The best sci-fi and fantasy books to read this summer 2026

For some people, “a good summer read” means a frothy rom-com or fast-paced thriller — something attention-grabbing but lightweight and easy-access. But 2026’s most intriguing summer science fiction and fantasy books mostly head in a radically different direction, with high-concept, genre-warping ideas and often a dark, twisty sense of humor.

Here are some of the biggest swings and most exciting titles you’ll see on bookshelves — physical or digital — this summer.

1 The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden (June 2)

Image: Del Rey

The author of the terrific Winternight Trilogy, which began with The Bear and the Nightingale, is back with a different kind of historical novel. In The Unicorn Hunters, the queen of Brittany attempts to evade forced French rule via a secret marriage in a magical forest that blocks divination magic. Under the pretense of hunting unicorns, Anne enters the territory of the faerie queen, and finds much more than she was expecting there. Half political intrigue, half epic fantasy, this one could go in any number of directions.

2 Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (June 2)

Image: Tor Books

Fans of Severance or Jordan Peele’s Us shouldn’t miss this provocatively themed novel, built around the premise that immigrants split into two parts when they cross a border, with one “instance” of themselves going on to the new country, and the other staying behind. Sublimation follows a Korean girl named Soyoung Rose Kang, who moves to America at age 10 and loses all contact with her instance back home. Then her grandfather dies and her other self summons her for the funeral, while planning to steal her life. The Sliding Doors concept of alternate realities built around a single significant moment has always been a rich field for speculative stories. But it’s hard to beat the poignancy — or current political significance — of turning an immigrant’s past and future into two individuals at odds with each other.

3 The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher (June 9)

Image: Harper Voyager

This one was custom-written for fans of dark academia stories told from unusual angles. In childhood, Briar Jones was rejected from their mysterious local magic school, and had to watch their best friend disappear into it — and disappear from Briar’s life entirely. As a teenager, Briar gets a short-term temp job at the school, gets their first peek into its rituals and secrets, and finds out their best friend has become one of the biggest monsters in a school with no shortage of them.

4 Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian (June 16)

Image: S&S/Saga Press

The first of two Brandon Sanderson collaborations this summer launches a new trilogy, The Strata Wars, about a struggling musician named Jack Solomon who dies and “wakes up in a new reality, where music and light are considered magic and past eras play out underneath the streets of London.” Sanderson’s partner on the project, writer, editor, and musician Peter Orullian, will write the other two books solo. Sanderson describes the idea behind the books as a “long-time passion project” that he’s happy to hand over to Orullian as “steward.”

5 Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison (June 23)

Image: Tachyon Publications

Political satire, science fiction satire, or eat-the-rich satire? Why not all of the above? Philip K. Dick Award-winner Meg Elison starts with a weird premise straight out of Clone High, with an Elon Musk twist: a cabal of right-wing billionaires have cloned founding fathers George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock, and are raising them in private in an environment meant to simulate the mid-1700s. The plan is apparently to use them as weapons in the ongoing culture war — until Ben gets his hands on an iPhone and discovers porn.

6 The Tinder Box by M.R. Carey (June 23)

Image: Orbit Books

M.R. Carey has written a ton of dark fantasy and horror (The Girl with All the Gifts, The Book of Koli and its sequels), and also writes comics as Mike Carey (Lucifer, Hellblazer, The Unwritten). He returns with a “dark fairy tale” linking a witch, a soldier, and a demon. The demon, strangely, is dead when it “falls out of the sky” carrying an artifact of incredible power, leaving the wounded soldier and his witch caretaker to decide how to use it responsibly — or whether to use it at all.

7 Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 23)

Image: Tor Books

The author of the Engines of Reason series (which continues with a new novel, Elder Race, Book II, in September) tries something ambitious and different with Green City Wars, a noir fantasy-mystery where all the characters are animals — except it’s also a sci-fi novel where those animals are genetically modded servants of humanity. Skotch is a raccoon PI on the trail of a missing mouse who seems to have something everyone wants, in a book the publisher describes as “Philip Marlowe meets Redwall.”

8 Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay (June 30)

Image: William Morrow

Paul Tremblay (Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World) specializes in horror, and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is no exception. But his latest has a sci-fi bent that’s unusual for him. Julia Flang, a former semi-professional gamer, takes a high-paying temp job using AI and a game controller to pilot a vegetative man across the country. Meanwhile, the man, Bernie (of course his name is Bernie) is living in a colorful nightmare, convinced he needs to find a certain person, but unsure who and why. Part thriller, part body horror, part near-future dystopia, this looks like an appealingly weird one that pushes the limits of Tremblay’s favorite genres.

9 The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus (July 23)

Image: S&S/Saga Press

Daniel Kraus has been in the news lately, between his horror novel Angel Down winning the Pulitzer Prize and the announcement that his unlikely survival-thriller Whalefall is being developed as a film adaptation. His latest, The Sixth Nik, has been framed as a “galaxy-spanning adventure” suited for fans of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, but it sounds a bit more like it’s aimed at readers of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers books. (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet et al.) The deep-space crew of a biomatter ship called The Sickness, including a faceless assassin, a 9-year-old tech-enhanced culture, “a peyote-addicted medic,” and a heavily modded engineer, head to a rogue plague planet to uncover its mysteries, while battling several mysteries of their own — including why their ship is mutating around them.

10 The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell (July 26)

Image: DAW Books

From the author of the creepy, hilarious, tentacular romance Someone You Can Build a Nest In and the tragic Hercules reimagining Wearing the Lion, The Dragon Has Some Complaints centers on a three-headed dragon who used to be a four-headed dragon, before a run-in with conquering invaders. The three remaining heads don’t get along, but they do manage to cooperate enough to sneak into an “elite dragon rider academy,” to masquerade as a tame dragon while recovering from the battle. That leads to a relationship with a desperate rider in a story about found family — and the battle against the invaders who mutilated the dragon in the first place.