The Sci-Fi Books of All Time
A while ago, we came up with a list of the Best Fantasy Novels of All Time. Now we’re doing the same with science fiction! Some of these are classic tales you will surely know, but others are excellent works of science fiction that may have been flying under the radar. So, dear readers, as you make your way down the list, congratulate yourselves on the books you’ve read and add the unfamiliar ones to your TBR list. Note: This list is organized alphabetically.
1984
by George Orwell
Our favorite science fiction tends to use the future to illuminate and discuss issues in our present. 1984 is a prime example of this, a dystopian novel where our culture has become the victim of government surveillance and public manipulation. An important read for any age.
Altered Carbon (Netflix Series Tie-in Edition)
by Richard K. Morgan
Set in a future where interstellar travel is done by “sleeving” one’s consciousness into new bodies, the story follows a private investigator whose past collides with his present as he attempts to solve a rich man’s murder. A dark and gritty cyberpunk experience. Now a Netflix series!
Amatka
by Karin Tidbeck
Vanja is an information assistant in a world where language literally controls reality. After being sent to the ice colony Amatka to gather intelligence for her government, she falls in love with her housemate and decides to extend her mission. She begins to realize, though, that there is something deeply amiss in this colony.
Ammonite
by Nicola Griffith
Ammonite, Griffith’s first novel, won the Lambda Award and the James Tiptree Jr Award. A human expedition to the planet Jeep is nearly wiped out by a virus that kills all the men and most of the women. Some centuries later, an anthropologist, Marghe, is sent to test a vaccine on the descendents of the original expedition, themselves all women. As she lives and moves among them, Marghe finds herself changed in profound and unexpected ways.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
by Karen Lord
After their homeworld is destroyed, the surviving members of the Sadiri must find a way for their people to continue, despite the fact that most of the survivors are male. To do so, they make their way across the colony planet of Cygnus Beta under the guidance of a woman from the planet’s Central Government, encountering all kinds of people and cultures in their mission to save their vanishing race.
The Big Book of Science Fiction
by
Anthologies rarely make “Best Of” lists, but this one belongs on here — because it contains stories by many of the great science fiction writers we are discussing in our list. Le Guin, Asimov, Doctorow, Liu, Wells, Clarke, Butler, Vonnegut, and the list goes on and on! A wonderful primer for science fiction readers.
The Blazing World and Other Writings
by Margaret Cavendish
An early work of feminist Utopian fiction and proto-science fiction, The Blazing World tells the story of a woman from our earth who travels to another world via a portal at the North Pole, where she becomes empress of a society made up of fantastical half-animal half-human species. The book, published in 1666, reflects Enlightenment-era theoretical science, with Cavendish imagining submarines, boats with engines, and a universe without end.
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Often cited by critics of genetic engineering despite being written before the discovery of DNA, Brave New World imagines a future where people are divided into castes chosen before birth and kept docile through the use of drugs. Heavily relying on references to Shakespeare, it offers scathing criticisms of capitalism, utopian ideals and conformity.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter Miller
Nuclear war razed the Earth, plunging its survivors into a new dark age in which science is reviled and books are destroyed on sight. A small order of Catholic monks dedicated to a legendary miracle worker hold back the wave of ignorance as best that it can as barbarism swells at its gates. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bittersweet tale that might make you worry about our future as a species.