(credit: John Harris)

The winter holidays are looming, and many of you will soon be spending time in terrible places like airplane seats or the homes of relatives who want to lecture you about something deeply annoying. You need to escape. Never fear—we’ve got a bunch of recommendations for science fiction novels that will fill your brain with other realities.

These are books for binge-reading, so I’ve tried to include lots of series (just in case you need distraction for a prolonged period). The majority of these recommendations are for books that came out in 2015 or for trilogies whose final book came out this year, but there are a smattering of less-recent ones just to top you off.

I’m sure there are lots of books that you love but that I did not include. Recommend them in the comments!