Set in a near-future Orange County, the novel follows an undercover narcotics agent embedded in a household of drug users while concealing his identity from both the police and his targets.

A Wizard of Earthsea follows Ged, a gifted youth from the island of Gont, whose early talent leads him to a school of wizardry. After a duel goes wrong and releases a dangerous shadow, he must leave home and undertake a solitary quest to confront and undo the harm he caused.

Set during an interstellar war, a poet-linguist is recruited to decipher an enemy language—Babel-17—that appears linked to acts of sabotage. The central pressure is linguistic: does learning or speaking a language alter perception and agency, and can decoding or revising that language stop further attacks?

A man with intellectual disability undergoes an experimental medical procedure intended to raise his intelligence, and the narrative records the aftermath through dated personal entries.

After a pandemic that leaves civilians transformed into violent, vampiric beings, a lone survivor inhabits a ruined Los Angeles and endures daily assaults on sleep, sanity, and shelter.

A contemporary Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century, where she encounters ancestors and must navigate slavery's social and moral realities to survive and return to her own time.

A lone, recovering writer in a modern city discovers evidence of an occult pattern—drawn from a found journal and strange urban phenomena—that suggests unseen entities connected to the city's emotional life.

A gigantic cylindrical alien spacecraft enters the Solar System in the 2130s and a human exploration team intercepts it to investigate.

Billy Pilgrim, an American who served in World War II, experiences a fractured relationship with time after the war. The novel follows episodes of his life — including his capture and survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden — presented out of chronological order.