The 28 Best Science Fiction Books of All Time (in 2022)

Although there were some earlier flashes, science fiction (nd) began with the development of modern science in the scientific and industrial revolutions of the early 19th century. Many scholars credit Marty Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein as the first true science fiction novel.

thus, science fiction developed in parallel with the scientific theories of the time, in celebration of human reason and in opposition to more romantic and irrational stories. Of course, we have come a long way since then. Emeritus Professor of English and science fiction author James Gunn said, “Science fiction is the literature of change.” science fiction allows us to extrapolate any aspect of our culture and to imagine and examine the human condition in a rational way.

You are reading: Best science fiction books of all time

There are two major annual science fiction awards, the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Starting in 1953, the Hugo Awards are given to the best science fiction or fantasy works (of varying lengths) of the previous year, as decided by the current members of the World Science Fiction Convention. anyone can join the convention and vote for the hugos, so this is a very democratic award.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been awarded to the best science fiction works (of various lengths) of the calendar year, as decided by members of the Scifiction/Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). sfwa requires authors to meet certain publication criteria for admission, so nebulas are awarded by other science fiction authors. Most of the science fiction novels on the following list have won one or both of these prestigious awards.

Also, most of the novels below have had a significant impact on our culture and how we understand what it means to be human.

Brave New World is an iconic science fiction novel, considered by some to be one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. The story begins with a chilling tour of central London’s hatchery and conditioning facility, where five different castes of children are created in a factory.

brave new world holds up surprisingly well with its reproductive technology, dream learning, and psychological manipulation.

the main character bernard marx is a psychologist with an inferiority complex, dissatisfied with his life in the highly structured rigid society. This novel is considered one of the first dystopian novels, so unsurprisingly, things don’t go well for Bernard, or the later introduced protagonist, John.

Reading the novel through the lens of the 21st century, Huxley’s vision in which the population enjoys drugs/entertainment, and can be controlled by inflicting pleasure and/or distractions, seems prescient.

1984 has won numerous awards and has appeared on several best literature lists.

many of the dystopian ideas of george orwell’s novel 1984 have taken root in our society, the political control of information, surveillance, propaganda and psychological manipulation. elements like ‘big brother is watching you’, ‘who controls the past controls the future’ and ‘orwellian’ are now in common use.

In the novel set in 1984, Oceanian minor bureaucrat Winston Smith defies the ban on individuality by expressing his thoughts in a diary and pursuing a romantic relationship with Julia. the totalitarian government finds out and forces mavericks to reform, ultimately controlling what they think.

Orwell intended his story to be a warning about the dangers of government overreach, the cult of personality, and totalitarianism. I’m not sure we’ve learned our lesson.

fahrenheit 451 is another award winner and another dystopia. The title is derived from the burning temperature of the paper, 451 degrees Fahrenheit. book burning has become emblematic of trying to suppress or destroy knowledge.

In the novel, a firefighter’s job is to start fires and burn books. the books were banned because special interest groups were offended by books they didn’t agree with. Firefighter Guy Montag experiences a series of stressful events and finds himself dissatisfied with the status quo.

He devises a plan to get people off the TV and get the books back, but things go awry when he loses his wife, his house burns down, and a mechanical dog tries to kill him. Ultimately, civilization is destroyed, and Montag and his surviving book-loving friends hope to rebuild it with knowledge as a foundation.

bradbury has written many other important and critically acclaimed novels. one of my favorites is the poetic science fiction novel Martian Chronicles (1950).

Heinlein’s work is considered innovative because it used indirect exposition, mentioning specific details so that readers can infer things about the world of a novel, rather than the author explaining them. he also has some famous writing rules (write, finish what you start, refrain from rewriting, submit, keep submitting until sold).

it’s hard to pick just one heinlein novel for a best list, but i’m going to go with starship troopers. It is a coming of age story of interstellar soldier Roger Young during humanity’s war with the alien bugs, told in a non-linear chronology. This novel is classic military science fiction at its finest; Heinlein, himself a naval officer, knew what he was writing about.

Several of his other science fiction novels won multiple awards, including Double Star (1956), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), The Moon Is a Tough Mistress (1965). Some of my favorites also include his long Lazarus novels, particularly The Cat That Walks Through Walls (1985).

philip k. Dick has had an unusual number of his science fiction stories adapted for film and television.

the man in the high castle is an alternate history novel in which the us. It lost World War II and was divided by the victorious Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. there are several point of view characters with their own subplots, but here I will focus on the main one, tagomi.

in japanese controlled san francisco, mr. Tagomi works for a trading company and faces moral dilemmas throughout the events of the book, often consulting the i-ching when making decisions. he too seems to go to parallel lands. thus, the novel explores the concepts of multiple worlds, destiny and identity.

ubik, dick’s 1969 science fiction novel, also won several awards. Another outstanding penis science fiction novel is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), dramatized by the blade runner movies.

