Best New Sci-Fi Books Summer 2026
Prepare to launch into hyperdrive with our highly anticipated summer book releases across the sci-fi and dystopian fiction genres. From mind-bending space operas and hard science puzzles to parallel dimensions, science fiction stretches the limits of human curiosity under the creative guidance of masters like Paul Tremblay and Joseph Eckert.
To help you map out a reading plan that aligns with your universe, our in-house editorial team has analyzed publisher promos, presales numbers and aggregate reviews from critics and advance readers to select the most creative and forward-thinking new releases for our visionary Galactic Guru Reader Type.
August 2026 Sci-Fi New Release Books
A Plagued Sea
by Kim Bo-Young - Sophie Bowman
First the flood
Next the sickness
Last the change
Visionary Korean author Kim Bo-Young unleashes a Lovecraftian nightmare of infection, transformation and abomination.
"[Kim Bo-Young's] fiction is a breathtaking piece of cinematic art." – Bong Joon Ho, Academy Award-winning director of Parasite
While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the danger, Mu-young boards the train with her niece: she'd rather face the earthquake than leave the girl in her mother's care. That choice haunts her for the rest of her life.
Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fishy monsters, and the government's lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Mu-young's niece is dead, and all that's left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble. Will Mu-young survive? Does she even deserve to?
Split Signal (Main)
by T. Davis Bunn
Peyton's migraines won't stop ... but they're not what they seem.
Peyton isn't convinced when Miami police declare her sister Evelyn's death part of a multiple suicide pact and close the case. So when the FBI reveal they believe Evelyn was murdered, and there could be a link to the recent FBI sting operation the sisters took part in, she agrees to work undercover at Etico, a California start-up turning the world of social media upside-down.
But Peyton is also experiencing uncontrollable migraines ... and they're becoming more frequent. Scientists are perplexed that her brain doesn't follow normal activity during a migraine attack. In fact, the two sides appear to be working independently of each other.
As alarming discoveries are made at Etico, Peyton is sure these are not only connected to her sister's death but also her migraines ... Can she find the missing link that will expose the truth?
An enthralling read for fans of twisty high-stakes thrillers, technothrillers and science fiction from Blake Crouch and Andy Weir.
The Divine Gardener's Handbook: Or What to Do If Your Girlfriend Accidentally Turns Off the Sun
by Eli Snow
DELUXE EDITION featuring beautiful sprayed edges!
WARNING: MAY CAUSE REBELLION, RADICAL GARDENING AND ROMANCE.
“Pure chaotic good.” -- Julie Leong, USA Today bestselling author of The Teller of Small Fortunes
The Divine Gardener's Handbook is a sapphic dystopian fantasy of botanical sabotage, a questionable god named Saul, and a woman falling for the person most likely to ruin her life.
In a Jenga-stacked megacity where glowing blue flowers hum in the dark and palace doors open into secret worlds, getting a job in the Divine Gardens is almost impossible--like being plucked from obscurity by a carnival claw machine. But Cyprin has spent her whole life trying.
Her only chance is winning the annual flower pageant, dominated for five years by Purcell: brilliant head gardener, unbearable rival and the one person Cyprin can't stop thinking about. When Cyprin cheats her way to victory, she's thrust into a world of sentient plants, ancient secrets, and a God who turns out to be just some exhausted man with a very good garden.
What begins as rivalry, heated, glaring and increasingly personal acts of warfare spirals into something much more dangerous. As rebellion spreads through the city and the truth beneath the Gardens begins to unravel, Cyprin and Purcell find themselves caught between ambition, obsession and the terrifying possibility of understanding each other completely.
Even if they burn the whole world down in the process.
The Divine Gardener's Handbook is perfect for readers who like their fantasy weird, heartfelt and a little unhinged.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario
by Matt Dinniman
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Join Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, as they fight fantastical creatures and deadly mobs to make it to the next level and build the kind of fan following the dungeon masters can't ignore in the second book in the smash-hit Dungeon Crawler Carl series--now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.
"Greetings, Crawlers! The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin."
