Excellent Sci-Fi Series to Listen to on Audio

Easily the oldest sci-fi series on this list, Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy — more commonly known today as Lilith’s Brood — traces humanity’s post-Earth existence. Rescued from their dying world by the tri-gendered, humanoid Oankali, the surviving humans are asked to breed with their alien saviors to create constructs: human-Oankali hybrids.

Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe Romances is a series of standalone novellas and short stories set in the same shared universe. In The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, the Dai Viet Empire’s war-weary leader searches for the titular structure, which she tried — and failed — to destroy three decades earlier. In The Tea Master and the Detective, a living mindship brews tea in its post-military career, only to have its peaceful life upended by a spontaneous murder investigation.

Slate’s ship, Temptation, can take him anywhere in space and time, provided he has a map to guide him. His daughter and co-navigator, Nix, knows no other home. Slate’s goal is to reach 1868 Honolulu, where Nix’s late mother still lives. But traveling there could threaten to cause Nix to disappear entirely from the timeline. Tough choices lie in the waters ahead.

When a dangerous and deadly fifth season descends over the continent, Essun, an orogene hiding the power to control seismic activity, rushes home… only to find that her husband has murdered their young son and kidnapped their daughter. Now, Essun must pick her way across a blighted landscape to exact revenge.

Mallory Viridian doesn’t know why people tend to die in her presence. But they do, and she’s tired of getting folks killed. That’s why she left Earth to live on a space station full of non-human beings, who are seemingly impervious to her terrifically bad luck. Now, a shuttle full of humans is on its way to Mallory’s new home, and she knows it’s only a matter of time before someone is murdered.

In a world of micro-democracies, Information has controlled the electoral process for decades. But when an attack brings Information down on Election Day, the world is thrown into chaos. Set in an all-too-foreseeable future in which a global tech conglomerate controls elections and the media, Infomocracy follows three people through the aftermath of the attack: a troubleshooting operative, a rising politician, and an anarchist.

The psionically powerful ruling class, the Psy, live under a strict, emotionless protocol to avoid becoming feral. Their subordinates, the emotional Changelings, have recently come under brutal attack. The murderer is clearly one of the Psy, and Changeling hero Lucas Hunter is determined to find them. Teaming up with one of the cold Psy may be his best chance at success… but what should he do when the woman he’s partnered with begins to show signs of passionate emotion?

In the future, the Company controls interplanetary travel, and assigns SecUnits — androids — to protect human travellers. The Murderbot Diaries’ eponymous SecUnit hacked its own hardware to become self-governing. All it wants to do is watch its favorite soap opera, but its human charges keep getting themselves into trouble.