffer at the hands of a...
2022
Best Novel
A Desolation Called Peace
Teixcalaan, Book 2
An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options.
In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit...
2021
Best Novel
Network Effect
The Murderbot Diaries, Book 5
You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows?
And you're a sentient murder machine...
2020
Best Novel
A Memory Called Empire
Teixcalaan, Book 1
Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident—or that Mahit might be next...
2019
Best Novel
The Calculating Stars
Lady Astronaut, Book 1
A meteor decimates the U.S. government and paves the way for a climate cataclysm that will eventually render the earth inhospitable to humanity. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated timeline in the earth’s efforts to colonize space, as well as an unprecedented opportunity for a much...
2018
Best Novel
The Stone Sky
The Broken Earth, Book 3
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.
Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.
For Nassun,...
2017
Best Novel
The Obelisk Gate
The Broken Earth, Book 2
The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night. Essun—once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger—has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead, there is Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, with a request. But if Essun does what he asks, it would seal the...
2016
Best Novel
The Fifth Season
The Broken Earth, Book 1
This is the way the world ends. . . for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up...
2015
Best Novel
The Three-Body Problem
Remembrance of Earth's Past, Book 1
Amid the turmoil of China’s Cultural Revolution, a young physicist named Ye Wenjie makes a decision that will echo across decades—and beyond the boundaries of Earth itself. Years later, a series of strange and unsettling events begins to trouble the scientific community: experiments yield impossible...
2014
Best Novel
Ancillary Justice
Imperial Radch, Book 1
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
Now, an act of...
2013
Best Novel
Redshirts
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better...until Andrew...
2012
Best Novel
Among Others
Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins, but her mind found freedom in the science-fiction novels that were her closest companions.
When her...
2011
Best Novel
Blackout
Oxford Time Travel, Book 3
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees...
All Clear
Oxford Time Travel, Book 4
Stranded in the chaos of World War II London, a group of time-traveling historians from the future struggle to survive as history unfolds around them with relentless force. What began as a series of academic observations has turned into a desperate fight to endure the Blitz, with each of them cut...
2010
Best Novel
The City & The City
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have...
The Windup Girl
Anderson Lake is AgriGen’s Calorie Man, sent to work undercover as a factory manager in Thailand while combing Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories.
Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature....
2009
Best Novel
The Graveyard Book
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place—he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their ghostly teachings—such as the ability to Fade...
2008
Best Novel
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
In an alternate present where a temporary Jewish settlement was established in Alaska after World War II, the district of Sitka has become a vibrant, chaotic refuge—now on the brink of being dissolved. As the deadline for reversion looms, Detective Meyer Landsman, a weary and disillusioned homicide...
2007
Best Novel
Rainbows End
In the near future, technology has transformed the world into a seamless blend of physical and digital reality. Augmented vision overlays information onto everyday life, networks connect minds and machines, and knowledge is more accessible—and more controllable—than ever before. Robert Gu, once a...
2006
Best Novel
Spin
Spin, Book 1
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big...
2005
Best Novel
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England—until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity.
Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes...
2004
Best Novel
Paladin of Souls
Chalion, Book 2
Ista dy Chalion has known madness, loss, and the suffocating weight of a life not her own. Once a queen, now a widow, she finds herself trapped in a quiet existence defined by others’ expectations. Determined to reclaim her freedom, Ista sets out on a pilgrimage—seeking not only spiritual solace,...
2003
Best Novel
Hominids
The Neanderthal Parallax, Book 1
During a quantum physics experiment deep beneath the Earth, a scientist from a parallel universe is accidentally transported into our world. But this is no ordinary visitor—he is a Neanderthal from a reality where his species, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant form of intelligent life. Stranded...
2002
Best Novel
American Gods
Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.
But just days before his...
2000
Best Novel
A Deepness in the Sky
Zones of Thought, Book 2
After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds. The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap...
1999
Best Novel
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Oxford Time Travel, Book 2
Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between the twenty-first century and the 1940s in search of a hideous Victorian vase called “the bishop’s bird stump” as part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid.
But then Verity Kindle, a...
1998
Best Novel
Forever Peace
2043 A.D.: The Ngumi War rages, fought by “soldierboys”—the remote control war machines run by soldiers hundreds of miles away. Julian Class is one of these soldiers, and for him, war is indeed hell. The psychological strain of being jacked-in to his soldierboy—and the genocidal results—are becoming...
1997
Best Novel
Blue Mars
The Mars Trilogy, Book 3
The red planet is no more. Now green and verdant, Mars has been dramatically altered from a desolate world into one where humans can flourish. The First Hundred settlers are being pulled into a fierce new struggle between the Reds, a group devoted to preserving Mars in its desert state, and the...
1996
Best Novel
The Diamond Age
Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young...
