Sci-fi story not set in space – Extreme Reader 2025Like this list

27 items

• Afterglow

  Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors

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  Hopeful and forward-looking futuristic short stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need.

• Akira

  Ōtomo, Katsuhiro, 1954-

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  In Neo-Tokyo, built on the former site of Tokyo after World War III, two teenagers are targeted by agencies after they develop paranormal abilities.

• Annihilation

  VanderMeer, Jeff,

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  Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Cake Eater

  Dahlin, Allyson,

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  In the year 3070, App sensation, style icon, and social influencer Marie Antoinette arrives in Versailles to marry Louis-Auguste and together, after witnessing people outside of their gilded world suffering and starving, risk everything to set…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The City Inside

  Basu, Samit,

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  The City Inside, a near-future epic by the internationally celebrated Samit Basu, pulls no punches as it comes for your anxieties about society, government, the environment, and our world at large-yet never loses sight of the hopeful potential of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Early Departures

  Reynolds, Justin A.,

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  What if you could bring your best friend back to life--but only for a short time? Jamal's best friend, Q, doesn't know that he died, and that he's about to die again. He doesn't know that Jamal tried to save him. And that the reason they haven't…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Echo Wife

  Gailey, Sarah,

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  When they said all happy families are alike, I don't think this is what they meant...' Evelyn Caldwell's husband Nathan has been having an affair - with Evelyn Caldwell. Or to be exact, with a genetically cloned replica. After a morning that begins…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Frankenstein

  Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

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  Eager science student Victor Frankenstein uses body parts of the dead to bring a creature to life. Although initially excited that his experiment is a success, Frankenstein becomes horrified at the grotesque being that stands before him and flees.…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Hum

  Phillips, Helen, 1981-

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  After losing her job to artificial intelligence, May, in a city populated by intelligent robots called "hums," takes her family on a three-night respite to the Botanical Garden, a rare green refuge, where her children come under threat, and she is…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Iron Widow

  Zhao, Xiran Jay,

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  The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall of China. It doesn't matter that the girls die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Kindred

  Butler, Octavia E.,

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  Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Leave the World Behind

  Alam, Rumaan,

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  Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Light at the Bottom of the World

  Shah, London,

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  Teenaged Leyla McQueen, who lives beneath the ruins of a submerged London in 2099, joins a prestigious submersible race in the hope of clearing her father's name before encountering government corruption and a hidden world.

• The Marrow Thieves

  Dimaline, Cherie, 1975-

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  In a future world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's indigenous population - and it is their marrow that…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Never Let Me Go

  Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954-

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  Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But curiously,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Our Wives Under the Sea

  Armfield, Julia,

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  Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Phoenix Extravagant

  Lee, Yoon Ha,

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  Gyen Jebi isn't a fighter or a subversive. They just want to paint. One day they're jobless and desperate; the next, Jebi finds themself recruited by the Ministry of Armor to paint the mystical sigils that animate the occupying government's…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Psalm for the Wild-built

  Chambers, Becky,

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  In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk & Robot series gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Robopocalypse

  a Novel

  Wilson, Daniel H. (Daniel Howard), 1978-

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  Two decades into the future humans are battling for their very survival when a powerful AI computer goes rogue, and all the machines on earth rebel against their human controllers.

• The School for Good Mothers

  Chan, Jessamine,

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  Set in near-future America, The School for Good Mothers introduces readers to a government-run reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence. Protagonist Frida Liu, a 39-year-old…Read moreRead more of this annotation