12 Best Space Books

Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a mission accident leaves him presumed dead and completely alone. With limited supplies and no easy way to contact Earth, he uses botany, engineering, and dark humor to improvise a way to stay alive long enough for rescue.

Roach looks at the unglamorous side of space travel, from zero gravity sickness to toilets, isolation, and crash tests. It is a funny, deeply reported tour of what the human body can, and cannot, handle off Earth.

Michael Collins recounts the training and spaceflights that brought him from test piloting to Gemini 10 and Apollo 11. Personal observations of colleagues, spacecraft, and Earth combine technical detail with the tensions, humor, and emotions of early space exploration.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, bewildered everyman Arthur Dent is whisked into deep space by his friend Ford Prefect and the starship Heart of Gold, stumbling into a funny tour of an indifferent universe.

Cosmos takes readers from the birth of stars and planets to the rise of life on Earth. Sagan blends astronomy, history, and philosophy into an accessible story about how we came to understand the universe and our small place within it.

From a prehistoric encounter with a mysterious monolith to a crewed mission to Jupiter controlled by the HAL 9000 computer, this novel traces key steps in human evolution. When HAL begins to malfunction, astronaut Dave Bowman must survive—and face whatever intelligence planted the monoliths.

On the desert planet Arrakis, young Paul Atreides must survive betrayal, master the lethal ecology of the sandworms, and lead the Fremen in a struggle over the spice melange, a drug that underpins galactic power, prophecy, and trade.

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he is there. As he pieces together his past and the crisis threatening Earth’s sun, he must solve a staggering scientific mystery, and he may not be the only one fighting to survive.

Stephen Hawking introduces questions about the universe's beginning, its possible fate, and the nature of time. He explains black holes, relativity, and quantum ideas for general readers, connecting familiar physical concepts with the puzzles of cosmology.

Drawing on decades as a test pilot and astronaut, Chris Hadfield shares how he chased an impossible dream and what spaceflight taught him about preparation, teamwork, risk and perspective, turning behind-the-scenes stories into practical lessons for everyday life.

During China's Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie secretly contacts the unstable world of Trisolaris. Decades later, nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao uncovers a deadly conspiracy through a baffling VR game and a global breakdown of fundamental physics.

Hari Seldon's science of psychohistory predicts the Galactic Empire's collapse. He establishes a Foundation on distant Terminus to preserve knowledge and shorten the coming dark age, leaving successive generations to face crises involving religion, trade and political power.