From the start, Dune was a winner with readers, winning numerous science fiction awards. dune is set in the distant year 10,191 when humans have colonized the universe, implementing a feudal society. noble paul atreides family is the administrator of the desert planet arrakis.

The planet’s claim to fame is that it is the sole source of the coveted blend, the spice, a drug that enhances mental abilities and prolongs life. The novel tells the story of the complex, multi-layered struggle for control of the Arrakis.

Herbert wrote five well-received sequels: Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1983), and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). others (approved by herbert estate) have continued the series.

There have been many film, television, and computer game incarnations of the dune universe. dune is one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time.

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Although he was inspired by several Clarke stories, Clarke initially developed this novel in collaboration with film director Stanley Kubrick. With millions of copies of the novel and its sequels sold worldwide, Clarke’s Space Odysseys have become iconic. At the beginning of the novel, a giant crystal monolith appears on earth and experiments on primitive primates.

later, david bowman and another astronaut are on a supposed mission to saturn with their a.i. Hal’s computer room begins to malfunction and an astronaut dies, leaving David alone after he unplugs Hal. David learns that the real mission is to explore Japetus, a moon of Saturn.

As he does so, he discovers another monolith and travels through it as a kind of portal. David transforms into a non-corporeal immortal and ends up saving the earth from a nuclear war. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first work that really brought space travel to life.

Honorable Mention goes to Fountains of Paradise (1979), Clarke’s, Childhood’s End (1953), and Rendezvous with Rama (1973). Sci-fi fans can’t go wrong reading Clarke.

slaughterhouse-five is a non-linear anti-war satirical novel that follows the life of unreliable narrator billy peregrino. it’s science fiction because billy is ‘unstuck’ and randomly travels through time. In a brief linear reconstruction: Billy is born in New York and is drafted into the Army during World War II, soon captured and spends most of the war as a prisoner of war, experiencing horrors.

After the war, he marries, has children, and is abducted by aliens, who teach him the secrets of time. Scholars consider Billy to be an unreliable narrator, psychologically scarred by his war experiences. Thus, vonnegut, himself a World War II veteran and pacifist, explored modern issues like post-traumatic stress disorder before they were recognized.

vonnegut published several other novels, experiments in the form of the novel itself, often dealing with mental health issues.

Ursula k. Le Guin is a very talented American novelist whose works have had a significant impact on our culture. In science fiction terms, the award-winning Left Hand of Darkness is part of the Hainish cycle of Le Guin, which spans several novels, including the award-winning 1974 The Dispossessed.

the left hand of darkness tells the story of genly ai, an envoy from the confederation of planets, who is sent to the planet gethen to persuade his nations to join the federation. however, genly is hampered by the ambisexual (genderless) natives, whom he can’t seem to understand, and his consequent influence on the culture.

Seeing how delicately these issues are handled is fascinating and thought-provoking of our culture. Le Guin’s exploration of gender and sex and her influences on society was groundbreaking and one of the first feminist science fiction books.

le guin is credited with raising the bar for science fiction literature and won many, many awards.

isaac asimov was one of the most prolific authors of all time, writing or editing over 500 books and hundreds of stories, including the foundation series and i, robot. asimov is perhaps best known for his three laws of robotics.

However, his most critically acclaimed novel was The Gods Themselves, which consists of three parts. In the first part, in the early 22nd century, Earth-based radiochemist Frederick Hallam discovers that people from a parallel universe have interfered with ours and develop a way to pump energy between the universes. Later, physicist Peter Lamont communicates with the parallel universe, warning them that their actions are damaging the universes.

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in the second part, in the parallel universe, alien dua, one of the “gods” of the title, tries to transmit the message of lamont. In the third part, in our universe, on the moon, the physicist Denison tries to solve the problems caused by the people in the parallel world and he achieves it by using a third parallel world.

asimov had a doctorate. in biochemistry and was a very important science fiction author, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s; in his later life, the good doctor devoted himself mainly to non-fiction.

