Best Early Science Fiction Books

The War Of The Worlds

by Wells, H. G.

An example of the first contact between humanity and an alien race on the violent end of spectrum and crossing genres with Alien Invasion.

This is the only book on this list that doesn't actually set foot on Mars, so in a sense it's not a Martian novel at all. But it was the key book that fixed the popular idea of Martians, and it was the first great ali...

We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We was written in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and though Zamyatin was himself a Bolshevik, the novel expressed his disquiet at the structuring of society that the Soviet Union was planning; it was,...

Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

If there is one overused cliché in science fiction, it is the alternate history novel in which Hitler won the Second World War. But this is a novel about the Nazis triumphant that is not clichéd for the very simple re...

The Skylark Series (Skylark)

by E. E. Smith

The great innovation in American science fiction during the 1920s was the invention of the space opera, and that was largely down to E.E. "Doc" Smith. Sometime around 1916 he had the idea for a story about travelling thr...

R.u.r.

by Karel Capek

Czech is hardly a widely spoken language, and in the years immediately after the First World War Czechoslovakia had barely gained its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had largely swamped Czech culture...

The New World (The Age Of Discovery)

by Stackpole, Micheal A.

A startling look at the role of government, including eugenics.

The three grandchildren of the royal cartographer Qiro Anturasi, a mapmaker whose magic can reshape reality, must save their world from destruction. Nalenyr is besieged on all sides by those who would save the fabled lan...

A Martian Odyssey

by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

A Martian Odyssey was Weinbaums first science fiction story; but within eighteen months he was dead, having written barely enough to make a collection. But with that first story he guaranteed his lasting fame, and signif...

Herland (The Herland) Start here

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Towards the end of the 19th century a big movement for women's suffrage started up on both sides of the Atlantic. Accompanying the political campaign, there were many stories that showed the social roles of men and women...

A Princess Of Mars (Barsoom) Start here

by Burroughs, Edgar Rice

In the latter years of the 19th century, astronomers detected lines on the surface of Mars, and before long these were being identified as irrigation canals, suggesting notm only that the planet was habitable, but tha...

A Voyage To Arcturus

by David Lindsay

Science fiction has produced some pretty weird novels in its time, but there aren't many that can match A Voyage to Arcturus. It has had a major influence on writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, while others have...

Metropolis

by Thea Von Harbou

This is the novelisation of the film that Thea von Harbou wrote with her husband, Fritz Lang. It was the first feature-length science fiction film, the most expensive film made to that date, and the film alone marks this...

The Iron Heel

by Jack London

London succeeds in doing what many men have tried to do over the course of history, and almost every man has failed in doing: understanding how women think. Unlike most of London's fiction, this first person nar...

Deluge

by S. Fowler Wright

The idea of a drowned England had been a commonplace in British scientific romances since at least After London by Richard Jeffries, but it received its finest expression in Fowler Wright's Deluge. In this novel ear...

The Color Out Of Space

by Lovecraft, H. P.

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the science fiction and weird fiction that appeared in American genre magazines was often hard to tell apart. Weird fiction writers often used science fiction tropes, and vice versa....

When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide) Start here

by Philip Wylie

Not many science fiction writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Kipling was the first member of this exclusive club. His finest science fiction is a pair of stories concerning the Aerial Board of Control,...

With The Night Mail

by Rudyard Kipling

Not many science fiction writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Kipling was the first member of this exclusive club. His finest science fiction is a pair of stories concerning the Aerial Board of Control,...

The Hampdenshire Wonder

by J D Beresford

This was the first novel to fully explore the consequences of the birth of homo superior. Victor Stott is born weak and awkward, with an enlarged head, and at first, because he doesn't speak or cry, he is assumed...

It Can’t Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

And here we have another Nobel Prize winning author of science fiction, though in this case Lewis flirted with genre in only one novel. But that novel is a classic. In the tradition of Jack London's The Iron Heel, this...

The Purple Cloud

by M. P. Shiel

A so called last-man novel. A single man has survived and most of the novel are his meditations on humanity and the universe.

M.P. Shiel was a prolific author of excitable stories for the popular magazines of the day: he was, among other things, the person who gave us The Yellow Peril. But his best story was rather more considered and mo...

The Machine Stops

This is a story about dependence on technology. Most humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth and below grand, life is governed by an omnipotent machine.

This short story is the only science fiction that the renowned novelist E.M. Forster ever wrote, but it continues to be read and applauded today. The story was written in response to A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells,...

The Angel Of The Revolution

by George Griffith

With the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Europe faced the prospect of a united Germany and a major shift in the delicate balance of power. As a result stories started to appear, first in Britain, then France, Ameri...