1995
Best Novel
Mirror Dance
Miles Vorkosigan is used to living on the edge—but when his clone brother, Mark, takes matters into his own hands, everything begins to unravel. Desperate to prove himself and step out of Miles’s shadow, Mark launches a reckless mission to liberate a group of cloned soldiers from a brutal research...
1994
Best Novel
Green Mars
The Mars Trilogy, Book 2
Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed on Mars, and its transformation to an Earthlike planet is under way. But not everyone wants to see the process through. The methods are opposed by those determined to preserve their home planet’s hostile, barren beauty.
Led by the first...
1993
Best Novel
A Fire Upon The Deep
Zones of Thought, Book 1
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.
Nobody knows what strange...
Doomsday Book
Oxford Time Travel, Book 1
For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant...
1992
Best Novel
Barrayar
Vorkosigan Saga, Book 2
Sick of combat and betrayal, Cordelia Vorkosigan is ready to settle down to a quiet life. But when the Emperor dies, her husband Aral becomes guardian of the infant heir to the imperial throne of Barrayar and the target of high-tech assassins in a dynastic civil war.
But neither Aral nor Cordelia...
1991
Best Novel
The Vor Game
Vorkosigan Saga, Book 5
The Prince and the Mercenary.
Together, they can get into a lot of trouble. Trouble only the combined forces of the Free Dendarii Mercenaries can get them out of. At least, that's what they're hoping for....
In this latest adventure with the galaxy's craftiest mercenary leader, Miles starts out...
1990
Best Novel
Hyperion
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it.
In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through...
1989
Best Novel
Cyteen
On the planet Cyteen, humanity has mastered the science of cloning and psychological conditioning, creating a society built on the replication—and control—of human minds. At the center of this world stands Ariane Emory, a brilliant and controversial scientist whose work shapes not only the future of...
1988
Best Novel
The Uplift War
Uplift, Book 3
As galactic armadas clash in quest of the ancient fleet of the Progenitors, a brutal alien race seizes the dying planet of Garth. The various uplifted inhabitants of Garth must battle their overlords or face ultimate extinction.
At stake is the existence of Terran society and Earth, and the fate of...
1987
Best Novel
Speaker for the Dead
The Ender Saga, Book 2
Centuries after the events that made him both a hero and a pariah, Ender Wiggin lives on, traveling the stars under a new identity as a “Speaker for the Dead”—one who tells the truth of a person’s life after they are gone. When he is called to the remote colony world of Lusitania, Ender is asked to...
1986
Best Novel
Ender's Game
The Ender Saga, Book 1
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than...
1985
Best Novel
Neuromancer
Sprawl, Book 1
Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding...
1984
Best Novel
Startide Rising
Uplift, Book 2
The Terran exploration vessel Streaker has crashed in the uncharted water world of Kithrup, bearing one of the most important discoveries in galactic history.
Below, a handful of her human and dolphin crew battles armed rebellion and a hostile planet to safeguard her secret—the fate of the...
1983
Best Novel
Foundation's Edge
Foundation, Book 4
At last, the costly and bitter war between the two Foundations has come to an end. The scientists of the First Foundation have proved victorious, and now they return to Hari Seldon’s long established plan to build a new Empire on the ruins of the old. But rumors persist that the Second Foundation is...
1982
Best Novel
Downbelow Station
Pell Station stands as a fragile refuge at the edge of human space, a vital hub of trade and survival in a region torn apart by war. As the conflict between Earth and the breakaway Union intensifies, waves of displaced ships and desperate refugees flood the station, straining its resources and...
1981
Best Novel
The Snow Queen
Snow Queen, Book 1
The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter of the sea mers. But soon the galactic stargate will close, isolating Tiamat, and the 150-year reign of the Summer primitives will begin.
Their only chance at surviving the change is if...
1980
Best Novel
The Fountains of Paradise
Renowned structural engineer Dr. Vannevar Morgan seeks to link Earth to the stars—through the construction of a space elevator connecting to an orbiting satellite 22,300 miles from the planet's surface. The elevator would lift interstellar spaceships into orbit without the need of rockets to blast...
1979
Best Novel
Dreamsnake
On an Earth scarred by nuclear war, Snake harnesses the power of venom to cure illnesses and vaccinate against disease. The healer can even ease patients into death with the power of her dreamsnake. But she is not respected and trusted by all, and when she tries to help a sick nomad child, the...
1978
Best Novel
Gateway
The Heechee Saga, Book 1
Seeded among the stars are troves of valuable artifacts left behind by the enigmatic, long-vanished alien race called the Heechee. For the right price, anyone can climb aboard one of the abandoned Heechee spaceships, cast off on an autopilot voyage to parts unknown, and take a chance on finding...
1977
Best Novel
Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
As the world collapses under the weight of environmental disaster and societal breakdown, a small group of survivors retreats to an isolated valley, determined to preserve humanity at any cost. Their solution is radical: cloning. Free from disease, war, and the unpredictability of natural...