Joe Haldeman’s Eternal War is a multi-award winning military science fiction novel, with a very different tone than Starship Troopers. In War Forever, brilliant physics student William Mandella is recruited into an elite military force and sent into an interstellar war against the Taurans.

william falls in love with his fellow soldier, marygay potter, and the soldiers are victorious, but due to time dilation, the land is unrecognizable when they get home.

william and marygay re-enlist, getting separate assignments, but manage to reunite after the war, which is revealed to have started due to a misunderstanding. the forever war was widely acclaimed for tackling the alienation of soldiers after war and showing how futile war can be.

haldeman returned to this world several times in his forever war series. several of his other novels have also won numerous awards. some of my favorites are accidental time machine (2007) and camouflage (2004).

fredrick pohl’s multi-award winning novel gateway is the first in his heechee saga. the title gateway is a hollow asteroid, containing hundreds of spaceships, created by the long-vanished ‘heechee’ alien race.

Unfortunately, humans haven’t figured out how to operate the ships yet, so the volunteer astronauts have no idea where they’ll end up or how long it will take to get there.

the protagonist of the story is the nice robinette “rob” broadhead; she tells us of her adventures on these mysterious ships through a non-linear chronology along with her therapy sessions, necessitated by what she experienced on the voyages. With Pohl’s masterful characterization, this is a highly entertaining novel.

pohl’s man plus (1976) also won several awards.

Also, a multiple award winner, Vonda n. mcintyre’s dreamsnake investigates biotechnology and genetic manipulation in a post-apocalyptic earth.

Mcintyre’s protagonist is snake, a traveling healer who uses her genetically modified snakes to produce medicine, alleviate suffering, and alleviate death. Her unique (possibly alien) dream snake Herb is killed by a patient’s ignorant family, and the snake must figure out what to do without her.

The rest of the book describes Snake’s adventures on his way home, including dealing with a man addicted to snakes, discovering the origin of dream snakes, and saving his life. the novel was praised for its female heroine, compassion, and world-building. McIntyre’s 1997, The Moon and the Sun is also recommended.

octavia e. Butler’s non-linear standalone novel Kindred is a major exploration of the dynamics of gender, race, slavery, and power through a time-traveling sci-fi story. Butler’s protagonist is a young African-American writer, Dana Franklin, who travels between the angels of 1976 and a slave-filled pre-Civil War plantation in Maryland.

Dana travels back in time because a Caucasian ancestor, Rufus Weylin, lures her into the past and ends up saving her life multiple times while suffering the horrible consequences of being a black woman in the antebellum South. Dana eventually kills Rufus in self-defense and returns home to 1976, albeit wounded.

butler wrote numerous highly acclaimed novels, including The Parable of the Sower (1993), which also won many awards.

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neuromancer by william gibson is the novel that started the subgenre known as cyberpunk. has had significant impacts on our culture, including the popularization of terms like cyberspace, matrix, and the proliferation of various literary “punks” like steampunk, dieselpunk, biopunk. Considering the low level of technology in 1984, Gibson’s achievement is even more impressive.

In Neuromancer, Henry Dorsett Case’s hacking prowess is ruined by a disgruntled former employer. When a mysterious new employer offers to fix him up in exchange for an illegal job, Case jumps at the chance.

The case joins a cohort of criminals who are ultimately supposed to merge two AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. He uses his considerable hacking skills and eventually prevails, overcoming various obstacles, including law enforcement agency ai.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is a thought-provoking military science fiction novel starring child soldiers. raises many important questions related to war, violent video games, and childhood.

In Ender’s Game, humanity is at war with an alien race, the Formics, also known as insectoid critters. Protagonist Andrew “ender” Wiggin is recruited at age six, taken to command school, and trained to be a commander in the war. While the training has its brutal aspects, Ender and his fellow child recruits think it’s all a game, including their final exam battle, in which he commits genocide.

Of course, it turns out it wasn’t a game and ender has won the war for humanity. card does an absolutely incredible job of characterizing the ender boy, and the reader identifies with him throughout the novel, and thus his act of genocide is all the more jarring. the card revisits the world several times in its ender game series.

Over time, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, has become more chilling and prophetic. is set in the near future after the secular u.s. the government has been overthrown by a totalitarian patriarchal theocracy, the republic of gilead.

The protagonist is only known as Ofred, literally “Fred’s”, her male master. handmaidens are necessary for procreation because many women are infertile due to environmental radiation and pollution.

Offred’s story is dark and unsettling, depicting her highly limited shopping excursions, mating “ceremony” and the like, in contrast to her flashbacks to normal life before the revolution. in the end, she gets mixed up with the resistance and is taken to parts unknown in a van.

