According to 90% of science fiction authors, the future is anything but bright. Since the genre’s inception, sci-fi’s best minds have been imagining the bangs and whimpers with which the world will end. Alien invasion. Climate disaster. Black holes. AI Takeover. The sun blowing up. Space fungus. The list goes on. If you’re looking for sci-fi thrill rides that don’t send you careening off a sad cliff in the end, strap in with these upbeat authors. They’ve written the 10 best sci-fi books with happy endings. Not those kind of happy endings, get your mind out of the spicy Booktok gutter.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
This Is how You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a sci-fi love story that, contrary to the way most queer literary love affairs turn out, doesn’t involve one or both lovers dying mega-sadly. An epistolary novel, Time War captures the correspondence between Red and Blue – two agents fighting in a temporal war for their respective faction. Written through real letters sent between the two authors, this novel follows Red and Blue’s romantic arc from bitter rivals to devoted diehards. Semi-spoiler alert: this novel will 100% fool you into thinking that it will end in tragedy, given the noble sacrifice one lover makes for the other. But take heart, dear reader, when adherence to time is more of a suggestion than a fundamental law of physics, anything is possible.
Check out the latest price for This Is How You Lose The Time War on Amazon here.
The Martian
You’ve seen the Hollywood movie with Matt Damon, you know how this novel ends. Andy Weir’s The Martian is the story of a Bostonian math genius raised in a rough part of town who meets a kindly therapist played by – wait that’s a different story. THIS story is about an astronaut stranded on a mission to Mars after his crew-mates mistakenly leave him for dead (wow guys). Alone on the Red Planet, our intrepid hero has to figure out how to survive – by growing potatoes in Martian soil and finding out a way to phone home E.T.-style. I couldn’t even grow a potato in regular Earth dirt. The fact that this guy can do it in zero atmosphere is optimistic enough. Spoiler alert: he makes it home. But it’s the journey, and not the destination that makes this novel so difficult to put down.
Check out the latest price for The Martian on Amazon here.
The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet
The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet is a novel by solarpunk/hopecore sci-fi stalwart Becky Chambers. If you’re looking for something cozy, queer and set in the hi-tech future, basically all of her novels fit the description. This book concerns a ragtag spaceship crew on a vessel charged with excavating wormholes throughout the stars to facilitate faster than light travel. But the plot is not about the mission, it’s about the people on the mission. Not the lightyears between stars, but the inches between hearts – human and extraterrestrial. Who are these people? Why did they sign up for this lonely job? How do they feel about each other? Spoiler alert: the answer to that last question by novel’s end is that they’re all finally part of a found family.
Check out the latest price for The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet on Amazon here.
Binti
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti is about one young woman’s dream to go to space college, which is quickly shattered by an alien attack. While hitching a ride one of the most competitive universities in the galaxy, young Bent’s vessel comes under assault from the Meduse – an jellyfish-esque alien race straight from Lovecraft’s imagination. Unlike most eldritch horrors, these aliens’ motivations are not only conceivable – they’re justified. After Binti befriends a Meduse, she learns that her soon to be alma mater is responsible for stealing a precious cultural artifact from the species – British Museum-style. While I wouldn’t call the novel fuzzy and feel-good, it’s an optimistic read in the end. Binti begins to bridge the divide between her another species and her own, so that both can walk hand in hand (tentacle?) towards healing.
Check out the latest price for Binti on Amazon here.
Contact
Written by ultimate sci-fi optimist Carl Sagan, Contact is a cherished piece of the titanic scientist’s literary legacy. It’s a story about Ellie, a child prodigy turned Harvard-grad who is hired to investigate why Adolf Hitler’s voice is ringing out beyond the stars. No, seriously. Humanity just picked up a retransmission of Hitler’s 1936 Olympic speech which, unfortunately, was the first TV signal to leave Earth’s atmosphere. Is Ellie dealing with space-Nazis? Thankfully, no – just an alien species that happened to tune in to a broadcast from humanity’s worst representative. After a technology arms race ensues between nations, Ellie attempts to lead her team towards to the final frontiers of science. Unlike more pessimistic literary views of human/alien relations, Contact‘s thesis is that the existence of aliens is a good thing. We’re not alone, after all.
