The 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Westworld meets The Stepford Wives in this gripping revenge thriller about the unlikely alliance between a woman and her clone. After geneticist Evelyn Caldwell learns that her husband, Nathan, is cheating on her, she soon ferrets out the truth: Rather than work on their strained marriage, Nathan stole Evelyn’s proprietary cloning technology and replaced her with a more docile substitute. But when Evelyn finds her clone standing over Nathan’s dead body, crying, “It was self-defense,” these quasi-sisters will have to work together to conceal the crime and preserve Evelyn’s scientific reputation. The Echo Wife’s juicy premise runs deep, raising eerie questions about love, justice, and individuality.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s outstanding alt-history series Lady Astronaut begins with a disaster: When a meteorite hits the eastern seaboard in 1952, millions of people are killed, including the president and most other government officials. Mathematician and pilot Elma York calculates that the resulting climate shift will wipe out life on Earth in a matter of decades, meaning that the only solution is to establish a colony on Mars. Elma longs to become an astronaut, but because of the sexism, racism, and antisemitism of the time, she and other women are benched as “human computers.” Against the thrilling backdrop of this burgeoning space race, Elma and her colleagues wage an increasingly public war against discrimination, fighting for their right to become astronauts. Textured with strong scientific research and achingly real characters, The Calculating Stars is a lively time machine to an alternate past.

Not all science fiction has to be serious. John Scalzi sets this metafictional satire on the starship Intrepid, where low-ranking crew members reach a grim realization: On the ship’s frequent away missions, it’s always the ensigns who die a cheap, gruesome death. If that sounds like a riff on Star Trek’s ill-fated “redshirts,” that’s because it is: These ensigns are the expendables of their own third-rate Star Trek rip-off, doomed to become cannon fodder. “Sooner or later, the Narrative will come for each of us,” one muses. Like a sci-fi comedy crossed with The Truman Show, Redshirts follows the ensigns’ efforts to transcend their own narrative. “You’re making bad science fiction, and we have to live in it,” one complains. Snappy and surprising, Redshirts takes a comic premise and elevates it into a clever meditation on fiction and free will.

In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fantastical fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behavior of earthlings (for instance: “Human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracized by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is a modern classic in the making—an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.

This recent debut earned its place on our list for two reasons: its innovative mosaic structure and its nightmarish satire of life under algorithmic rule. In the technocapitalist hellscape of Apex City (formerly known as Bangalore), citizens live in thrall to the odious Bell Corp and its Bell Curve: a modern-day caste system determined by productivity and social media virality. The elite Twenty Percent enjoy luxurious privileges, while the middling Seventy Percent lead workaday lives and the precarious Ten Percent risk becoming Analogs, forced to live a dehumanizing existence without electricity or running water. But when the elusive “Ten Percent Thief” steals from the Twenty Percent to give to the Analogs, like a cyberpunk Robin Hood, a revolution brews. Told through various perspectives all across Apex City, this biting satire considers how we live now—our unfettered capitalism, our “hustle and grind” culture, our obsession with “correct” opinions—and shows it to us through a dystopian kaleidoscope, hideous and true.

When we head for the stars, we take culture with us—and Midnight Robber exemplifies how sci-fi writers can build the world we know into the worlds we imagine. On the technologically advanced planet Toussaint, descendants of Caribbean immigrants live under the watchful supervision of Granny Nanny, an all-seeing AI who guides the fate of humanity. When young Tan-Tan is spirited to a planet of exiles by her abusive father, she escapes his clutches and finds refuge among the douen, an alien race inspired by Afro-Caribbean folklore. To survive on this new planet, Tan-Tan becomes the stuff of myth herself: the Robber Queen, a Carnival legend who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Told with magic and music in a unique patois, this bildungsroman reads as much like a futuristic folk tale as it does sci-fi.

Long before Facebook’s Metaverse, Neal Stephenson coined the term in this cyberpunk acid trip of a novel. Snow Crash’s Hiro Protagonist lives a double life: In reality, he delivers pizzas for the Mafia, but in the Metaverse, he’s a hacker and a warrior prince. When he learns about a lethal virus picking off hackers one by one, his race to find its dastardly architect sends him pinballing through everything from technological conspiracy to ancient Sumerian mythology. It’s sexy, action-packed, and downright prophetic in its vision of our virtual future; you’ll want to strap in tight for this dizzying techno-thriller.