His final destination is unknown, as is his true name. Atwood concludes the novel with a strangely disrespectful epilogue, set in 2195 when Gilead was overthrown, in which a professor discusses and jokes about Offred’s story in the context of a historical record of events.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars is a startlingly realistic account of the colonization of Mars. is the first book in his mars trilogy (red mars (1992), green mars (1993), blue mars (1996)).

robinson is known for his attention to detail, including details of the inner lives of his characters. On Red Mars in 2026, humanity begins to colonize Mars with the Ares spacecraft and a crew of a hundred mostly American and Russian scientists.

there are several main characters, a couple of standouts are sax russell, a physicist, leading the greens, who want to terraform mars as soon as possible, and ann clayborne, a geologist, leading the reds, who want to preserve the planet.

The central conflict of the novel, then, is the conflicting desires of these two factions, Green and Red. finally, the greens, supported by the earth, emerge victorious and the great terraforming efforts begin.

Unfortunately for the Greens, guerrilla warfare tactics consisting of “accidents” and sabotage set the stage for the coming conflict and full-blown war breaks out. robinson has written several recommended science fiction novels.

beggars in spain by nancy kress is considered a pillar of feminist science fiction and is also an admirable example of a science fiction novel starring biology. this novel is acclaimed for its predictions of emerging technologies and competing genetic engineering, bioethics, and social orders.

kress is a master of characterization, world building, and storytelling. the central premise of the novel is the creation of the sleepless, people who do not sleep, through genetic engineering, and its consequences.

As the story progresses, the insomniacs’ enormous advantages result in a restructuring of human society and increased stress. The main question of the story is: what do the haves owe to the have-nots in a world where technology is making workers obsolete?

Kress continues his wonderful sleepless series with Beggars and Selectors (1994) and Beggars Ride (1996).

Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age: Or, A Young Girl’s Illustrated Manual Explores the Roles of Education, Culture, Technology, and Relationships in Human Development.

The title derives from the idea that humans will create a new archaeological period, the high-tech diamond age, which will succeed the stone, bronze, and iron ages. In this future, humans are divided into various tribes, including the Victorians, the Han, and the Nippon.

in the novel, the main character, nell, a second-class citizen because she doesn’t belong to a tribe, receives a stolen copy of an illustrated primer from a young interactive victorian girl as a child, and encourages her to be successful and interesting and subvert the status quo.

The primer’s engineer, john percival hackworth, gets into trouble and, among other things, is forced to mass-produce the primer for the han. Eventually, the young women raised in the illegal handbook of the mouse army, led by Nell, foment the revolution to overthrow the tribes, leading to an era of greater freedom.

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Stephenson’s other science fiction novels have been nominated for or won numerous awards. a personal favorite is the rise and fall of d.o.d.o. (2017) with nicole galland.

connie willis’s work is wonderful because of her imagination, humor and focus on characters.

willis is the most awarded science fiction author in history. his novel, not to mention the dog, is set in the same time travel world as his award-winning doomsday book (1992) and blackout/all clear (2010). I can attest to the fact that, not to mention the dog, he was inspired by Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 humorous novel Three Men in a Boat: (not to mention the dog).

In willis’s charming novel, time-traveling historians at 2057 oxford university are focused on rebuilding coventry cathedral, but one of them illegally brings a cat back to the present (when they’re extinct) from the it was victorian

the protagonist, ned henry, attempts to fix the resulting time interrupt, but has traveled too far in time, has a case of ‘time lag’, and, confused, gets stuck in 1888, where he accidentally interrupts the timeline even more.

Several humorous mishaps ensue, but with the help of verity kindle, a charming time-traveling companion, things are finally patched up and the timeline is saved. Hurrah! Science fiction fans can’t go wrong with any of Willis’s books.

Michael Chabon’s novel The Police Union in Yiddish is a detective story set in an alternate history. chabon creates a fascinating world with a jewish settlement in alaska, where four million jews are saved from the nazi holocaust, but israel is destroyed three months after its founding.

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The protagonist is alcoholic homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the Sitka Police Department. The story begins when Landsman discovers a murder in the hotel where he lives and calls his partner, a half-Tlingit, half-Jewish Berko Shemets.

The two men investigate and discover that the deceased, Mendel Shpilman, was the son of a powerful crime boss, as well as a possible Jewish messiah, and was involved with Meyer’s deceased sister.

The story takes many twists and turns, including an international conspiracy to bomb the Dome of the Rock and build a new temple in Jerusalem. In the end, Meyer solves the murder, but the detectives seem to give in to pressure from religious fanatics.

The Three Body Problem is one of the few Chinese science fiction novels to have been successful in the English-speaking world, and it is not an easy book to digest. the chronology of the novel is not linear and involves multiple characters, so it is not easy to summarize.

A main plot is: Wenjie Ye witnesses the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, including the murder of her father, and becomes disillusioned with the state of humanity. therefore, wenjie and others with similar sentiments turn to some aliens, the trisolarans, to take over planet earth and fix us.