1976
Best Novel
The Forever War
The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand—despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away.
A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and...
1975
Best Novel
The Dispossessed
The Hainish Cycle, Book 5
Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—defined by warring nations, great poverty, and...
1974
Best Novel
Rendezvous With Rama
An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth’s solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama.
What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours....
1973
Best Novel
The Gods Themselves
In the twenty-second century, Earth obtains limitless, free energy from a source science little understands: an exchange between Earth and a parallel universe, using a process devised by the aliens. But even free energy has a price. The transference process itself will eventually lead to the...
1972
Best Novel
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Riverworld, Book 1
Sir Richard Francis Burton awakens on the banks of a vast and mysterious river—naked, bewildered, and very much alive. But Burton is not alone. Stretching endlessly along the river’s shores are billions of people drawn from every era of human history, all resurrected into a strange new world with no...
1971
Best Novel
Ringworld
Four travelers come to the ringworld. . .
Louis Wu: human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it.
Nessus: a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular...
1970
Best Novel
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Hainish Cycle, Book 4
When Genly Ai, an envoy from a vast interstellar alliance known as the Ekumen, arrives on the icy planet of Gethen, his mission is simple in theory: persuade its nations to join a wider community of worlds. But Gethen is unlike any place he has known. Its inhabitants are ambisexual, taking on male...
1969
Best Novel
Stand on Zanzibar
In a dangerously overcrowded near future, where corporations rival governments and information is weaponized, Norman Niblock House is rising fast within General Technics—one of the most powerful companies on Earth. Behind the scenes, his work is helping to orchestrate a bold and controversial move:...
1968
Best Novel
Lord of Light
On a distant colony world, a group of humans has remade itself into gods. Using advanced technology, they have taken on the identities and powers of the Hindu pantheon, ruling over the planet and controlling access to the very tools that could challenge their authority. For generations, they have...
1967
Best Novel
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
On a penal colony turned society on the Moon, life is harsh, resources are scarce, and authority is absolute. The lunar population—descendants of transported criminals and political exiles—live under the distant control of Earth, their labor exploited and their voices ignored. But when a quiet...
1966
Best Novel
Dune
Dune, Book 1
Set in a distant future among a vast interstellar empire, Dune follows Paul Atreides, the young heir to House Atreides, whose family is entrusted with the stewardship of Arrakis—the desert planet that is the only source of the universe’s most valuable substance: spice. This rare resource grants...
This Immortal
Conrad Nomikos has a long, rich personal history that he'd rather not talk about. And, as Arts Commissioner, he's been given a job he'd rather not do. Escorting an alien grandee on a guided tour of the shattered remains of Earth is not something he relishes-especially when it is apparent that this...
1965
Best Novel
The Wanderer
Without warning, a mysterious rogue planet appears in Earth’s sky, its immense gravitational pull unleashing catastrophic forces across the globe. Tides rise to monstrous heights, earthquakes shatter cities, and the fabric of everyday life collapses as humanity struggles to comprehend the scale of...
1964
Best Novel
Way Station
Enoch Wallace is not like other humans. Living a secluded life in the backwoods of Wisconsin, he carries a nineteenth-century rifle and never seems to age—a fact that has recently caught the attention of prying government eyes. The truth is, Enoch is the last surviving veteran of the American Civil...
1963
Best Novel
The Man in the High Castle
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names.
In this dystopian world, we meet characters like Frank Frink, a dealer of counterfeit Americana who is himself hiding his Jewish ancestry; Nobusuke Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister in San...
1962
Best Novel
Stranger in a Strange Land
Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and...
1961
Best Novel
A Canticle for Leibowitz
In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine...
1960
Best Novel
Starship Troopers
Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the...
1959
Best Novel
A Case of Conscience
A Case of Conscience follows Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit priest and biologist sent as part of a scientific expedition to the distant planet Lithia. There, the team discovers a civilization of reptilian aliens who live in a perfectly ordered, rational society—one that appears entirely free of...
1958
Best Novel
The Big Time
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you've had hints of the Change War. It's been going on for a billion years and...
1956
Best Novel
Double Star
Out-of-work actor Lorenzo Smythe is desperate for his next role when he is recruited for a job unlike any other: to impersonate one of the most powerful political figures in the solar system. What begins as a temporary assignment quickly spirals into something far more dangerous, as Smythe is drawn...
1955
Best Novel
They'd Rather Be Right
The story follows a group of scientists who develop Bossy, a computer capable of solving any problem—scientific, philosophical, or personal. However, the machine has a unique limitation: it only works for individuals who are psychologically capable of accepting its answers without resistance. For...
1953
Best Novel
The Demolished Man
In a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in seventy years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a ten-year death struggle with rival D'Courtney Enterprises.
Terrorized in his dreams by The Man With No Face and...