Classic Sci Fi Books

The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

A mechanic is the sole survivor on a ship that is just a wreck.

He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. Gully Foyle is a shipwrecked sailor abandoned out in space, and when ships pass him by without stopping to pick him up he vows to exact revenge. He manages...

To The Moon

by Heinlein, Robert A.

An award winning novel about a colony that rebels against the Lunar Authority that controls it.

Science fiction-roman.

Fahrenheit 451

by Bradbury, Ray

A classic "What if?" story about book banning, happiness, and knowledge.

Everyone loves the idea of the thinking man's fireman (particularly middle aged women who read Fifty Shades of Grey), but that's not why Fahrenheit 451 made it to second on this list. Bradbury made his bread and butter w...

1984

by George Orwell

A classic novel that is definitively a dystopia.

The words have become so commonplace we hardly realise we are using them: Big Brother is watching you, the Ministry of Truth, Room 101, Newspeak, thoughtcrime. George Orwell gave us a language for describing our fear...

The Day Of The Triffids (Triffids) Start here

by John Wyndham

The world changes when a meteor shower leaves most of the world's population blind. The event is augmented by the flesh-eating and mobile plants.

In Billion Year Spree, his epic history of science fiction, Brian Aldiss coined the term "cosy catastrophe" for the sorts of novels that John Wyndham wrote. Well, they are certainly catastrophes, but they are far from...

Childhood S End

by Clarke, Arthur C.

An alien race invades Earth, but they are benevolent and a golden age begins on Earth.

You're going to hate me for this. Really. See, Clarke is one of the three giants of science fiction, old-school science fiction. He was writing this novel in 1953 at a time when the genre was read almost exclusivel...

The Robot Stories

by Asimov, Isaac

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law....

The Best Of

by Moore, C. L.

We often tend to slip into the notion that before the advent of writers like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, science fiction was an exclusively masculine domain. But that couldn't be further from the truth. There have al...

Dune (Dune Chronicles) Start here

by Herbert, Frank

The whole series over time shows the colonization and taming of the wild planet Dune over thousands of years.

A blend of sci-fi and fantasy, Frank Herbert's Dune created a foundation for many of the themes in modern genre fiction. Its exploration of ecology, pacifism, and mysticism pairs with a story of destiny to remain rel...

The Cold Equations

by Tom Godwin

These were the great years of the sf short story; magazines like Astounding, F&SF, Galaxy and If were in their pomp and most of the brilliant novels of the period began their life as short stories. It would be easy...

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...

Mission Of Gravity (Mesklin) Start here

by Hal Clement

This story is a discovery of the oceans on planet Mesklin--a planet with an iron core, a rapid rotation, and a sentient species that resemble yard-long centipedes.

Hard science fiction in its purest form didn't have villains; the implacable laws of the universe were enemy enough for anyone. After all, who needs enemies when you're faced with an oblate planet where gravity...

The Rediscovery Of Man (Instrumentality Of Mankind)

by Cordwainer Smith

Practically all of Cordwainer Smithâs fiction belongs within a future history that starts just a few years from now and extends for tens of thousands of years into the future. At the heart of this, and the core of his ve...

Who?

by Algis Budrys

At the height of Cold War paranoia, Algis Budrys wrote a novel that perfectly captured the doubts and distrusts of the time. There is an explosion at an allied research station close to the Iron Curtain, and lead...

Witch World (Witch World) Start here

by Lackey, Andre Norton And Mercedes

Simon Tregarth is a man on the run from various shadowy ruffians, people he associated with because he was wrongly convicted of working the black market while in the military. Willing to try anything, he ends up passing...

The Space Merchants (The Space Merchants) Start here

by Pohl, Frederik

In his pioneering study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis argued that The Space Merchants was possibly the best science fiction novel ever written. In the fifty-odd years since then, little has happ...

A Case Of Conscience (After Such Knowledge) Start here

by James Blish

A Jesuit investigates an alien race. The aliens have no religion, but have an innate sense of morality.

From Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" to Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, there was something of a trend in the 1950s for bringing Catholicism into a science fiction context, usually to the detriment of t...

The Man In The High Castle

by Dick, Philip K.

A novel where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win WWII.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most idiosyncratic and successful writers in science fiction. Okay, he's probably better known these days for all the films that have been based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total...

The Sirens Of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut

This is the novel in which we first encounter some of the themes and ideas that would later emerge in Slaughterhouse-Five. There are Tralfamadorians, there's the familiar resignation in the face of the inevitabili...

The Body Snatchers

by Jack Finney

Aliens replace the people of a California town with emotionless copies, the paranoid novel behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If you had to name one science fiction movie that encapsulated America's national paranoia in the mid-50s it would have to be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and this is the original novel upon which that film is base...

More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

There was a period when science fiction tended to refer to the next stage in human evolution as homo superior, and one of the ways of achieving this state was through a gestalt, a number of individuals working as one. Th...