When other humans find this out, they’re understandably unhappy. but since the trisolarans already have a foothold on earth, it’s unclear what they can do about it.

In Cixin Liu’s world, the universe is vast, full of inflexible physics, and other species try to take what we have. continues the story in the dark forest (2015 English translation) and death’s end (2016 English translation), on an even larger scale. Cixin Liu’s work is extremely popular in China.

The Wind Up Girl is considered by many to be among the best in literary science fiction. The novel is set in the 23rd century after global warming has decimated the earth and genetically modified organisms have destroyed the ecosystem. only thailand has genetically viable seeds and a viable civilization, although its capital is below sea level, protected by bombs and dams.

there are several main characters, the captain of the green police ‘white shirts’, jaidee rojjanasukchai, and kanya jaidee’s protégé, the greedy anderson lake, who attempts corporate espionage, hock’s assistant seng anderson, and a haven Chinese, and emiko, a ‘rope girl’, a Japanese. human-robot hybrid and prostitute.

In short: An accidental plague at Anderson’s factory sets off a chain of events including a white shirt uprising, emiko kills several people, kanya rises to the top of the white shirt troops and floods the city ​​to stop the plague. in the end, anderson contracts the plague while artificial emiko is left standing, one of the only survivors.

it’s clear that bacigalupi has a real knack for building worlds. the novel has become something of a focal point for those who oppose genetically modified organisms, though I don’t think that was bacigalupi’s intention.

Although the author describes it as police fiction, the city and the city can be considered a great fusion of science fiction and procedural police. as the title alludes, two separate city-states occupy the same geographic space. for example, a building may belong to one city, while the neighboring building may belong to the other.

Even more challenging are laws that prohibit residents of one city from entering, interacting with, or even seeing or hearing the other city, even though it might be right in front of their eyes and ears. thus, in this scenario, a young woman is found murdered with her face disfigured.

inspector tyador borlu of beszel’s extreme crime squad investigates and discovers the victim is foreign archeology student mahalia geary, who has been linked to the political turmoil involving beszel and its twin city of ul qoma. His investigations eventually led him to the fabled Orciny, a third city that exists in the spaces between Beszel and Ul Qoma.

Things get very complicated for the tyador when he finds himself embroiled in internal and external warring factions, including some secretive groups, but he ultimately prevails.

china miéville has received praise for other novels, such as lost street station (2002) and embassytown (2011).

is set thousands of years in the future with the protagonist breq, an auxiliary call, a segment of an a.i. who once animated a spaceship called toren justice and the soldiers of it.

the plot has two timelines, one in breq’s present when he fights for (vigilante) justice for his lost ship in the form of a special weapon, and another nineteen years earlier showing how the ship was lost in a war undercover.

leckie successfully creates a universe where what it means to be a ‘person’ is quite different, but still very relatable. Interestingly, the Rachaai rulers are gender neutral, which adds an extra aspect to the story, as they are all supposed to be female. this novel is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human.

The award-winning series continues with Auxiliary Sword (2014) and Auxiliary Mercy (2015).

author and psychologist n.k. Jemisin burst onto the fiction scene in 2010 with his trilogy of Inheritance novels, followed by his Blood of Dreams duology and his Broken Earth series. She is the only author in the history of mankind to have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row.

Season Five is the first book in the award-winning Broken Earth series, which features a world devastated by geological catastrophes every few centuries. has (more or less) three characters from parallel viewpoints essun, damaya and syenite, orogenes, who have special, but forbidden, abilities to control energy.

An elderly mother, Essun, has hidden her power from her family, but when her son accidentally reveals his power, her horrified husband kills him and kidnaps their daughter.

essun follows them to try to rescue her daughter, facing many challenges along the way. Damaya is open about her powers and is forced to work for the oppressive government. she achieves some success and it turns out that she takes syenite as her adult orogenic name. later that essun is an even older syenite. plot twist! Ultimately, things don’t look too promising for our protagonist as he begins a new “season.”

The award-winning series continues with Obelisk Gate (2016) and The Stone Sky (2017).

The Calculating Stars is the first book in Kowal’s Woman Astronaut Alternate History series, and really, who could miss a series by that name?

in the world of kowal, the earth is hit by a 1952 meteorite impact on the chesapeake bay, destroying the east coast; the resulting climate change threatens the rest of the planet.

The protagonist, the brilliant mathematician pilot Elma York, joins the space race as humanity reaches the moon and then Mars. kowal addresses many issues related to gender and discrimination. if only there was a true international aerospace coalition…

The series continues with Heaven Predestined (2018).

related: the best hard science fiction books of all time

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