We may not be able to predict what the future holds or what life on other planets will look like, but one thing is for certain: there’s bound to be jeopardy.
While catastrophe is certainly not ideal in real life (though it seems, of late, difficult to escape it), it is the backbone of the thriller genre. Wartime machinations, engineered pandemics, a good old-fashioned chase—it gets our hearts racing.
And the only thing that could make that taste of action even more exciting is the wonderful genre crossover of thrillers and science fiction.
For a taste of just how exciting the future can be, here are eight of our favorite hard sci-fi thrillers.
The Andromeda Strain
Back in 1969, long before he’d set cloned dinosaurs chasing after people, Michael Crichton wrote this gripping and chilling novel that’s presented as an official government report.
It begins, in classic fashion, with a UFO crashing in (where else?) New Mexico. Investigators rushing to the crash site find all the local people are dead.
But what has killed them?
Soon a team of elite scientists are battling to understand and destroy an extra-terrestrial micro-organism that appears intent on wiping humanity off the face of the earth.
The Caves of Steel
Set a millennia in the future when the Earth is so densely populated it causes claustrophobia, Asimov’s robot classic from 1953 sees New York City detective Elijah Baley investigating the murder of a visitor from one of Earth’s planetary colonies.
To pursue the killer, Baley is sent to the outer worlds, where he’s paired up, much against his better judgement, with a new assistant, R. Daneel Olivaw. Daneel is a “positronic” robot programmed for logical deduction.
Stranger yet, it seems that the chief suspect is the man who created him. Could the solution to the crime somehow lie in Daneel’s circuitry?
A quirky and exciting future noir from one of the greats of science fiction.
Neuromancer
Published in 1984, Gibson’s futuristic heist novel featuring ace computer hacker Case was so far ahead of its time it’s hard to fathom if the author was imaging what the world would come to look like, or actually shaping the future.
The Canadian-American's debut thriller is the place you’ll find the first use of the word ‘cyberspace’. It also introduces the concept of the the matrix, in which the virtual world and the physical world are interwoven.
Inspired by 1930s pulp detective fiction and filled with recognizable slacker characters, Neuromancer is a cyberpunk gem.
Chasm City
British writer Alastair Reynold’s award winning 2001 novel features security expert Tanner Mirabel. He’s travelled to Chasm City to avenge the death of the wife of one of his clients, murdered by a man named Reivich, who claims to be immortal.
The city was once considered the peak of human civilization, but is now a place of plague, desolation, and medieval violence. Mirabel tracks his cunning foe through the extraordinary landscapes of the Glitter Band, while all the while succumbing to the mind-bending effects of the virus that has destroyed the city.
Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan’s hard-boiled interstellar private eye, Takeshi Kovacs, makes his debut in this brilliant 2003 novel set in the distant future.
Kovacs, a smart, cynical former elite soldier, is hired to investigate the slaying of a billionaire. The twist is that his client is the dead man himself—or at least his consciousness, which he’s had digitized and downloaded into a new body.
Sharply written and packed with more sex and violence than a Micky Spillane novel (Kovacs could be a distant relative of Mike Hammer, or perhaps his consciousness), it’s the first in an excellent trilogy.
Cash and Gravity
Perrin Pring’s genre-bending thriller fuses sci-fi, western, and a chase novel to astounding effect.
This work is set in a future in which six mega corporations and their private armies have supplanted the US government. The creation of a revolutionary fusion device that could bring interstellar travel within reach of mankind sparks an all-out war.
In the midst of the carnage, tough female marine Chevy Cole and a couple of unlikely—and possibly untrustworthy—accomplices attempt to smuggle the device across a violent and dangerous landscape to safety in Idaho, pursued all the while by murderous rivals.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Philip K. Dick’s superb and highly influential 1968 thriller is set on a dried out planet Earth where red dust blows in clouds around the tower blocks (Ridley Scott’s movie adaptation, Blade Runner, went for constant rain instead, but then Scott is from the north of England).
Six next generation androids have escaped from the colony on Mars and made it back to what they likely think of as home. Hard bitten bounty hunter Rick Deckard is hired by the LAPD to hunt them down and “retire” them.
Dick’s novel mixes classic hard-boiled pulp with meditations on what it means to be human. A genuine classic.
The Demolished Man
Bester won the first ever Hugo Award for a science fiction novel back in 1953 for this genre-spanning detective novel. Widely regarded as the first ever science fiction crime novel, The Demolished Man is set on a future Earth in which people can communicate telepathically.
The novel mixes the disquieting dystopian atmosphere of Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking hard sci-fi novel Brave New World with a plot straight out of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction—a murder at a house party during a game of sardines.
In a world in which people can read each other’s minds, how is the killer planning to get away with it?
Featured image: Mudassir Ali/Unsplash
