Hard Science Fiction Book Report for February 2025
For the month of February, 2025, we tracked 245 new hard science fiction books. This report cannot be directly compared to last month's report because we made a lot of changes and updates to our book tracking methodology. We improved how we look for books at other retailers besides Amazon, and we used additional sources for specific hard science fiction books.
Book Categories
For the month of February, we tracked 9 different sub-categories of hard science fiction books (remember we allow books to exist in more than one category):
- Artificial Intelligence (73 books)
- Cosmic Exploration (48 books)
- Time Travel and Alternate Realities (26 books)
- Survival in Dystopia (46 books)
- Ethics of Technology (50 books)
- Interpersonal Dynamics in Sci-fi (10 books)
- Environmental and Ecological Novels (13 books)
- Military and Conflict (12 books)
- Philosophical and Existential Inquiry (64 books)
The majority of books fall between 100 and 400 pages with a gradual decline in count as the page numbers increase, with 71 books (about 30%) falling under 100 pages:
The page counts roughly follow a normal distribution (as you would expect.)
The four longest books are all omnibuses that collect multiple books in one. Not until we get to the fifth book, at 849 pages, do we get to a long, single volume, book.
Publishers and Retailers
Of the 245 books, only 61 of them had publishers listed (about 25%.) The others are self-published (some of that 61 are also self-published, the author just filled out the publisher field when listing their book.) Only 59 books purchased an ISBN number (or had an ISBN number that we were able to find.)
The 25% statistic compares to only 17% of books in January being available anywhere but Amazon. Again, I think this less reflects true book availability outside of Amazon, and more the improvements of how we are finding books month over month.
Most titles were only available at Amazon, with only 21 of the 245 available anywhere else.1 The top retailers we are currently tracking are Bookshop.org with 17 titles and Barnes & Noble with 14 titles.
We are continuously improving how we find books, and in future months we hope to make this section of the book report more robust.
About the Data
Our data collection this month is better than it was for last month's version: I feel more confident that we are accurately tracking books published at Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and others; I also feel like we are better tracking original sources of hard science fiction specific books. However, there are still some notable sources for books we have no insights into (specifically Apple Books, and Kobo), and we do not have any insights into library providers (specifically Libby and Overdrive -- we applied for API access to Overdrive and were denied.)
Also, our data still rely heavily on Amazon, and there is a very good chance that a book not listed at Amazon will not show up in our lists. Primarily, this is because Amazon is the only retailer that breaks the science fiction category down into a Hard Science Fiction sub-genre. Other retailers do not get that specific in their genres. The Hard Science Fiction genre at Amazon is not perfect -- it is self-identified by the author or the publisher -- however, that is an ok limitation to me. Oxygen Leaks is not meant to be the gate keeper on what is hard science fiction, rather just the promoter. If an author or publisher chooses to identify a book as hard science fiction, that is good enough for us.
What the over-reliance on Amazon categorization means, though, is that if a book is not published at Amazon, we are likely going to miss it in our lists. We do not have another source of identified hard science fiction books (if anyone is aware of one, please let us know!) As the largest book retailer in the world, this is not a big limitation. However, with the political backlash against Amazon, and as people are trying to find more alternatives to the dominance of Amazon, this limitation may become a bigger deal in the future; possibly affecting the future quality of our hard science fiction lists.
We will do our best to overcome this shortcoming by trying to diversify our data sources. For now, this is something we are keeping an eye on and managing the trend.
Footnotes
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take this statistic with the massive caveat that there are a number of top retailers we are not scanning yet. Specifically Apple, Kobo, and Google Play Books. We will be adding scanning those retailers in the coming months. ↩