Some of the best science fiction makes us ask, “What the hell did I just read?” Star Maker is one of those books—an enormously ambitious history of the universe, told by an Englishman who floats into the cosmos one evening while contemplating its vastness. Disembodied and imbued with godlike powers, he speeds through extraordinary galaxies in search of intelligent life, encountering several exotic alien civilizations along the journey. It all culminates in an encounter with the Star Maker himself, which unspools like a brain-bending creation myth. This eschatological acid trip is a singular work of imagination—one that will leave you with more questions than answers.

The great Carl Sagan wrote dozens of works of nonfiction but just one novel: Contact, a 1985 bestseller that later became a Jodie Foster flick. Sagan’s preoccupations with intelligent life come into view through Dr. Ellie Arroway, a principled astronomer who detects and decrypts a deep-space transmission from a planetary system far, far away. At the transmission’s urging, the nations of the world race to build a mysterious machine, but faith leaders call the enterprise (and the rationality of science) into question. Through this thoughtful, layered story, Sagan plumbs the often antagonistic relationship between science and religion, asking if perhaps both are seeking contact in different forms. After all, disciples from each camp can agree on one thing: “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

Haunting and dread-filled, Under the Skin blends horror with sci-fi to create something unforgettably disturbing. In the Scottish Highlands, a strange-looking drifter named Isserley cruises the highways picking up hunky hitchhikers, who often vanish into thin air after entering her beat-up vehicle. Through her taut conversations with her passengers, Isserley teases out clues about their lives, wondering who might miss them if they disappear. To say too much about Isserley and her agenda is to spoil the book’s mysteries, but through this character, Michel Faber toys with sci-fi’s fundamental questions, like: What makes us human? Beneath our different appearances, are we all the same? Under the Skin reminds us that not every sci-fi novel needs to be a treatise on interstellar travel; in fact, this one lingers because of its masterful friction between the quotidian and the strange.

In the backwoods of Wisconsin, there lives a hermit named Enoch Wallace. Though Enoch is 124 years old, he doesn’t look a day over 30—that’s because Enoch is a caretaker, and for over a century, he’s been running a rest stop for intergalactic travelers inside his rickety Civil War-era farmhouse. Enoch’s neighbors look the other way, but when the government catches wind of a strange man who never ages living in a house that no human can enter, their investigators come knocking, with disastrous consequences. Clifford D. Simak was a fine practitioner of what’s now called “pastoral science fiction”—think of it as classic sci-fi set in the countryside, inflected with that familiar Bradbury-esque Midwestern sentimentalism. The subgenre has fallen into disuse, but if you ever find yourself longing to be transported to a cornfield at dusk, looking up at the stars and wondering what’s out there, let Simak be your guide. Warm, wise, and bittersweet, Way Station is his masterpiece.

“Robot western,” you say? Say no more! In C. Robert Cargill’s speculative future, machines have proven victorious in the much-feared war between man and machine; now humans have been extinct for over three decades, and two supercomputers (called One World Intelligences) are vying to become king of the ruins. Enter Brittle, a former caregiver robot now scavenging to survive in the barren Sea of Rust (formerly the Rust Belt). When an OWI launches a scheme to assimilate millions of robots into the mainframe, Brittle and a merry band of gunslingers travel through the robot underground to defend their individuality. On its surface, Sea of Rust is a rip-roaring shoot’em-up, but underneath, it’s an Asimovian meditation on sci-fi’s most enduring questions. Is an artificial life still a life? Are human creations doomed to repeat human mistakes? Cargill is a fine standard-bearer for the next frontier of this time-honored subgenre.

Published in 1949 during the waning glory of science fiction’s golden age, What Mad Universe is a dazzling high-wire performance—at once a cheeky satire of classic pulp magazines and an excellent pulp tale in its own right. In a near-future setting, pulp magazine editor Keith Winton is transported to a parallel universe through a freak rocket launch accident. This alternate reality looks just like home, but with some key differences: Here, everything from Keith’s magazines is a fact of daily life, from interstellar travel to war with extraterrestrials. Soon enough, Keith becomes a fugitive on the run in New York City, desperate to get back to his own timeline. What Mad Universe is packed with daffy, self-referential details for the devoted sci-fi reader; for instance, in Fredric Brown’s alternate universe, H.G. Wells never wrote a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth, but rather a political manifesto condemning the human colonization of Mars. Campy and comical, this novel is both an homage and a send-up, not to be missed.

Science fiction and magical realism collide in this imaginative prequel to Nnedi Okorafor’s World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death. Here we meet Phoenix, an “accelerated woman” grown in New York’s Tower 7. Though she’s only two years old, she has the mind and body of a middle-aged adult, along with superhuman abilities. Phoenix suffers a painful awakening when her lover takes his life under dubious circumstances, proving that Tower 7 is less of a home and more of a prison. Her daring escape leads her to Ghana, where she learns brutal truths about colonialism and vows to fight back against her oppressors. Blistering with love and rage, Phoenix’s fight for justice is downright electrifying.

