6 Intriguing YA Sci-Fi Books for Your FCF Lineup
Science fiction is a broad category: you just need a world that is plausible but not quite yet achievable based on current technology. Victor Frankenstein’s efforts to create life, time travels to a world inhabited by Eloi and Morlocks, a society pacified by soma—all classic examples of science fiction.
But really, when most of us think of science fiction, we think of space. Aliens, spaceships, zero gravity, worlds upon worlds beyond our own.
And why not? Earth is merely one planet in a vast universe, and despite amazing progress, there is still so much we don’t know about space. The imagination has plenty of room to run wild.
With such a large imaginative playground, YA sci-fi books have something to offer all our students. For those who naturally gravitate toward the genre, there are hyperspeed adventures and alien species galore. But even for those of us who don’t proclaim an affinity for science fiction, there are romances to be had, mysteries to be solved, worlds to be saved, dystopian governments to be toppled, and thought-provoking issues to be explored.
While not naturally drawn to the genre ourselves, we’ve happened upon some good science fiction novels over the years. Even though they’re written for adults, these novels still appeal to high school students, particularly those with STEM interests. But when our research started to turn up a list of YA sci-fi books, all relating to space, we were thrilled to be able to present options for a much wider range of readers.
These six YA sci-fi books are set in space (or, at least, talk a lot about space), and they’re full of aliens, space travel, and planets galore. But they’re also stories about family, love, and developing the confidence to be the person you were made to be. What more could we look for in a First Chapter Friday recommendation?
6 YA Sci-Fi Books for Your First Chapter Friday Lineup
Ender Wiggins is a Third, ordered into existence by the government in hopes that one of the talented Wiggins children will qualify for Battle School, where he will train to become the hero his world needs in the war against the Buggers.
The six-year-old Ender, wildly intelligent, combines his brother Peter’s cruelty with his sister Valentine’s empathy, making him the perfect candidate for Battle School. There, his experience is carefully manipulated by the teachers and commanders to ensure he is isolated from his classmates and to make him willing to display extreme violence and cruelty when bullied.
As Ender moves up the ranks in Battle School, he wrestles with his loneliness and his hatred of the similarities he sees in himself to his cruel brother Peter. The perspective of the adult commanders that begins every chapter makes the reader uncomfortable with the ways Ender is manipulated to achieve supposedly necessary ends.
We won’t give any spoilers since we didn’t see the ending coming, but the book is ripe with opportunities for discussion: the human longing for power and the danger that longing poses, the role adults should play in children’s lives, the conflict between nature and nurture, the lengths to which it is (or is not) appropriate to go in the name of preventing or ending war.
Gideon Hofstadt, a high school junior, is on thin ice with his parents. Ever since he got in trouble with the FCC for trying to make contact with the International Space Station, he’s been one mishap away from losing his at-home science lab. So when he and his brother set off an explosion on their farm (in order to test his homemade seismograph, of course) that creates an enormous crater, they can’t tell the truth. Instead, they tell their parents, and the police who show up within minutes, that a meteor came from the sky and exploded, leaving nothing but the crater behind.
Unsurprisingly, things spin out of control quickly. Gideon is determined to keep the truth from coming out (since he’s not sure how illegal his experiment was), but his attention-seeking brother Ismael gets bored telling the meteor story and starts to tell people the crater was caused by an alien encounter. Word spreads, and all of a sudden, the small, boring town in rural Pennsylvania is full of national news reporters, Truth Seekers (who have long believed in the existence of aliens), and adherents to a wellness cult (don’t worry, it makes sense in context), all hoping for their own alien encounter.
Gideon decides to turn the situation into a social experiment about hoaxes to enhance his MIT application, and the novel is interspersed with Ismael’s “interviews,” blog entries, and newspaper articles.
The novel is really funny (be aware of some mild profanity, including in the first chapter after the explosion), and despite its quirkiness, it also deals with more serious issues about relationships (family, friends, and boyfriends), human psychology, and doing the right thing. We think it will appeal to many students, especially those who, like Gideon, have plenty of their own experience with at-home experiments and Arduino kits.
Billed as Bonnie and Clyde set in space, we also got some major Mandalorian vibes from this space western. The novel opens in Shane’s cell on the Opian prison moon: originally locked up for committing one of his trademark heists, he’s now in solitary for killing another prisoner. Meanwhile, Ava, the Bonnie to Shane’s Clyde, is going through security, using her acting skills to appear as a sweet and innocent girlfriend so she can sneak in a pistol that will allow Shane to escape.
Of course, Ava’s plan is successful, and she and Shane get back to work, planning a new heist that will provide for their families struggling to survive back on Nakara, their home planet. When, carrying out their plan, they overhear negotiations between government and military leaders that will destroy their home planet so that others in the galaxy can survive, they set out on a mission to thwart the military at every turn.
