The 5 Most-Read Sci-Fi Books on Goodreads Right Now: ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ and More

Science fiction has always been a genre where almost anything goes, and the sci-fi books readers can’t get enough of on Goodreads this week certainly prove it. The current five most-read titles range from a futuristic murder mystery and a dystopian romance to a time-travel tale, a surprisingly comforting story about a monk and a robot and the continuing adventures of a man and his cat trapped inside the universe’s deadliest dungeon.

Sitting at the top of the list is Matt Dinniman‘s The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, the sixth installment of his enormously popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series—and a book that’s currently appearing among Goodreads’ most-read fantasy titles as well. It’s followed by Fury in Death, the newly released 63rd installment in J.D. Robb’s long-running futuristic mystery series.

But this week’s list isn’t dominated by new releases. Emily St. John Mandel’s 2022 Sea of Tranquility and Becky Chambers’ 2021 A Psalm for the Wild-Built continue to attract readers years after publication, while Alexis Patton’s new Us Defiant Few completes her dystopian Us Dark Few trilogy.

Here are the five sci-fi books Goodreads members are reading most this week—and what their authors have said about the stories and their inspiration for them.

1. ‘The Eye of the Bedlam Bride’ (July 2, 2023)

Author: Matt Dinniman
Publisher: Originally independently published; republished by Ace/Penguin Random House

What it’s about: Book six of the wildly popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series finds Carl and Princess Donut reaching the dungeon’s eighth floor, where the surviving crawlers face a bizarre new challenge: capture six dangerous monsters that will be transformed into cards for an increasingly deadly game. Among the potential catches is Shi Maria, the terrifying Bedlam Bride. And as Carl and Donut have learned repeatedly, the dungeon’s rapidly deteriorating AI is perfectly capable of making an already impossible situation even worse. Dinniman originally independently published the book in 2023; Ace released its hardcover edition in May 2025.

Matt Dinniman says: “When I first started writing [Dungeon Crawler Carl], I was writing a very simple straightforward story about a dude and his cat on an alien game show. I wasn’t anticipating such a complicated overarching political plot. As I started working and going on, that’s kind of what happened. [But] I kind of make it all up as I go along with no outline and no plan. It’s how I prefer to write. Because of that, I have to keep track, or I simply wouldn’t be able to make it work. It’s like doodling on a giant canvas.”

“I’ll start writing something and discover, ‘Oh, I need to know about the Queen’s corgis,’ for example. Then I’ll find a Wikipedia article or a short documentary on YouTube and I’ll watch it while I’m sitting in bed.” A perfect example was a Patreon choice for the setting of book six. “They picked Cuba of all the countries in the world for the characters to land in. I knew nothing about Cuba. I had to get books. I had to watch hours of YouTube videos, researching everything.” (Goodreads)

Note: Matt Dinniman is simultaneously showing up at the top of Goodreads’ current fantasy rankings.

2. ‘Fury in Death’ (September 8, 2026)

Author: J.D. Robb
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

What it’s about: The 63rd installment in J.D. Robb’s futuristic In Death series sends NYPSD homicide detective Eve Dallas after a killer capable of extraordinary violence. A wealthy biotech executive has been brutally murdered inside his supposedly secure home, apparently by someone possessing unnatural strength. What initially looks like a deeply personal killing becomes considerably more complicated when Eve uncovers suspicious money, corporate secrets and another victim. Set in Robb’s mid-21st-century New York, the long-running series combines police procedural mysteries with a futuristic science-fiction setting.

Why J.D. Robb made this series sci-fi: “I wanted to try something a little different. I love writing romance and suspense, but I also wanted a twist. The near-future setting provided this and allowed me to more or less create a world. What would it be like in 2058? I could decide. And I could illustrate my own feeling that while the toys may change, people remain basically the same. they still love and hate and covet, they still have courage and cowardice. They’re still human. And these are not just books about murders. They’re about interaction and relationships and the evolution of characters.”

3. ‘Sea of Tranquility’ (April 5, 2022)

Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

What it’s about: Spanning centuries, Sea of Tranquility connects an Englishman’s strange experience in the Canadian wilderness in 1912 with a novelist living on a moon colony hundreds of years later and a detective investigating an anomaly in time. At the center of the mystery is an eerie moment involving violin music, a forest and an airship terminal that appears to cross the boundaries of time. Mandel mixes time travel, pandemic fiction and questions about the nature of reality into a story whose characters’ lives intersect in unexpected ways.

What Emily St. John Mandel says of the origins of this book: “My book The Glass Hotel came out in March 2020, and in the months before publication, I’d started to play around with autofiction. I’d been wanting to write about the experience of the long-haul book tour, which is both an incredible privilege and a very weird, very specific kind of business trip. Then Covid hit, and it lent me a kind of creative recklessness. I thought, ‘Why not try things that I never thought I’d try before? Everything’s awful, so I’m just going to write whatever I want.’ [Laughs.] At the same time, I thought, maybe that’s what the autofiction could be for: Using a sci-fi lens, maybe I could talk about the experience of the approaching pandemic.”

“I’d also been wanting for a really long time to write a time travel story. But the problem with time travel narratives is that they kind of fall apart under close scrutiny most of the time. Time travel creates an infinite loop, removing both cause and effect and free will from the equation, which is disastrous for fiction. That’s where the simulation hypothesis comes into play. The way to make time travel work for myself, as the writer, was to have a character in the year 2400 saying, ‘We don’t really understand why time travel works as well as it does. We feel like it should always create an infinite loop, and we think maybe the fact that it works at all is evidence that there’s something else going on here and we’re living in a simulation.’” W Magazine

4. ‘Us Defiant Few’ (September 1, 2026)

Author: Alexis Patton
Publisher: Bloom Books

What it’s about: The concluding volume of Patton’s Us Dark Few trilogy returns to Khalani and Takeshi following their escape from imprisonment—but Takeshi has lost his memory. As Khalani tries to help him rediscover both his feelings for her and his commitment to humanity, their search for the mysterious Project Helix could determine whether humans can reclaim Earth’s surface. The dystopian science-fiction romance mixes artificial intelligence, climate devastation, warring revolutionary factions and a relationship whose survival has become almost as uncertain as humanity’s.

What Alexis Patton says of the series’ inspiration: “I love video games and dystopian books. The Giver was a huge inspiration for me as well as Divergent. When I played the game Horizon Zero Dawn, that really inspired me to lean into a post-apocalyptic world and figuring out what happened to cause the mass destruction. Ultimately, I had a dream about the characters in my book and I knew the dream took place in prison. It really stuck to me so I created a story around that dream and these influences.” (lgjenkins.com)

5. ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built’ (July 13, 2021)

Author: Becky Chambers
Publisher: Tor.com Publishing

What it’s about: Centuries after the robots of Panga gained consciousness and disappeared into the wilderness, tea monk Sibling Dex leaves the city in search of something they can’t quite define. Their journey brings them face-to-face with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot who has ventured back into human society with one deceptively simple question: What do people need? The first Monk & Robot novella uses their developing friendship to explore purpose, contentment, humanity’s relationship with technology and the possibility of building a kinder future.

What Becky Chambers says of her inspiration for this book: “So many different bits and pieces went into Psalm. A lifelong love of robots. A strong itch to write something solarpunk. Growing up in Los Angeles and living in the woodsy middle of nowhere now. Lapsed Catholicism. Road trips with my wife. Studio Ghibli movies. A bone to pick with the idea that technology and nature are fundamentally at odds. A soft spot for tea, farms, cob houses, bugs, green roofs, and overgrown buildings. A desire to write something that serves as pure comfort for an adult audience.” (lapl.org)