Philip Kindred Dick, often referred to by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer and novelist. He wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against elements such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. He is considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction.

Radio Free Albemuth is a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985. Originally titled VALISystem A, it was his first attempt to deal in fiction with his experiences of early 1974. When his publishers at Bantam requested extensive rewrites he canned the project and reworked it into the VALIS trilogy. Arbor House acquired the rights to Radio Free Albemuth in 1985. They then published an edition under the current title, prepared from the corrected typescript given by Dick to his friend Tim Powers.

Burning Chrome (1986) is a collection of short stories written by William Gibson. Three of the stories take place in Gibson's Sprawl, a shared setting for most of his early cyberpunk work. Many of the ideas and themes explored in the short stories were later revisited in Gibson's popular Sprawl trilogy.

The Smoke Ring is a 1987 science fiction novel by Larry Niven. Like much of Niven's work, the story is heavily influenced by the setting: a gas torus, a ring of air around a neutron star. It is a sequel to The Integral Trees.

Paul S. Williams was an American music journalist, writer, and publisher who created Crawdaddy!, the first national US magazine of rock music criticism, in January 1966. He was a leading authority on the works of musicians Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Neil Young, and science fiction writers Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick, for whose literary estate he served as executor. Williams was also the founder of the Philip K. Dick Society, which helped to publish Dick's work and establish his legacy.

GURPS Autoduel is the GURPS genre toolkit book which details the post-apocalyptic world of one of SJG's other popular games, Car Wars. The initial publication was in 1986.

Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! is a fantasy novel by American writer Terry Brooks, the first in his Magic Kingdom of Landover series. Written in 1986, it tells the story of how Ben Holiday, a talented but depressed Chicago trial lawyer, comes to be king of Landover, an otherworldly magical kingdom. The book was re-released as part of a Landover omnibus in 2009.

Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (ISBN 978-1-59606-128-6) is a collection mostly of science fiction author Philip José Farmer's pseudonymous fictional-author literary works, edited by Christopher Paul Carey and published in 2008. Farmer describes a fictional-author story as "a tale supposedly written by an author who is a character in fiction." Carey, who had access to Farmer's correspondence while editing the book, reveals in his introduction that in the early to mid-1970s Farmer planned to edit an anthology of fictional-author stories by other writers. Farmer solicited fictional-author stories from authors such as Arthur Jean Cox, Philip K. Dick, Leslie Fiedler, Ron Goulart, Howard Waldrop, and Gene Wolfe, urging them to submit their stories to venues such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Only Cox, Waldrop, and Wolfe completed their stories and had them published, although Philip K. Dick's never realized fictional-author story "A Man for No Countries" as by Hawthorne Abendsen is said to have led Dick to write his posthumous novel Radio Free Albemuth. In the end, Farmer's fictional-author anthology never materialized.

Mindplayers is a 1987 first novel by science fiction author Pat Cadigan.

Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1949–1984 is a nonfiction book by David Pringle, published by Xanadu in 1985 with a foreword by Michael Moorcock. Primarily, the book comprises 100 short essays on the selected works, covered in order of publication, without any ranking. It is considered an important critical summary of the science fiction field.

Noble's Book is a 1985 fantasy tabletop role-playing game supplement for Pendragon published by Chaosium.

Lords of Middle-earth, Volume I is a 1986 fantasy role-playing game supplement published by Iron Crown Enterprises for Middle-earth Role Playing.

Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder is a 1987 anthology edited by Rudy Rucker and published by Arbor House.

The Island Worlds is a novel by Eric Kotani and John Maddox Roberts published by Baen Books in 1987.

The Black Tower is a novel by Richard A. Lupoff published by Bantam Books in 1988.