Best Sci Fi Books of All Time

Dhalgren

by Delany, Samuel R.

NOTE: THIS IS #26 on the TOP 100 LIST. The first 1-25 entries are found on THE TOP 25 BEST SCIENCE FICTION LIST. Dhalgren is one of the peculiarities of science fiction, a novel that is insistently experimental in form a...

Blindsight (Firefall) Start here

by Peter Watts

A group of freaks (who are also astronauts) are sent on a one way mission to investigate a mysterious object that appears at the edge of human space. Atmospheric and creepy.

This novel has been hailed as one of the best hard sf stories written this century. It's an awesome novel, packed with invention and new ideas and challenges to the way we think. You have to keep your wits about you w...

The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

An award winning, Canadian novel that explores themes of women in subjugation and agency in a futuristic theocracy.

Throughout its history, one of the strongest and most interesting aspects of science fiction has been its use in satire. And this is just about the most stunning of contemporary satires, one that is still remarkable appo...

Revelation Space (Revelation Space) Start here

by Alastair Reynolds

A complex novel that postulates many different lifeforms who struggle against ancient, machine-like intelligences seeking to destroy all new organic life.

Throughout its history, one of the strongest and most interesting aspects of science fiction has been its use in satire. And this is just about the most stunning of contemporary satires, one that is still remarkable appo...

Flowers For Algernon (1967)

by Keyes, Daniel

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes won the 1967 Nebula Award for Best Novel along with Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. This is the only time since the start of the Nebula Awards two books tied for the the Best Novel awar...

Ender's Game (1986) (The Ender Quintet) Start here

by Card, Orson Scott

The first in a famous series that seems to become more literary as its characters age. Follows a child prodigy and in the process makes the reader think about war, the means to war, and even loneliness.

Earth has survived two invasions by an insect-like alien race, and the International Fleet is training the most gifted children to lead the next defence. Six-year-old Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is taken from his family and se...

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...

Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis)

by Butler, Octavia E.

Science fiction isnât always meant to be comfortable or easy reading. Quite the opposite, any literature so based on ideas must challenge the reader, make them think differently (if only for as long as it takes to read t...

Blood Music

by Bear, Greg

A biotechnologist hides his biological computer creation in his body, but then they multiply and evolve. One of the first Sci Fi stories to treat DNA as a computational system that can be modified.

If Xenogenesis explores the emergence of posthumanity through exogamy, Blood Music explores it through infection. A renegade biotechnologist faces having his research shut down, so he injects himself with the “noocytes...

Pandora's Star (The Commonwealth Saga) Start here

by Hamilton, Peter F.

Hummanity can live forever by uploading themselves into new bodies.

The Commonwealth Saga is a vast, sprawling space opera that is spread over several novels and short stories. In a precursor to the main series, Misspent Youth, a rejuvenation procedure and memory crystals allow the pe...

Red Rising (not Magic, But Hunger Games Survival Meets School Setting With Some Fantasy Elements) (Red Rising Trilogy)

by Brown, Pierce

Books in this sub-genre focus almost entirely on magic, but Red Rising stands in stark contrast to that. Part dystopia, part sci-fi fantasy, Red Risingfocuses on the story of a relatively ordinary citizen who seeks to...

Slaughterhouse-five

by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time. It sounds like a fairly conventional time travel story. But this is Kurt Vonnegut, and nothing he wrote was ever conventional. In fact, the novel opens with a chapter that lays out h...

We Were Liars

by E. Lockhart

In the early 1920s, the manuscript of Zamiatin's novel, We, was smuggled out of Soviet Russia to be published in the West. One of the people who reviewed that novel was George Orwell, who would later write his own ve...

Frankenstein

by Shelley, Mary

Arguably the first Sci Fi novel and one that is also very much part of the Gothic tradition.

While not “strictly” a steampunk, this is one of the first science fiction novels, the ultimate science-gone-wrong story, and Victor Frankenstein is the quintessential mad-scientist, harnessing the power of a storm to cr...

Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs) Start here

by Morgan, Richard K.

Humans can transfer their conciousness into new bodies. This sets up a detective style story about a murder.

After dying in a particularly gruesome death, ex UN-envoy Takeshi Kovacs wakes up to find himself "re-sleeved" into a fresh body with a job offer: find who killed Laurens Bancroft , the richest man in the Bay city. But f...

Stand On Zanzibar

by John Brunner

In the 1960s, when overpopulation was a common worry for the future, it was often said that the entire population of the world could stand on the Isle of Wight. John Brunner imagines a future in which it would take a...

Queen City Jazz (Nanotech) Start here

by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Of course, we like to imagine that we won’t change; but nothing is going to stop the environment around us changing, and that is inevitably going to have an effect upon us. That is the theme of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Nano...

A Canticle For Leibowitz

by Jr., Walter M. Miller

After a nuclear war monks preserve civilization.

A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the rejuvenation of "civilization" after a devastating nuclear holocaust. It has three distinctive chapters, each one disconnected by centuries, focusing on life at a desert monastery nam...

The Atrocity Exhibition

by J. G. Ballard

Whenever you put a list of books together, you'll always get disagreements. But this could well be the most controversial choice of all, because J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition has always been controversial, ev...

Ringworld (1971) (Ringworld) Start here

by Niven, Larry

One of the most famous books of the genre, that follows the pros and cons of living on a spinning ring instead of a round planet. The fact that makes this book so famous is that after the author’s ideas were proven impracticable, he wrote a sequel explaining the inadequacies.

In the year 2850, Louis Wu turns 200 and is bored with life. Then a two-headed alien Puppeteer called Nessus offers him a job: join a small expedition to a gigantic artificial ring circling a distant star, a structure of...

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) Start here

by Douglas Adams

It began as a radio series on the BBC. It was quickly adapted for television (with many of the same cast), and much later there came a film version (though the less said about that the better). But it is now probably...