Fiction
Mind-Bending Science Fiction
The science fiction we'd hand to anyone — ideas that stay with you long after the last page.
14 books · ranked
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1
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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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
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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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
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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6
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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7
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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8
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
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9
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
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10
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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11
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.
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12
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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13
The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy brings Essun and her daughter Nassun toward an inevitable confrontation over the fate of a world wracked by recurring apocalypses — and reveals the deep history of the Stillness and the Obelisk Gate. Jemisin's trilogy made history as the only series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, with this final volume completing one of the most acclaimed achievements in contemporary fantasy.
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14
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.