Intertwined with their story is that of Cyrus, freshly graduated from Opia’s Air Force Academy and given a prestigious assignment under General Pelara Noth. After he and his partner fall under Ava’s manipulative spell, Cyrus is tasked with catching Ava and Shane, especially as the rebels make more and more headlines. But he starts to wonder which side he should be fighting for: the military or the rebels.
The high-stakes adventure is a lot of fun, and it will especially appeal to students who love Star Wars (and The Mandalorian) or Marie Lu’s Legend series.

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Spensa has always dreamed of being a pilot, just like her father. But her father was branded a coward when he apparently attempted to flee the Battle of Alta, and the stigma has followed Spensa her whole life.
Spensa spends her time hunting rats in the caverns of Detritus, where the remnants of humanity crash-landed 80 years ago, all the while studying for the pilot’s test, only to discover that Admiral Ironsides has no intention of ever letting her get into flight school. When a mysterious mentor allows Spensa to join his class, however, she gets to work toward her dream alongside her peers in the Skyward flight as they train to battle the Krell, an alien race attacking the planet.
Admiral Ironsides, however, has declared that Spensa will not get any of the privileges that come with being a cadet beyond attending classes, so Spensa attends classes by day, becoming one of the best pilots in Skyward, and sleeps in a mysterious cavern at night, where she catches rats to eat for dinner. As time goes on, however, a series of mysteries—reports of a defect discovered by the medics monitoring her, a broken down spacecraft with a personality of its own deep within her cavern, and the truth about her father’s role in the Battle of Alta—keep Spensa scrambling to not only preserve her own spot at Alta but to, possibly, preserve the entire planet.
This was a really fun read that a lot of students will enjoy. Reminiscent of quite a few other books set at schools in fantastical worlds (Harry Potter, Divergent, and Ender’s Game, to name a few) with some deserted-planet-Star-Wars vibes mixed in, the story feels familiar and new at the same time. Spensa won us over as the novel went on, and we were rooting for this underdog as she learned what it truly means to be brave.
Intergalactic war is brewing between two gods—Indigo, who could create life through songs, and Ozvios, the god of Destruction—both supposedly perished after a final battle that drew all of creation into harmony. But it turns out they never perished. Indigo was reborn in the body of Zaira, who has never been able to access Indigo’s powers and is awaiting execution at the hands of the Ilori Emperor as a sacrifice to Ozvios.
When a last minute opportunity to escape arises, Zaira is directed to find Wesley Daniels, who will help her defeat Ozvios and the Ilori, restoring peace to the universe.
Wesley is an empath who makes his living as an intergalactic smuggler, a disappointment to his Andarran mother, who shipped him off to boarding school when he was only seven. He has no intention of saving the universe; instead, he picks up a job transporting an infamous space podcaster, Ruben Rima, wanted by the Ilori for criticizing them on his show, safely to Earth, a faraway planet he’s never visited before.
Eventually, the three form a sort of band of misfits, teaming up to save the universe. Their high-energy adventures are, again, reminiscent of Star Wars (but this time, more of the quirky cantina bar full of strange creatures and Han Solo as smuggler vibes) and the equally mismatched group trying to save the universe in Marissa Meyers’ The Lunar Chronicles.
It’s January 1986, and the science teacher at Cash, Fitch, and Bird Nelson Thomas’s middle school is eagerly preparing students for the launch of the Challenger mission: she did apply to be the teacher sent to space, after all. Bird is thrilled: Judith Resnik, a mission specialist on the Challenger and the fourth woman to travel to space in 1984, is her hero, and she longs to be the first female shuttle commander.
Cash and Fitch have their own issues to deal with. Cash is repeating seventh grade with his younger siblings and not doing so well. Fitch is angry, pretty much all the time, and he’d rather spend all his time in the arcade than with his family. And all three of the Nelson Thomas kids deal with conflict and uncomfortable silences at home, where their parents are too busy arguing to create a home filled with more than five pieces of space junk that “sometimes bumped or slammed into each other before breaking apart” (according to Bird).
As the days count down to January 28, 1986, we know the space shuttle launch is not going to go as planned, but as Cash and Fitch realize the impact Challenger’s explosion has on their sister, the three siblings are drawn together in unexpected ways and come to understand one another better, and it’s beautiful to see the healing that begins in this messy family as a result.
Space is merely a setting or jumping off point for these engaging YA sci-fi books, and we think your students will enjoy the wide variety of adventures, love stories, and families (natural and “found”) within their pages. Please share with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works if you and your students have discovered other great YA sci-fi books we can add to our ever-growing To Be Read list!
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Looking for YA books to suggest to your students or use for your own FCF activity? Check out the YA book section of our website for all our recommendations.