The Best Sci Fi Books: 14 Titles Worth Your Shelf Space
Science fiction covers a lot of ground. Victorian invasion stories, galactic empires, cyberpunk heists, quiet stories about identity and family. This list pulls together fourteen books that have earned their place through awards, critical standing or sheer staying power.
The order reflects how much interest our readers show in each title, so the list opens with a recent bestseller and works back through the foundations of the genre. Every entry includes what the book is about and why it matters, whether that is a Hugo win, a spot on a major all-time novels list, or the fact that it invented a subgenre.
If you are new to science fiction, several of these are regularly taught in schools and make easy starting points. If you have read the classics already, there are Hugo and Nebula winners further down worth tracking.
Red Rising
Pierce Brown's 2014 dystopian novel reached number 20 on the New York Times Best Seller list and launched a long-running series. Darrow is a 16-year-old Red, the lowest caste in a rigid 14-colour hierarchy, mining helium-3 beneath the surface of Mars. After his wife is hanged for singing a banned protest song, he is recruited by a rebel group, surgically remade as a ruling-class Gold and sent to infiltrate the elite training Institute. What follows is a brutal contest between student Houses, fought in a recreated medieval landscape inside the Valles Marineris.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
Serialised from 1869 and published in a deluxe illustrated edition in 1871, Verne's novel remains one of the premier adventure stories ever written. Professor Aronnax joins an expedition hunting a sea monster, only to find himself a permanent guest aboard the Nautilus, an electrically powered submarine commanded by the exiled Captain Nemo. Verne based the vessel partly on a model of the French submarine Plongeur he saw in 1867, and its design is still regarded as decades ahead of the primitive craft of the time. It appears on our 100 novels of all time and school reading lists.
The Tommyknockers
King's 1987 novel is his clearest excursion into science fiction. Writer Bobbi Anderson uncovers the edge of a buried alien craft in the woods near Haven, Maine, and the gas it releases begins transforming the townspeople into inventive geniuses with no understanding of what they are building. Her friend Gard, shielded by a steel plate in his skull, watches the town change around him. King has since called it "an awful book", blaming the cocaine addiction he was writing through, while admitting "there's really a good book in here".
The War Of The Worlds
One of the earliest stories of conflict between humanity and an alien race, and one of the most discussed works in the whole science fiction canon. Wells sends Martian tripods armed with heat rays and poison gas across Surrey and London, narrated in the first person by a man watching his world collapse. He drew on the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and later described the book as "another assault on human self-satisfaction". Orson Welles's 1938 radio version famously convinced part of its audience that an invasion was actually underway.
The Paper Menagerie
Ken Liu's short story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2011. Jack grows up watching his Chinese mother fold origami animals that come to life, then grows ashamed of her accent and her ways, and pushes her away. After her death he finds a letter she wrote him in Chinese, which tells him about the Cultural Revolution, her journey through Hong Kong and her love for him. It is a short, direct piece about internalised racism and what gets lost when you reject where you came from.
Flowers for Algernon
Few science fiction stories have been so widely honoured. The 1959 novelette won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction, and the expanded 1966 novel was joint winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Charlie Gordon, a 37-year-old janitor with an IQ of 68, undergoes experimental surgery that triples his intelligence, and tells his own story through progress reports whose spelling and grammar shift as he changes. When Algernon, the laboratory mouse who had the operation first, begins to decline, Charlie works out what is coming for him. It sits on the TIME 100 novels list and is widely taught in schools.
Foundation
Asimov's 1951 book collects five interlinked stories into the opening volume of the Foundation Trilogy. Mathematician Hari Seldon develops psychohistory, a science that predicts the future statistically, and forecasts the fall of the Galactic Empire and thirty thousand years of barbarism. Exiled to the remote world of Terminus, his Foundation is meant to preserve civilisation's knowledge, though its real purpose unfolds across generations of mayors, traders and crises. One of the most influential structures in all of science fiction, and a fixture on all-time novels lists.
A Princess Of Mars
First serialised in All-Story Magazine in 1912, Burroughs's novel is a classic example of pulp fiction and a seminal instance of the planetary romance. Confederate veteran John Carter is mysteriously transported from an Arizona cave to Mars, where lower gravity gives him great strength, and he falls in with the six-limbed green Tharks before rescuing Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. Burroughs built his dying desert Mars on the popular theories of astronomer Percival Lowell. The Barsoom series went on to inspire later science fiction writers and scientists including Carl Sagan, who read it as a child.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco where nuclear war has left most animal species extinct and owning a real one is a status symbol. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard is assigned to retire six Nexus-6 androids, machines so close to human that only an empathy test can tell the difference. The question of who is really human, Deckard included, runs through every encounter. It became the basis for Blade Runner in 1982 and its 2017 sequel.
The Left Hand of Darkness
The novel that established Le Guin as a major science fiction author. Genly Ai is sent alone to the frozen planet Gethen to persuade its nations to join the Ekumen, a loose confederation of worlds, and fails largely because he cannot read a culture whose people have no fixed sex. Gethenian social life runs on shifgrethor, an intricate code of unspoken rules that Ai keeps misjudging, with serious political consequences. It is among the first books in what is now called feminist science fiction and the most famous examination of androgyny in the genre.
The Dispossessed
Subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, this 1974 novel is one of the small number of books to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards all at once. The physicist Shevek travels from the anarchist moon Anarres to the wealthy capitalist world of Urras, and the chapters alternate between the two, one strand moving forward and one filling in his past. Le Guin uses the structure to examine anarchism, capitalism, individualism and collectivism without letting either society off lightly. It also introduces the ansible, the faster-than-light communicator that matters across the whole Hainish Cycle.
The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin's hard science fiction novel was published in China in 2008 and won the Galaxy Award; Ken Liu's 2014 English translation became the first novel by an Asian writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. It opens during the Cultural Revolution with astrophysicist Ye Wenjie watching her father beaten to death, then follows her to a secret military project searching for alien life. Her decision to answer a signal from Trisolaris, a world orbiting three suns in chaotic and unpredictable patterns, sets an invasion fleet on a 450-year journey towards Earth. A Chinese television series followed in 2023.
Neuromancer
Gibson's 1984 debut is a foundational work of cyberpunk and the first book of the Sprawl trilogy. Case is a burned-out console cowboy in Chiba City, his nervous system deliberately damaged so he can no longer jack into cyberspace, until a mercenary called Molly and a damaged ex-soldier named Armitage offer him a cure in exchange for one last heist. Behind them sits Wintermute, an artificial intelligence trying to merge with its other half. Gibson's influences included Raymond Chandler's detective fiction and Burroughs's Naked Lunch.
A Wrinkle in Time
L'Engle's 1962 novel won the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Meg Murry, her child-genius brother Charles Wallace and schoolmate Calvin are taken across the universe by three supernatural beings to find Meg's missing scientist father, travelling by tesseract. They end up on Camazotz, a planet where every house is identical and everyone moves in step, under the control of CENTRAL Central Intelligence. It opens the Time Quintet and sits on the TIME 100 novels list.
Between them these fourteen books cover a century and a half of the genre, from Verne's submarine to Trisolaris. Several are short enough to read in a sitting, and several are the first instalment of something much longer if you want to keep going.