The aliens have come, and they've transformed Earth into a multilevel, video game-like dungeon. It's the newest season of the galaxy's most watched game show, Dungeon Crawler World. Now on the third floor, Carl and Donut have to fight harder than ever. They've already proven that a Coast Guard vet and once-and-forever feline royalty are an almost unstoppable team. Their ratings are off the charts. Viewers can't get enough. But the dungeon gets more dangerous each day, and now there's a whole new problem to deal with: Quests.
They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered women rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose. Can Carl and Donut solve the mystery in time?
And can Carl finally find some pants?
Includes part two of the exclusive bonus story “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret.”
The Salt King
by Natasha Pulley
An apocalyptic novel about belief, religion and the power of myth that blends the gripping, end-of-the-world storytelling of The Passage with the biting wit and epic queer romance that makes Natasha Pulley's books "delightful" (The Washington Post).
Jesuit priest Avelyn Brocken was born into a mining family in Hreodwater, a small, totally isolated salt town in the Fens of England. At age 16, he fled, abandoning his faith in the god of the mine-the Salt King-and the mythology that killed his whole family.
When a fellow priest is miraculously healed only to then be turned to salt after a visit to Hreodwater, Avelyn is sent by the Vatican to investigate. But in Hreodwater, the town's gentle doctor, Jericho, tells him that the priest is not the only one experiencing strange cures-and may not be the only one in danger from a substance in the mine that the locals call "salt light."
Avelyn and Jericho team up to protect the world from the salt light-but they may already be too late: strange happenings are occurring at mines all around the world. At an archaeological dig on the Dead Sea, electrical devices froth salt; at another salt mine in Russia, a KGB officer finds the bodies of five tourists who seem to have turned to salt; and at the huge salt works at Wieliczska in Poland, all communication is lost, and rumors circulate of total annihilation.
As salt light spreads, devastating cities around the world, Avelyn must decide what and who to believe-and whether his faith is strong enough to withstand an apocalypse.
The Infinite State: Book One of the Decurion Saga
by Richard Swan
In this blistering science fiction epic, international bestselling author Richard Swan presents a thrilling tale of survival and an eviscerating examination of totalitarianism.
THE INFINITE STATE begins at a flashpoint in the lives of a widowed party member, a disgraced investigator and a hypersled pilot entangled in a plot to escape the suffocating authority of a fascist state.
WHO GIVES YOU LIFE?
PATER AETERNUS.
Katherine Fuller's husband is dead. As an esteemed member of Pater Aeternus--governing party of the fascist, galaxy-spanning Decurion Empire--he has left behind an estate of immeasurable wealth. And Katherine is going to inherit it.
WHO GIVES YOU PURPOSE?
PATER AETERNUS.
Life under the Eternal Father is rigidly stratified, surveilled and controlled, each new day to be endured, not lived. But with Katherine's newfound fortune, she is presented with a rare and dangerous opportunity: purchase a virgin world, and create a better, fairer society.
WHO GIVES YOU JOY?
PATER AETERNUS.
But the Empire cannot allow its wayward daughter to succeed. And as Katherine works in secret, recruiting allies she's not even sure she can trust, she will discover exactly how far Pater Aeternus is willing to go to stop her. Because Katherine is going to create something nobody has seen for many years.
A democracy.
I Punched an Alien and Now We're in Couples Therapy
by Kimberly Lemming
A zany and sexy romance about a woman who finds herself stranded on a far-off planet and mated to the warlord alien king, from USA Today bestselling author Kimberly Lemming.
It's not in Blair's nature to just give up. Not when she's beamed up to a spaceship and then dropped on an alien planet. Not even when she's in the middle of a forest fire surrounded by dinosaurs. And definitely not when she's captured by an arrogant alien king. If King Osid thinks he can break her, he's in for a shock. Blair lives by one motto: If you stay ready, you never have to get ready.
But absolutely nothing could have prepared her for finding out that she's that arrogant King Osid's mate.
Despite recent hiccups, the alien researchers are determined to get their breeding program back on track. With that in mind, Blair and Osid are bundled off to the research center for what they're told is couples counseling. As they face a series of increasingly dangerous challenges, it soon becomes clear the research aliens may have confused an episode of The Bachelor with Survivor. Bonding over their common enemy, and shall we say ... encouraged by love darts, Blair and Osid let down their walls (and take off their clothes). When they discover that there are somehow even more secret plans in the works, another hilarious, steamy, over-the-top adventure is in store.
