Reading Challenge · Award

Nebula Award Winners: The Best Science Fiction Novels

The Nebula Award is science fiction's most prestigious honor — voted on by the professional writers of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, not fans. That makes it a peer verdict: working authors choosing the books they consider the best in the field. This challenge spans more than fifty years of Nebula Best Novel winners, from Daniel Keyes's heartbreaking Flowers for Algernon in 1966 to Arkady Martine's political space opera A Memory Called Empire in 2019. The list covers the full arc of the genre — from New Wave literary science fiction to cyberpunk to post-apocalyptic world-building. These are the novels that shaped what science fiction can do.