The Fantasy Review’s list of 6 Dark Science Fiction Books That Will Give You Chills.
The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) by Joe Haldeman
Check out our review of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and our Beginner’s Guide to The Forever War before jumping into this classic!
From the blurb:
Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months’ tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
From the blurb:
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families…and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again….
Dead Space: Martyr (Dead Space, #1) by B.K. Evenson
From the blurb:
When geophysicist Michael Altman hears of the mysterious signal emitted from deep within the Chicxulub crater, he can not resist the lure of an undiscovered artifact. With his girlfriend Ada, he joins a team excavating the underwater crater, determined to find the source of the baffling message. The artifact, named “The Black Marker,” possesses a mysterious power. Close proximity to the stone causes strange occurrences: visions of the dead, vivid dreams, and violent murders.…
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
From the blurb:
A crew of spaceship Nostromo is suddenly woken up from a cryogenic sleep because of mysterious signals coming from an unknown planet and received by a ship computer. The astronauts land on the planet surface and go to investigate an alien spaceship where one of them is attacked by an alien which fasten itself on his face. When the crew returns to their ship and abandon the planet, nobody forefeels that the real horror will begin very soon …
Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber
From the blurb:
When the Imperial prison barge Purge—temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, Rebels, scoundrels, and thieves—breaks down in a distant part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back—bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours, nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.
And death is only the beginning.…
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
From the blurb:
The once-utopian Chasm City — a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet — has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted — from the people to the very buildings they inhabit — only the most wretched sort of existence remains. For security operative Tanner Mirabel, it is the landscape of nightmares through which he searches for a lowlife postmortal killer. But the stakes are raised when his search brings him face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget.…