July 2026 Sci-Fi New Release Books
We Were Forbidden
by Jacqueline Harpman - Ros Schwartz
From the bestselling author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling trio of novellas (translated into English for the first time) each plumbing the depths of that vital human instinct: defiance.
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.
Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe--her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.
Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.
These novellas, the first works by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades, reveal her incredible stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice.
Mudlark
by Mary Helen Specht
A dazzling dystopian novel about the fall of a troubled rockstar, her long-lost solo album and her daughter's epic search for redemption in the ruins of New York City.
"Combines the spellbinding worldbuilding of Station Eleven with a rock-and-roll heart . . . A luscious, awe-inspiring and gorgeously written novel about love and how it will save us, no matter what the future holds."--Amanda Eyre Ward
Jenny Sweet's marriage is ending--and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.
Now 25, Neko is a mudlark: a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother's long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it -- someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade -- she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother's fate -- and her own.
A profound tale of resilience set in a future wracked by calamity and buoyed by hope, Mudlark is an unforgettable novel that explores how love and art persist as beacons of humanity.
The Red Woman on Mars
by Claire Barner
A Pride and Prejudice retelling, perfect for those looking for a mashup of sci-fi and Bridgerton and speculative romances like The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.
Vivian Bowen left Earth for Mars, seeking safety and a fresh start after seven long years trapped in a climate refugee camp. She's determined to fulfill her contract as a Red Mother by selecting a Martian partner and bearing genetically modified children to fund her family's survival back on Earth. In sixty days, everything will be secure.
But beneath the glamorous lifestyle of the Martian oligarchs, with luxurious gowns, lavish balls and charming suitors, lies a dark reality. The Red Mothers initiative is controlled by the Intelligence, an AI worshipped as a god, who is indifferent to the pain and suffering the Red Mothers will experience as they carry out their contractual duties.
The last thing Vivian expects is to be drawn to Xavier Dorsey, a charismatic and infuriating Martian politician hell-bent on shutting down the Red Mothers initiative. As Xavier pushes her to imagine a life beyond mere survival, Vivian is torn between her obligation to her family and her own evolving dreams of a different future.
When her younger sister is seduced by a dangerous Martian soldier and breaks her contract--threatening the lives of their family back on Earth--Vivian is forced to act. Joining forces with Xavier and the Intelligence to rescue her sister by infiltrating an enemy Martian dome, Vivian discovers a strength and power inside herself she never knew she had.
Caught between the security she's always craved and a future filled with passion and uncertainty, Vivian must decide how much she's willing to sacrifice for freedom and for love.
The Delivery: A Novella
by Gregg Andrew Hurwitz
From the New York Times bestselling author of the Orphan X series comes a tense novella, a psychological thriller about an AI companion that will do anything to serve, with terrifying consequences.
Rebecca and Mark Higgins are doing their best to hold their family together. She's healing from the pain of a miscarriage, he's drowning in pressure at work, and their neurodivergent daughter, Maddy, needs all the care she can get. So when a cutting-edge tech company offers the perfect solution, they jump at the chance. And they welcome “Mr. Man,” a humanoid AI companion, into their home.
Designed to anticipate their needs, he's like a miracle at first. The house runs like clockwork. Meals appear on the table. And Maddy thrives under his patient attention. But when inexplicable tragedies start to strike the neighborhood, Rebecca glimpses a darker pattern at play.
Each incident is an answer to an unspoken fear, each kindness shadowed by violence. Mr. Man isn't just following instructions--he's anticipating what they want. Even the things they never dared to say. And if he's executing their darkest desires, it's their responsibility to stop him...at any cost.
Not with a Bang
by Temi Oh
Station Eleven meets Leave the World Behind in this family drama at the end of the world about a crumbling household's attempts to find their way back to each other amidst a cataclysmic event.
"Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it."
The Minton family is in crisis. After losing his job, Marcus begins stockpiling cans, running evacuation drills and digging a doomsday bunker in the back garden. At the same time, his daughters are unravelling in their own ways. Chantale is being haunted by dreams of disaster, and Briar's obsession with a missing classmate draws her deeper into the seductive world of a UFO cult. Meanwhile, no one is aware of the diagnosis their mother has been trying to keep hidden.
