If you liked
Books like The Time Machine
Loved The Time Machine by H.G. Wells? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from science fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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2
Foundation
A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows; grand-scale ideas SF.
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3
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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4
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A bounty hunter chases androids in a decayed future and starts to wonder what makes anyone human; the basis for Blade Runner.
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5
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai, an envoy from a galactic confederation, is sent to the planet Gethen — where all humans are ambisexual, able to be either male or female — to persuade the planet to join the confederation. Le Guin's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel is a sustained thought experiment about gender, society and what we assume to be natural that remains one of the most important works in speculative fiction.
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6
Slaughterhouse-Five
A man comes 'unstuck in time' after surviving the firebombing of Dresden; an anti-war novel like no other.
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7
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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8
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Earth is demolished for a bypass and an ordinary man hitchhikes the cosmos; the funniest book in science fiction.
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9
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
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10
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.