# The 10 Best Science Fantasy Novels of All Time

> Spaceships run on grammar, necromancers wear sunglasses, and a dying world still has a castle at the top. Some of these are Newbery classics, a few came out this year.

*By YPB Team · Published October 30, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-10-best-science-fantasy-novels-of-all-time*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Code and Codex**
   Yoon Ha Lee's 2026 space opera where a reality-bending language rules an empire and its Swan destroys every other tongue.
2. **Ninefox Gambit**
   Yoon Ha Lee's 2016 debut novel, in which calendar-driven 'exotic technologies' power a war fought with belief and mathematics.
3. **Gideon the Ninth**
   Tamsyn Muir's 2019 novel of necromancers and sword-swinging cavaliers solving a murder mystery in a decaying space palace.
4. **A Wrinkle in Time**
   Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 Newbery winner that sends Meg Murry across the universe by tesseract to rescue her father.
5. **The Fifth Season**
   N. K. Jemisin's Hugo-winning 2015 novel set on a far-future supercontinent where orogenes can still the earth's quakes.
6. **Light from Uncommon Stars**
   Ryka Aoki's 2021 novel mixing a violin teacher's deal with hell, a trans runaway prodigy and a family of alien refugees running a donut shop.
7. **Lord Valentine's Castle**
   Robert Silverberg's 1980 Majipoor novel about an amnesiac juggler on a colonized giant planet who may be its rightful ruler.
8. **Perdido Street Station**
   China Mieville's 2000 novel of New Crobuzon, a city of thaumaturgy, steam and monstrous slake-moths.
9. **This Is How You Lose the Time War**
   Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's 2019 epistolary novella about rival agents who fall in love across timelines.
10. **The Gunslinger**
   Stephen King's 1982 opener of The Dark Tower, following Roland Deschain across a world that has moved on.

Tags: fantasy, books, sci-fi