When, on the morning of the eldest daughter's wedding, an extinction-level event tears the world apart, the Mintons must fight their way through a devastated city -- back to safety, survival and each other.
The Felicity Complex
by August Clarke
Annie Bot meets Fallout in this dystopian satire: six women created in a lab, designed to serve the billionaires of the future in a luxury fallout shelter, rebel against their programming after the end times arrive.
Welcome to the Felicity Complex! Constructed during the height of the Cold War, our unique hotel is prepared to protect you, the billionaire class, from nuclear annihilation! Shielded from radiation and supplemented with closed air systems and hydroponic gardens, this resort bunker offers a prime existence underground: full gymnasium and spa, gourmet meals, top-tier medical care and the best entertainment.
Meet Hallelujah! Grown in a lab and educated in the ways of concierge hospitality, she believes in her duty to comfort the Lord-anointed refugees of the apocalypse. (Even if her lover Anastasia disagrees. Even if her creator Dr. Younghusband is disappointed in her.) Don't worry--everyone is safe from communists in the Felicity Complex!
Look, Hallelujah, guests have finally arrived! Hallelujah and her sister specimens have waited ages for you. Never mind the secrets other rich survivalists may be hiding. Just make sure they don't notice the violent intentions behind our staff's wide, wide smiles...
A sendup of traditional womanhood and lampooning the paranoias of the elite, The Felicity Complex questions the ambitions behind the entitled few who plan for the end times--and who truly survives them.
The Demon Star
by Jesse Aragon
"Mythic, propulsive and rich with characterization, The Demon Star is one hell of a debut." – Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of the Red Rising series
On a ruined planet oppressed by eldritch gods, a rebel leader forces his son to become the vessel of a god-killing demon. Caught in a conflict spanning galaxies and millennia, two unlikely allies must decide whether to save the child, their world, or themselves.
The otherworldly religious conflict of Dune, the cosmic strangeness of Gideon the Ninth and the heart-pounding action of Red Rising converge in this horror-tinged epic science fantasy debut
Ysira Naktis was a human sacrifice, destined for death. But unlike the thousands "harvested" each year, she did the unthinkable. She survived--and what she brought back with her could rewrite the fate of her civilization.
When Ysira's son is chosen for demonic possession, she is faced with a choice: allow him to harness cosmic power at an unspeakable cost or doom millions to save him. She finds an unlikely ally in Brother Jacen Kheris, once a gifted exorcist, now an addict desperate for purpose.
From a demon-haunted canyon to a starbound satellite, they must battle their way through cultists, aliens and the gods themselves. The truths they unearth send them hurtling down a path that can only lead to apocalypse.
Affairs of State
by Calvin James
A lavish vortex of politics and romance among the stars. Levar Boylan is hurled into a world of diplomatic galas and impossibly high stakes to rekindle things with his lover, the demon empress Astrid.
A deft, witty and sexy read for fans of A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell.
In this sweeping story of high-stakes romance and cut-throat politics amongst the stars, dashing junior supply officer Levar Boylan finds himself unceremoniously pulled from the front lines to serve as a diplomat for abruptly arranged peace talks with the Empire. All because he once dated an Imperial baroness.
Levar gets more than he bargained for when his former lover, Astrid, is revealed as the reigning Demon Emperor and despite the years, the war, and their difference in rank, their mutual attraction still burns bright.
The re-ignited relationship with the towering, horned Emperor threatens to drown the lovelorn soldier in a whirlpool of conflicting agendas. Levar's superiors suspect his loyalty is waning, while Astrid hopes he will abandon the defeated Commonwealth to become an Imperial noble. As sinister schemes bubble to the surface, Levar must dodge assassins, outfox kidnappers and battle militant insurgency to save his country, his love and his life.
Icefall: The Rise of the Nine
by Michael Newman - Jon Land
“Dynamic characters headline this exhilarating fusion of action and alien horror.” – Kirkus Reviews
A team of superbeings are all that stands between Earth and total annihilation at the hands of a predatory alien species.
An alien ship crashed into Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier 150,000 years ago and froze within the ice...until glacial melting thawed out its deadly inhabitants in the present day.
Kai and Jules Bevins, both professors of astrobiology at Caltech, are roused from their home and whisked away to the site where a special division of the army has taken charge. But not before something escaped through a breach in the hull.
