10 Science Fiction books to read in 2025

Holy shit. It’s 2025!

We made it. The future we read about in sci-fi books is actually here. 

Kind of. 

We don’t have the flying cars but we do have the pocket supercomputers.

We haven’t colonised other worlds, but we have opened a new frontier to virtual worlds.

And we have – touch dark matter – got here without triggering the apocalypse.

For now.

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And one of the BIG reasons we’ve made it this far is science fiction. It turns out that fusing leading ideas from science and philosophy into narrative structures is an essential survival quality for sentient life.

If we ever do contact the alien other I have no doubt they too will have scifi – just not as we know it.

Which is why I’ve thrown together this new year’s video of 10 science books to read in 2025.

Advance Warning : this isn’t a bunch of new books from publisher press releases “Coming in 2025”. These are the books I’m reading as research for the Science Fiction channel, some recent, many classic, that will be shaping the discussions in our community.

Also, this is a book video…so…you know, it’s just me talking…no fast cut video clips…and no…music…

It’s been a big year for the Science Fiction channel. On YouTube we’ve gained tens of thousands of subscribers and grown the regular viewership to over a quarter of a million people.

If you missed them I STRONGLY recommend catching up with three of the more serious video essays of this year. It’s statistically 12.7 times more difficult to get the Almighty Algorithm to notice a book related video.

So, you might have missed these videos on Stanislaw Lem surviving a Nazi firing squad, HG Wells’ historic meeting with Vladimir Lenin, and the feature length Hippies With Guns : The Culture of Iain M Banks

Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the modern day HG Wells. No other science fiction writer today produces such intensely original ideas. There are at least a dozen works of genius in the Roberts back catalogue, none of which have  won a Hugo award.

Just give Adam Roberts a Hugo already. It’s getting embarrassing! Like not giving Taylor Swift her Grammys.

Lake of Darkness is a space opera novel in which “Good is a construct and evil is a virus”. What does that mean? I don’t know yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out in 2025

The Running Man by Richard Bachman / Stephen King

Lee Pace has been carrying the dead parrot that is the Foundation streaming show on his muscular shoulders for two years now, so I’m happy to see him join Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man.

Shame he’s the villain.

My fellow scifi-tuber Moid of Media Death Cult has a great video on King as a master of SF writing. I suspect a new version of the Schwarzenegger classic is going to turn a lot of attention on the Horror masters sci-fi writing.

I think The Long Walk is also often missed as a King masterpiece. Both novelas are brutal deconstructions of consumer capitalism, and boy do we need those coming into 2025

Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination by Elana Gomel

The point of the Grandfather Paradox isn’t that you should avoid killing your grandfather. It’s that it’s a paradox, and paradoxes tell you that your model of time is BORKED

Elana Gomel is a leading academic in narratology and science fiction studies, who has published a number of papers on new conceptions of time in sci-fi storytelling.

These are academic texts so contact your local public or college library for a loan. The effort is well worth it for anyone who wants to think at the cutting edge of scifi. Remember when HG Wells basically defined time in the popular imagination with The Time Machine?

It’s time for one of you to redefine time in 2025.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM

Speaking of time

The Science Fiction channel has a mission. Not just to fan squee over every new Denis Villeneuve DUNE movie

But a mission to find the 21st century mythos

And a serious contender is There Is No Antimemetics Division, written by the pseudonymous QNTM as part of the SCP wiki, then a bestselling self-published novel

Antimemetics is the single most original and consciousness warping work of science fiction generated by the 21st century memeplex so far, sci-fi that redefines time itself

Now QNTM AKA Sam Hughes has signed a mainstream publishing deal, so I’m assuming we’ll see Antimemetics on bookshop shelves in 2025

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Remember when a nineteen year old goth girl invented science fiction because she was bored of being stuck in a villa with Shelley and Lord Byron?

Frankenstein is the science fiction novel most people have heard of but never read. Its epistolary style makes it hard going for modern readers conditioned to “television prose”.

But with a new Frankenstein movie from Guillermo del Toro I think many, many people are going to be talking about Frankenstein without reading it in 2025

Let’s be the ones to buck that trend

Eiruna by Brendan Myers

On one hand Brendan Myers’ Eiruna is set on a cruise-liner in space afflicted by an outbreak of psychic powers.

On the other hand Eiruna is set right in the here and now in our social media era of ego, paranoia, conspiracy theories and tribal politics.

Brendan Myers is a professor of philosophy and a Celtic bard poet who has indie published a string of high concept science fiction novels in recent years.

Eiruna is Myers hitting his full stride.

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land

Nick Land is the philosopher-prophet of the Accelerationist movement, worshipped by tech billionaires and neo-reactionaries since writing his guide to the Dark Enlightenment

But before he went properly mental Land was a serious philosopher of Kant, Marx and cybernetics at the legendary CCRU at Warwick university

Land’s early “theory fictions” collected in Fanged Noumena are heavily influenced by William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Imagine if Skibidi Toilet had a serious meaning and you’re starting to get the vibe of Land’s Meltdown

Another Now : Dispatches From An Alternative Present by Yanis Varoufakis

By definition our ideas of what a “better world” might look like are always fictions and fantasies. The only place Communism has ever or will ever exist is in our imagination. But visions can have potent political power.

So when one of today’s most powerful real world Marxist politicians writes a collection of science fiction stories, it’s something to take note of.

I haven’t read Yanis Varoufakis’ Another Now yet, but it’s on my list as an antidote to the fallen Marxism of Land. Are you spotting a socialist trend in my 2025 reads?

Let’s get into why.

WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin

My prediction for 2025 include the statement that our sci-fi future begins until late stage capitalism collapses. And I think this is the reason why socialism and Marxism are having a popular revival.

Which makes it essential to understand the huge failings if both. Yevgeny Zamyatin was an insider on the Russian revolution who quickly saw how Marxism was failing in practice.

WE is Zamyatin’s brutal critique of “scientific socialism” and the book which, perhaps, inspired Orwell’s 1984. It was censored and remained little known until quite recently

An essential read for 2025

The Electric State by Simon Stalenhag

And a final movie inspired recommendation. The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag, without contest the most influential sci-fi illustrator of the last decade, is getting a Netflix movie adaptation in March 2025

The Russo Brothers seem like the least likely directors to capture Stalenhags bleak and oblique graphic narratives, and with Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt starring it likely will be a very loose adaptation

But we can also just ignore the movie and use it as an excuse to meditate again on Stålenhags beautifully mundane sci-fi visions