Here are 25 books that will take you on a voyage to the stars. Like my other lists I aim to listed books that are not the same popular books seen on other list. Hopefully there will add at least one books to your tbr.
Down Below Station
C.J. Cherryl
The pioneering new colonies of deep space, Calling themselves the Union, have rebelled against the repressive old order of the Earth Company in a war of attrition, the Union’s vast resources from the beyond have whittled Earth Compeny’s once great fleet down to a handful of carrier jumpships. Now fighting a rear guard action. But still powerful fleet regroups about Pell, the last neutral start station. But Pell is far from neutral. Secret envoys from Earth Company have arrived to sue for peace with the Union, even to sell out the fleet if necessary.
Barsoom Series (John Carter of Mars)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
John Carter, a gentleman from Virginia and a Civil War veteran, unexpectedly finds himself on to the red planet, scene of continuing combat among rival tribes. Captured by a band of six-limbed, green-skinned savage giants called Tharks, Carter soon is accorded all the honor of a chieftain after it’s discovered that his muscles, accustomed to Earth’s greater gravity, now give him a decided advantage in strength. And when his captors take as prisoner Dejah Thoris, the lovely human-looking princess of the city of Helium, Carter must call upon every ounce of strength, courage, and ingenuity to rescue her-before Dejah becomes the slave of the depraved Thark leader, Tal Hajus!
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Christopher Paolini
Kira Navárez dreamed of life on new worlds. Now she’s awakened a nightmare. During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she’s delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move.As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn’t at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human.
The Empire of Isher
A.E. Van Vogt
In the future mankind’s freedom depends on delicate balance of power between the ruling family of Isher and the Weapon Shops. The Weapon Shops provide the people with weapons that can only be used in self defense.
The Time and Space Trilogy
C.S. Lewis
While searching for a place to rest for the night, Dr. Elwin Ransom is abducted by a megalomaniacal physicist and his accomplice and taken to the red planet of Malacandra (Mars) as a human sacrifice for the alien creatures that live there. Once on the planet, however, Ransom eludes his captors, risking his life and his chances of returning to Earth, becoming a stranger in a land that is enchanting in its difference from Earth and instructive in its similarity.
A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind’s potential is determined by its location in space – from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these ‘zones of thought’, but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artefact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.
Ringworld
Larry Niven
Pierson’s puppeteers, three-leg two-head aliens find immense structure in unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders, they send a team of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, eight-foot red-fur catlike alien. Ringworld is 180 million miles across, sun at center. But the expedition crashes, and crew face disastrously long trek.
Enchantress from the Stars
Sylvia Engdahl
Elana, though still a first-year student at the academy of the interstellar Anthopological Service, is elated by the chance to take part in her father’s perilous mission to the medieval planet Andrecia, which is being invaded by colonists from a young starfaring Empire. How can they drive the Imperials away without revealing their own alien origin?
The Dark Beyond the Stars
Frank M. Robinson
For two thousand years, the starship Astron has searched the galaxy for alien life–without success. Now, just as the ship is falling apart, the only direction left to explore is across the Dark, a one-hundred-generation journey through empty space. The ship’s captain immortal, bossed refuses to abandon the quest. He will cross the Dark, or destroy the ship trying.
Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers and Arkady Bogdanov lead a terraforming mission. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness. For others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. For the genetic alchemists, it presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life and death.
Dark Orbit
Carolyn Ives Gilman
Lost in the deep crevasses of the planet among these people, Thora must battle her demons and learn to comprehend the native inhabitants in order to find her crewmates and warn them of an impending danger. But her most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lie beyond the boundaries of science.
Dust
Elizabeth Bear
On a broken ship orbiting a doomed sun, dwellers have grown complacent with their aging metal world. But when a serving girl frees a captive noblewoman, the old order is about to change.. Ariane, Princess of the House of Rule, was known to be fiercely cold-blooded. But severing an angel’s wings on the battlefield, even after she had surrendered, proved her completely without honor.
Fortune’s Pawn
Rachel Bach
Devi Morris isn’t your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It’s a combination that’s going to get her killed one day – but not just yet.
That is, until she just gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn’t misnamed: it likes to get into trouble, so much so that one year of security work under its captain is equal to five years everywhere else.
On a Red Station, Drifting
Aliette de Bodard
For generations Prosper Station has thrived under the guidance of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the station’s artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives. But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper’s brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor; and a flood of disorientated refugees strain the station’s resources.
On Basilisk Station
David Weber
Honor Harrington in trouble: Having made him look the fool, she’s been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship’s humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system’s only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens.
The Galaxy Game
Karen Lord
For years, Rafi Delarua saw his family suffer under his father’s unethical use of psionic power. Now the government has Rafi under close watch, but, hating their crude attempts to analyze his brain, he escapes to the planet Punartam, where his abilities are the norm, not the exception. Punartam is also the center for his favorite sport, wallrunning.
The Lives of Tao
Wesley Chu
When out-of-shape IT technician Roen woke up and started hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumed he was losing it. He wasn’t. He now has a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions – the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix – the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes. Meanwhile, Roen is having to train to be the ultimate secret agent. Like that’s going to end up well…
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinlein
On Luna – an open penal colony of the twenty-first century – a revolution is being plotted. The conspirators are a strange assortment: an engaging jack-of-all-trades, his luscious blonde girlfriend, and a lonely talking computer. Their aim – the overthrow of the hated Authority. But things don’t go according to plan, and their independence may ultimately prove harder to maintain than it was to seize…
The Dreaming Void
Peter F. Hamilton
The year is 3589, fifteen hundred years after Commonwealth forces barely staved off human extinction in a war against the alien Prime. Now an even greater danger has surfaced: a threat to the existence of the universe itself. At the very heart of the galaxy is the Void, a self-contained microuniverse that cannot be breached, cannot be destroyed, and cannot be stopped as it steadily expands in all directions,
The Deep Sky
Yume Kitasei
They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first. It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.
Chasm City
Alastair Reynolds
Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake – until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. Tanner’s pursuit of Reivich takes him across light-years of space to Chasm City, the domed human settlement on the otherwise inhospitable planet of Yellowstone. But Chasm City is not what it was. The one-time high-tech utopia has become a Gothic a nanotechnological virus has corrupted the city’s inhabitants as thoroughly as it has the buildings and machines.
Embassytown
China Miéville
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak. Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.
Polaris Rising
Jessie Mihalik
A space princess on the run and a notorious outlaw soldier become unlikely allies in this imaginative, sexy space opera adventure—the first in an exciting science fiction trilogy. In the far distant future, the universe is officially ruled by the Royl Consortium, but the High Councillors, the heads of the three High Houses, wield the true power. As the fifth of six children, Ada von Hasenberg has no authority; her only value to her High House is as a pawn in a political marriage.
The Stars, Like Dust
Isaac Asimov
His name was Biron Farrill and he was a student at the University of Earth. A native of one of the helpless Nebular Kingdoms, he saw his home world conquered and controlled by the planet Tyrann—a ruthless, barbaric Empire that was building a dynasty of cruelty and domination among the stars. Farrill’s own father had been executed for trying to resist the Tyrann dictatorship and now someone was trying to kill Biron. But why?
We Have Always Been Here
Lena Nguyen
Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.