This list looks at the best of them, from Cloud Atlas and Never Let Me Go to Blindsight and The Three-Body Problem. Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi-adventure-romance by Margaret Atwood, best known for writing The Handmaid's Tale. All in all, this is a dense, committed work of hard sci-fi, one containing more ideas in a single chapter than you find in most books. The City & The City is one of the most enjoyable books by China Miéville, a madcap genius of so-called 'weird fiction'. The best sci-fi novel of the 2000s is also one of the most restrained, keeping its genre elements to a minimum and using them to amplify the psychological drama.