Best New Sci-Fi, Dystopian Fiction & Graphic Novels
Prepare for liftoff into the deep unknown and distant future with this guide to the best new sci-fi books coming out this fall. As a Galactic Guru, you know that there’s no better time to ponder the cosmos and dystopian worlds as the weather grows cooler.
Our editors have personally reviewed librarian recommendations, presales numbers and critical reviews to bring you the best of the best new releases. Whether you enjoy speculative fiction, space operas or dystopian thrillers, we have the perfect read for you. Transport your reading list to another dimension with these top-rated new sci-fi books. We are the titles that our book lovers recommend.
Sci-Fi New Release Books September 2026
Buzzard
by Inez Ray
An urgent and electrifying must-read with shades of Octavia Butler and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Library journal calls it “a modern cousin of The Handmaid's Tale.”
In 2086, corporations are monitoring fertility. Abortion is illegal. And the last woman alive who can perform the procedure is in hiding.
Seven years ago, midwife Mae Bastet was arrested for infanticide in the fractious Arizona Territory for providing health care to women in need. She was torn from her sons and sent to Buzzard--an experimental private prison deep in the Sonoran Desert, run by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan.
Desperate to reunite her family, Mae tries to keep her head down, swallow her prison-issued hormone supplements, and do her job as a glorified school nurse to Obsityan's army of teenage drone pilots. But when mysterious, improbable pregnancies begin cropping up in her charges, she uncovers a web of secrets that has the power to destroy Obsityan. Mae must choose: stay complicit in Obsityan's crimes or hold fast to her midwife principles and risk never seeing her sons again.
Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian debut that traces the possible trajectory of our current political and technological reality--and the power of our deepest human bonds.
Exit Party
by Emily St John Mandel
The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman--a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State--searches for answers.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party.
The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party's host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon.
An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
Helium
by Dave Kenney
Will wonders never cease? Joan has a gravity problem-and she's desperate to keep it hidden. Haunted by a loss too heavy to bear, she drifts to Palomar Gardens, a tiny Southern California commune where hope hovers and teases. Here she encounters George, a charismatic mystic whose lofty visions will soon captivate the world.
Drawn into George's orbit, Joan finds her footing. But the line between wonder and deception is thin, and her hold on reality slips. Improbable machines appear in the sky, only to vanish without explanation. Beautiful lies masquerade as truth. Her secret unmoors with consequences she cannot foresee.
Helium is a story of faith, folly, and the fragile human longing to touch the stars-of searching for a place in the cosmos where the possible and the impossible carry equal weight.
"A story about flying saucers, burgeoning cult leaders, and a heartbroken woman with a fantastical gift, Helium is a mesmerizing historical novel." -Clarion Reviews, 5/5 stars
"Enthralling literary fiction [...] the kind of book you devour." - Independent Book Review
"Engaging [...] a skillfully written, multi-dimensional tale." - BlueInk Review
"Strange, sorrowful, and luminous." - Literary Titan, 5/5 stars
Incarnate
by Alma Katsu
From beloved horror maven Alma Katsu comes a terrifying reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the internet age.
"Electric ... A deliciously addictive techno-horror that you can't look away from." -- Kylie Lee Baker, author of Japanese Gothic
Beauty doesn't fade. It feeds.
Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation.
Isabella. An impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy's artistry is brilliant, and Isabella seems so real that she garners millions of followers. But everybody knows overnight success doesn't just happen. And when someone gets a little too close to the truth, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she's willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets.
A modern reimagining of a classic tale, Alma Katsu's Incarnate is an illuminating, haunting tale of algorithmic worship and beauty that can kill.
Ply
by Hernan Diaz
"Ply is majestic. A cracked mirror world, a lot like ours; peopled by survivors, a lot like us; sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control." -- David Mitchell
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination
Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature.
Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a "pincher," someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It's a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.
After rewriting America's past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind.
Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.
Scion
by James Islington
John Wick meets Ghost in the Shell in this fast-paced cyberpunk thriller by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few.
My job, when you think about it, isn't so different from a lot of people's.
The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the "killing people" part of it, I guess, but that's a them problem: it's been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realized they had a way to live forever--limited resources be damned--there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent.
So, sure, I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I'm really only clocking in to try to crawl out from beneath my debts. But someone's got to do it.
Luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at doing it.
Still. This next job ... I don't know. It's something I haven't had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way.
I'm sure it'll all go totally fine though.
The Strangers
by Naomi Alderman
From the bestselling author of The Power comes a part memoir, part speculative novel, following a writer wrestling with grief even as a new species is discovered, forcing humans to reconsider what it means to share our planet.
They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere.
A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents' home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these "mimmoths" are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they've come from.
As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief--a place with its own logic and rhythms--the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.
Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to 'mimmoth psychosis'? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?
From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It's like nothing you'll have read before.
Under Story
by Chloe Benjamin
The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story--and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin's place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.
"We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday."
At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she's ever known. For 10 hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can't escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice--and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo--her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive.
And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them--to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.
Related Books Recommendations
If you enjoy fantasy, romantasy and epic world building, don't miss our Dragon Slayer Reading Guide. For more great sci-fi, speculative fiction and dystopian novels to add to your TBR, check out our Galactic Guru Book Recommendations for Summer 2026.