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The Banned Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list is compiled and maintained by Worlds Without End. It was originally inspired by a story out of Missouri about a local school board banning Slaughterhouse-Five. That story raised the question: “How many other science fiction and fantasy books have wound up on someone’s prohibited books list?”
When I first came across this list after joining WWEnd back in 2016, it was approximately 50 books long. When I got interested in taking a hand at curating it myself last year, it was still approximately 50 books long.
In the fall of 2024, the United States appeared to be at a crossroads. In the period leading up to the election, the country was divided, and the culture war was in full swing. I felt like I was seeing new stories about censorship occurring in school libraries across the country almost every day. To raise awareness of the issue, I proposed an update to the Banned Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list for Banned Books Week. That update doubled the size of the list, from approximately 50 to just over 100 books.
Fast forward a year. The fall of 2025 is here, and so is another Banned Books Week. The mundane dramas of regular life had me pretty busy, so I wasn’t sure I was going to find the time for another update to the list this year. Curiosity drove me to at least check on the state of things, and what I found left me stunned and compelled me to update the list again.
This list isn’t supposed to be about censorship in the United States, and it’s not. Some of the books on this list come from book bannings in other countries around the world… BUT, in preparing the update for 2025, I discovered that just considering book bannings in this country alone would add over 400 new titles to the list. That is not a typo. You read that correctly–over 400 new titles. And that’s just science fiction, fantasy, and horror books. When you start looking at books that aren’t in the genres we focus on here, that number quickly grows into the thousands… in the United States, the “land of the free.”
Now, some people may still argue that we don’t ban books in the United States, and I suppose, technically, they are right. The books on this list can still be borrowed from most public libraries, or purchased from local bookstores, or ordered online.
So what actually constitutes a book banning?
For the purposes of this list, a book banning includes only those instances where challenges to a book’s inclusion on the shelves of a public or school library actually resulted in the book being removed from shelves. Challenges that were ultimately resolved by books remaining on shelves are not included.
So… in the last few years alone, over 400 books that you might be interested in reading were removed from shelves in different libraries around the United States. Last year the size of this list doubled. This year it has quintupled. What does next year hold in store?
If you are interested in fact checking any information posted above, or if you are researching this topic yourself, here a few places you could start:
- Banned Books Week
- The American Library Association
- PEN America
- United Against Book Bans
- The EveryLibrary Institute
Posted in Banned Books
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English (US) ·