In this outstanding debut, Sue Burke blitzes beloved genre tropes (like colony ships and first contact) into a character-driven story about manifest destiny gone galactic. In the 2060s, a group of humans flee their ravaged Earth; 158 years later, they settle on a lush planet and christen it Pax (Latin for “peace”). But the settlers won’t find any peace here, because Pax’s abundant native plants are sentient, and they aren’t keen on sharing their world. Narrated by successive generations of colonists (and even the plants themselves, who think of the human settlers as “their” animals), Semiosis charts the turf war between these two factions. Sometimes that war is downright lethal, while other times it’s a nuanced struggle for two cultures to communicate without a shared language. In this magnificently alien world, Burke tells a powerful story about the dangerous hubris of colonialism.

Banks’ The Culture series, spanning ten installments published over 25 years, centers on the titular Culture, a post-scarcity intergalactic empire dominated by the Minds, a cabal of (mostly) harmless artificial intelligences. In this futuristic landscape of “space socialism,” as the author calls it, each volume centers on an agent of the Culture tasked with influencing specific change. Through this diversity of protagonists, Iain M. Banks assesses his ambiguous utopia from ever-changing perspectives. Our favorite volume is Excession, the most cerebral of the lot—and one that speaks to us all the more powerfully in the age of AI. When a black sphere 50 times older than the universe appears in remote space, the all-knowing Minds are stumped. For the first time ever, they’ve encountered what Banks calls “the Outside Context Problem”—a dilemma they lack the frame of reference to solve. Following the Minds as they deliberate and disagree about the sphere, Excession stands out in its series (and in the sci-fi canon) for its high-minded characterization of AI.

Revered as “the Melville of science fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe wrote dense and heady books that aren’t for the faint of heart. But for serious sci-fi readers, there are immense rewards to penetrating Wolfe’s baroque prose and visionary imagination. His best-known work is The Book of the New Sun, a dazzling tetralogy about Severian, a torturer exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner. Our favorite volume is The Claw of the Conciliator, the second installment in the series, wherein Severian heads to the city of his exile, only to be waylaid along the journey by love, fantastical creatures, and a mysterious artifact with ancient powers. Erudite and intricate, this series is a colossus of imagination and language—a must-read for any serious student of the genre.

As a key architect of science fiction’s New Wave (a 1960s and 1970s movement for the genre to become more experimental), Roger Zelazny wrote boundary-breaking books that pushed the field in a new direction. His best novel, Lord of Light, fuses heady concepts from religion and philosophy with the familiar trappings of sci-fi. On a colony planet, crew members from the original expedition (the Firsts) have biohacked themselves into immortality through reincarnation; meanwhile, their descendants worship them as Hindu gods, eager for their own chance at another lifetime. The Firsts achieve reincarnation through a technology that transfers minds between bodies, but they keep a tight grip on the process, subjecting the population to mind scans to determine worthy subjects. Sam, a young commoner who embraces Buddhism over Hinduism, plans to seize the tech (à la Prometheus stealing fire from the gods), deliver it to the people, and usher in a new era of enlightenment. Epic in scope and richly imagined, Lord of Light is a pivotal example of sci-fi’s ability to fold multiple disciplines into one story.

Structured as a poetic correspondence between two time-traveling spies, this forbidden romance puts the “distance” in “long-distance relationship.” As Agents Red and Blue hopscotch through the multiverse, altering history on behalf of their respective military superpowers, they leave behind secret messages for one another—first taunting, then flirtatious, then flowering with love and devotion. “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” Blue muses. “Letters are structures, not events,” Red replies. “Yours give me a place to live inside.” Amid the dangerous chaos of their circumstances, Red and Blue find constants in one another. Playful and imaginative, told with lyrical grace, this is a dazzling puzzle box of a novella.

Welcome to AutoAmerica, where AIs have put many people out of work, the privileged Netted live on high ground, and the rest of the population, known as Surplus, live in swamplands wracked by consumerism. Teenage Gwen plays baseball with fellow members of the Surplus in an underground league, but when the government takes notice of her talents, she’s shipped off to the Olympics in ChinRussia, playing in dangerous territory alongside the Netted. Like Brave New World before it, The Resisters explores our consent in our own subjugation. “No one would have chosen the extinction of frogs and of polar bears… and yet it was something we humans did finally choose,” Gish Jen writes. In this funny and tender novel, she makes the impossible look easy, grafting a heartfelt story about family onto big questions about freedom and resistance.