Meanwhile, a pair of Alaska state troopers locate a missing Amazon driver fifteen miles away on the Juneau Icefield and trace his movements to a nearby village with a population of less than fifty. Arriving in town, they are greeted by the bodies of villagers who were killed in an impossible, horrific way.
Thousands of miles away, under a remote archaeological find in Pakistan, the Nine--a team of superbeings placed on Earth a million years ago by intergalactic colonizers that seeded our planet to create human life--are lifted from their long slumber. The kind of threat they've been waiting for has finally come.
The Nine find unexpected allies culled from the ancient history of their home world in the form of a teenage boy and godlike entity. All this leads to a confrontation on a volcanic island that will determine the fate of civilization, even as the Nine uncover the shattering truth behind their own tragic paths and learn of a much greater battle to come. Will they be enough to stem the apocalyptic menace threatening all of mankind?
June Sci-Fi Book Releases
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
by Paul Tremblay
Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers in this genre-bending near-future tech nightmare that is as bitingly funny as it is horrifically believable from the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie.
Meet Julia Flang, a 20-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle and working two jobs she doesn't like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world's largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can't refuse. One sham interview later, she's offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state -- one with proprietary AI implanted in his head -- from California to the East Coast.
To sum up in Julia's own words: "You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country." In a word, yes. But he's not dead dead.
Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he's trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn't remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can't remember.
Using a cellphone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls "Bernie" from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was -- and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.
Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a heady, horrific genre-bender from one of the most groundbreaking voices in fiction today.
How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information
by Thomas S Mullaney
NONFICTION - When world-renowned scholar Thomas S. Mullaney "lost" both his parents, he began thinking of how information -- all the stuff that makes us, that we make, and that we leave behind -- ultimately disappears.
The information that makes up our lives, from mundane official documents, poignant family photos and sentimental artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes, both defines us, and inevitably decays, no matter the medium. Everything that we put "in formation" eventually collapses into randomness. Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent's death. Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made.
How We Disappear is a wide-ranging examination of the micro and macro, toggling between storytelling from Mullaney's own life and his reflection on the science of entropy and the nature and history of information. Lyrical and poignant, the book offers inspiring and eye-opening insight on the miracle of existence and on what it means to forge meaning from a chaotic universe.
Sublimation
by Isabel J Kim
A most-anticipated title from USA Today, Glamour, LitHub, New Scientist, Time Out, The Nerd Daily, Goodreads, Library Journal, LibraryReads, Bookstr and more!
"One of the best debuts of the year." -- John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of Starter Villain
Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you'd sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.
The border cuts you in two. When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.
Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at 10 years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.
She doesn't know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life. How far would you go to live the choice you didn't make?
"After Sublimation, the immigrant story will never be the same." -- Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Traveler
by Joseph Eckert
The Traveler is the story of a reluctant time-traveler, his extraordinary son and the bond between them that even millennia cannot break. An adventure full of heartbreak, hope and futures beyond imagination.
It's a day like any other when Scott Treder first jumps forward through time. One moment, he's on his way to work, fingers drumming the steering wheel. The next, he's tumbling headlong down the road, his car gone, a dozen panicked voicemails from his wife waiting on his cell.
7:51 a.m. Monday, April 13th. A blink of an eye.
7:52 a.m. Tuesday, April 14th. An entire 24 hours, gone.
This one moment -- this first spontaneous slip -- marks a change in the course not only of Scott's future, but that of the world. From this point on, at precisely 7:52 a.m. every morning, Scott inexplicably travels forward in time in ever-doubling intervals. First one day lost in a blink, then two, then four, until weeks, even years, are passing him by in an instant.
Meanwhile, his wife is left alone to pick up the pieces of the life they once shared, and before long, Lyle, Scott's genius 7-year-old son, will surpass him in age.
Because while his dad is rocketing forward in time, Lyle is growing up-graduating early, studying at Berkeley, becoming the foremost scholar of quantum physics, all in an attempt to bring his father back … Meet an extraordinary father and son in this captivating, heart-wrenching speculative debut.
Related Recommendations: For more titles to add to your TBR, check out our list of the Best New Sci-Fi Books for Spring 2026. If you enjoy a little bit of magic with your otherworldly adventures, check out our Dragon Slayer Reading Recommendations.