Science Fiction Bildungsromane
Explore the best Science Fiction Bildungsromane—coming-of-age tales set in futuristic worlds. Discover top books blending personal growth with sci-fi adventure.
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Always Coming Home
by Ursula K. Le Guin
An "ethnographic" novel that portrays life in California's Napa Valley as it might be a very long time from now, imagined not as a high tech future but as a time of people once again living close to the land.
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In the Heart of the Valley of Love
by Cynthia Kadohata
This novel explores human relationships in a Los Angeles of the future, where rich and poor are deeply polarized and where water, food, gas and education cannot be taken for granted.
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Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
by Russell Hoban
This acclaimed story is set in an England that has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Society has regressed to an Iron Age, semi-literate state represented by the special language that the author created especially for this book.
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Sideshow
by Sheri S. Tepper
On the planet of Elsewhere, the Council had always enforced the governing of each province in the manner the people had chosen, so long as each respected its neighbors' local customs--and so long as the people remained within their homelands. Generations later, inhabitants have begun to question this tradition. The Council has received mysterious messages and reports of strange manifestations across the planet. Now, Enforcer Fringe Owldark has been sent with a small crew of seven, each possessing an unusual talent, to investigate their worst fear--the arrival of the Hobbs Land gods. Free will and the reality of God are just too of the timeless issues this courageous band of humans must confront as they strive to decide if complete tolerance and leaving others alone is evil. . .and what they should do if it is. Vividly imagined and exquisitely rendered, Sideshow is Sheri S. Tepper's most controversial novel yet.
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Orbital Resonance
by John Barnes
Melpomene Murray and her spaceborn classmates are humanity's last hope, and Mel's just starting to realize how heavy a responsibility this is. But what they never realized is that Melpomene might have plans on her own "Orbital Resonance".
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Girl in Landscape
by Jonathan Lethem
Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.
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The Sky So Big and Black
by John Barnes
Accompanying her eco-prospector father on a tour through the Martian wilderness, Terry finds herself having to guide the trip's young survivors back home after a terrible accident.