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The Space Between Worlds
Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds is set in a grimdark future where corporations profit off of multiple realities, but don’t worry, things get better. Now that people can vault between parallel universes so long as their alternative selves are dead at the destination, big business has figured off a way to monetize this quantum physics quandary. Cara has been hired by a mega-corp due to her alternates’ exquisitely bad luck, most are dead in their wasteland worlds. Tasked with collecting off-world data for her superiors, Cars begins to consider tendering her resignation after one of her last few alternates dies under suspicious circumstances. Reading this novel feels like watching a successful class-action lawsuit go down in real time – except way more exciting and with less legal jargon. In the end, and unlike they do with taxes, the corporation pays.
Check out the latest price for The Space Between Worlds on Amazon here.
Redshirts
Named after the doomed side characters splattered across Star Trek‘s run, Redshirts satirizes one of sci-fi’s most recognizable tropes. The plot follows the space crew of the Intrepid, whose low-ranking members keep dying in increasingly bizarre and brutal circumstances. While most of the crew theorizes the ship is cursed, one man has another hypothesis: they’re all a part of a T.V. show, and scripted to die. A postmodern sci-fi story about a group of people who realize they’re living in the minds of a writers’ room, this novel features not one, but multiple endings – ranging from decently uplifting to totally optimistic. Not everyone will make it to season 2, but the ones that do are gonna stay alive until the series finale at least.
Check out the latest price for Redshirts on Amazon here.
Semiosis
Sue Burke’s Semiosis is a parable about plants, and why you shouldn’t trust them. That succulent on your windowsill? It’s plotting your downfall. After a group of colonists land on a steaming jungle planet, they begin to suspect that the local flora is watching them. After learning to communicate with a highly manipulative species of bamboo, their fears are confirmed. While the novel primarily centers around humanity’s relationship to a plant with the communication style of your worst ex, things take a turn for the better after the species’ put aside their differences to face down a greater foe. The enemy of my enemy is my houseplant after all. It’s essentially a non-downer version of The Ruins, which if you haven’t read, is one of the bleakest examples of human/plant relationships – those vines are toxic in every sense of the word.
Check out the latest price for Semiosis on Amazon here.
The Calculating Stars
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal is an alternate history sci-fi story where things turn out very bad for mid-century humanity, but get better as the decades march on. After a meteorite crashed into the East Coast (taking out most of the American government with it) mathematician and former pilot Elma York is called in to help the planet. In her estimation, the planet’s time has passed. After presenting her sobering climate change predictions to surviving politicians, the (new) president orders her to pursue a space colonist program. This is not a novel that ends in the salvation of the human race, but rather one woman’s successful attempt to overcome social adversity and launch into space as a female astronaut. It’s unsure if humanity will survive by novel’s end, but Elma thrives regardless.
Check out the latest price for The Calculating Stars on Amazon here.
All Systems Red
While The Murderbot Diaries by title alone sounds like a biography of bloodshed, the series’ first novel All Systems Red defies expectations to tell a story of human connection. Well, sort of human connection. Former security android “Murderbot” has decided to break from protocol and spend its time binging human soap operas, much to the surprise of the security corporation that designed it. As Murderbot slowly and secretly becomes autonomous, it begins to question its relationship to itself, its mission, and the human research team it has been assigned to protect. Following in the footsteps of Isaac Asimov’s robot-consciousness musings, All Systems Red is the a story of an artificial being’s attempt to live a real life – in quiet defiance of his handlers’ plans. Murderbot just wants to watch T.V. and be left alone, and while that might sound like a sad reality for some, nothing makes this robot happier.
Check out the latest price for All Systems Red on Amazon here.
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