# The 36 Best Nebula Award-Winning Novels

> Six decades of the science fiction writers' own top prize sit side by side here, pairing pulp-era space epics with quiet literary fantasy and recent horror. Some winners became household names, while others are overdue for a second look.

*By YPB Team · Published November 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-36-best-nebula-award-winning-novels*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Dune** — score 1000/1000
   Frank Herbert's 1965 novel set on the desert planet Arrakis, the first winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
2. **The Left Hand of Darkness** — score 970/1000
   Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel about an envoy on the planet Gethen, whose people have no fixed sex; it won both the Nebula and the Hugo.
3. **Flowers for Algernon** — score 936/1000
   Daniel Keyes's 1966 novel about Charlie Gordon, whose intelligence is raised by surgery; it shared the Nebula with Babel-17.
4. **Annihilation** — score 770/1000
   Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel about four women surveying the mysterious Area X, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy.
5. **Gateway** — score 770/1000
   Frederik Pohl's 1977 novel about prospectors flying abandoned alien ships to unknown destinations, the first of his Heechee books.
6. **Speaker for the Dead** — score 592/1000
   Orson Scott Card's 1986 sequel to Ender's Game, which made him the first writer to win the Nebula and Hugo for best novel in consecutive years.
7. **The Windup Girl** — score 592/1000
   Paolo Bacigalupi's 2009 debut novel set in a future Bangkok ravaged by engineered plagues, which shared the Hugo and won the Nebula.
8. **The Forever War** — score 592/1000
   Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel about a soldier whose interstellar tours age him centuries relative to Earth, drawing on his Vietnam service.
9. **Babel** — score 592/1000
   R. F. Kuang's 2022 novel about a Chinese-born student at an Oxford translation institute that powers the British Empire with silver magic.
10. **The Fountains of Paradise** — score 592/1000
   Arthur C. Clarke's 1979 novel about an engineer building a space elevator from a mountain on an equatorial island.
11. **Parable of the Talents** — score 513/1000
   Octavia E. Butler's 1998 sequel to Parable of the Sower, about Lauren Olamina's Earthseed community under a theocratic regime.
12. **Network Effect** — score 513/1000
   Martha Wells's 2020 Murderbot novel, the first full-length book in the series, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
13. **The Buffalo Hunter Hunter** — score 513/1000
   Stephen Graham Jones's 2025 horror novel built around a Blackfeet vampire's confession recorded by a Montana pastor in 1912.
14. **Ringworld** — score 513/1000
   Larry Niven's 1970 novel about explorers on a vast ring-shaped artificial world circling a star, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
15. **Ender's Game** — score 513/1000
   Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel about child prodigy Ender Wiggin trained in battle-school war games, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
16. **The Gods Themselves** — score 513/1000
   Isaac Asimov's 1972 novel about an energy exchange with a parallel universe, which won him the Nebula and the Hugo.
17. **Rendezvous with Rama** — score 513/1000
   Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel about humans exploring a giant cylindrical alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System.
18. **Neuromancer** — score 513/1000
   William Gibson's 1984 debut novel about hacker Case, which popularised the word cyberspace and won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick awards.
19. **All the Birds in the Sky** — score 513/1000
   Charlie Jane Anders's 2016 novel about a witch and a tech prodigy whose friendship shapes the fate of a collapsing world.
20. **Paladin of Souls** — score 420/1000
   Lois McMaster Bujold's 2003 fantasy following the widowed Dowager Royina Ista on a pilgrimage, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
21. **The Yiddish Policemen's Union** — score 420/1000
   Michael Chabon's 2007 alternate-history detective novel set in a Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
22. **The Claw of the Conciliator** — score 420/1000
   Gene Wolfe's 1981 novel, the second volume of The Book of the New Sun, following the exiled torturer Severian.
23. **The Calculating Stars** — score 420/1000
   Mary Robinette Kowal's 2018 alternate history in which a 1952 meteorite strike pushes a woman mathematician toward becoming an astronaut.
24. **Doomsday Book** — score 308/1000
   Connie Willis's 1992 novel about an Oxford historian whose time-travel trip lands her in England during the Black Death, winner of the Nebula and the Hugo.
25. **Ancillary Justice** — score 308/1000
   Ann Leckie's 2013 debut about Breq, the last fragment of a warship's AI, which won the Nebula, Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards.
26. **The Stone Sky** — score 308/1000
   N. K. Jemisin's 2017 finale of the Broken Earth trilogy; its Hugo win made her the first author to take the Best Novel Hugo three years running.
27. **Babel-17** — score 308/1000
   Samuel R. Delany's 1966 space opera about a poet decoding a language used as a weapon, joint Nebula winner with Flowers for Algernon.
28. **American Gods** — score 308/1000
   Neil Gaiman's 2001 novel about ex-convict Shadow Moon caught in a war between old gods and new ones across America; it also won the Hugo.
29. **The Speed of Dark** — score 308/1000
   Elizabeth Moon's 2002 novel about Lou Arrendale, an autistic man offered an experimental treatment to reverse his autism.
30. **Tehanu** — score 0/1000
   Ursula K. Le Guin's 1990 Earthsea novel about Tenar and a scarred child, her third Nebula for Best Novel after The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
31. **A Master of Djinn** — score 0/1000
   P. Djèlí Clark's 2021 debut novel, set in an alternate 1912 Cairo where agent Fatma el-Sha'arawi investigates a magical murder.
32. **The Dispossessed** — score 0/1000
   Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel about physicist Shevek moving between an anarchist moon and its capitalist twin planet.
33. **Startide Rising** — score 0/1000
   David Brin's 1983 Uplift novel about the dolphin-crewed starship Streaker hiding on a water world; it also won the Hugo.
34. **Red Mars** — score 0/1000
   Kim Stanley Robinson's 1992 novel about the first hundred colonists of Mars, opening his Mars trilogy.
35. **Among Others** — score 0/1000
   Jo Walton's 2011 novel about a Welsh teenager who sees fairies and finds refuge in science fiction at an English boarding school.
36. **Uprooted** — score 0/1000
   Naomi Novik's 2015 fantasy, inspired by Polish folklore, about a village girl chosen by a wizard called the Dragon.

Tags: fantasy, books, sci-fi, awards, nebula award