The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time | Penguin Random House

1

1984

by George Orwell

Our favorite science fiction tends to use the future to illuminate and discuss issues in our present. 1984 is a prime example of this, a dystopian novel where our culture has become the victim of government surveillance and public manipulation. An important read for any age.

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2

Altered Carbon (Netflix Series Tie-in Edition)

by Richard K. Morgan

Set in a future where interstellar travel is done by “sleeving” one’s consciousness into new bodies, the story follows a private investigator whose past collides with his present as he attempts to solve a rich man’s murder. A dark and gritty cyberpunk experience. Now a Netflix series!

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3

Amatka

by Karin Tidbeck

Vanja is an information assistant in a world where language literally controls reality. After being sent to the ice colony Amatka to gather intelligence for her government, she falls in love with her housemate and decides to extend her mission. She begins to realize, though, that there is something deeply amiss in this colony.

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4

Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

Ammonite, Griffith’s first novel, won the Lambda Award and the James Tiptree Jr Award. A human expedition to the planet Jeep is nearly wiped out by a virus that kills all the men and most of the women. Some centuries later, an anthropologist, Marghe, is sent to test a vaccine on the descendents of the original expedition, themselves all women. As she lives and moves among them, Marghe finds herself changed in profound and unexpected ways.

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5

The Best of All Possible Worlds

by Karen Lord

After their homeworld is destroyed, the surviving members of the Sadiri must find a way for their people to continue, despite the fact that most of the survivors are male. To do so, they make their way across the colony planet of Cygnus Beta under the guidance of a woman from the planet’s Central Government, encountering all kinds of people and cultures in their mission to save their vanishing race.

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6

The Big Book of Science Fiction

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Anthologies rarely make “Best Of” lists, but this one belongs on here — because it contains stories by many of the great science fiction writers we are discussing in our list. Le Guin, Asimov, Doctorow, Liu, Wells, Clarke, Butler, Vonnegut, and the list goes on and on! A wonderful primer for science fiction readers.

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7

The Blazing World and Other Writings

by Margaret Cavendish

An early work of feminist Utopian fiction and proto-science fiction, The Blazing World tells the story of a woman from our earth who travels to another world via a portal at the North Pole, where she becomes empress of a society made up of fantastical half-animal half-human species. The book, published in 1666, reflects Enlightenment-era theoretical science, with Cavendish imagining submarines, boats with engines, and a universe without end.

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8

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

Often cited by critics of genetic engineering despite being written before the discovery of DNA, Brave New World imagines a future where people are divided into castes chosen before birth and kept docile through the use of drugs. Heavily relying on references to Shakespeare, it offers scathing criticisms of capitalism, utopian ideals and conformity.

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9

A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter Miller

Nuclear war razed the Earth, plunging its survivors into a new dark age in which science is reviled and books are destroyed on sight. A small order of Catholic monks dedicated to a legendary miracle worker hold back the wave of ignorance as best that it can as barbarism swells at its gates. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bittersweet tale that might make you worry about our future as a species.

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10

The Children of Men

by P. D. James

Building a premise that feels all too plausible, British author P.D. James crafted a modern classic that continues to feel disturbingly relevant with each passing year. Inspired by the real issue of declining birthrates around the world, James imagines a world where that birth rate declined to zero, and an England under the thumb of an autocratic government. Within this narrative framework James explores themes of human frailty, the societal necessity of procreation, love, and hopelessness. It is a powerful novel lifted by James’ gift for deft, sharp characterization and steadily rising tension.

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11

The City & The City

by China Miéville

Combining his fantastic weird fiction with a police procedural, Miéville delivers a tightly-knit story that won the Hugo Award. The novel takes Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad, through two very different worlds on the hunt for a murderer. Astounding storytelling by one of the best writers working today.

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12

Darwin’s Radio

by Greg Bear

Bear envisions a world where the next leap in human evolution is not superhero mutations but rather a small step that changes the world. Great characters fighting against bigotry amidst scientific upheaval and government control. Winner of the Nebula Award.

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13

Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

The city of Bellona is not what it once was — most people have fled, leaving behind only the madmen, the criminals, and the desperate. And a young man, a poet known as the Kid. This dense and intricate tale winds its way through issues of race, gender, and sexuality in a near-future, devastated landscape, in a way that simply cannot be missed.

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14

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Philip K. Dick

War and pollution have taken their toll on Earth, leaving it very nearly uninhabitable. Those who can afford to do so have fled off-world, leaving what’s left to the not so fortunate, like Rick Deckard. Rick, who makes his living eliminating renegade androids, is prompted to question his work, and even his own identity, during a particularly challenging assignment. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an amazing novel, and perhaps one of the most approachable of Dick’s many works.

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15

Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

Time travel is a reality, and, finally, historians can observe the past as it happened. At Oxford College, a trip to 14th century England has gone awry, stranding a young historian in the midst of the bubonic plague. As a team in the present era works to bring her back home, a new and deadly form of the flu begins to spread through London. Is there a connection between the two epidemics? If you like medical mysteries and historical fiction, you’ll love this book.

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16

Downbelow Station

by C. J. Cherryh

C.J. Cherryh’s body of work is so expansive that if you asked twenty different people for her best book, you’d get twenty different answers. But it’s hard to argue with a Hugo Award and a Locus shortlist, so for my money, Downbelow Station is the place to start. Set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union Universe, Downbelow Station is a story of corporate space exploration gone awry as humankind expands outwards among the stars.

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17

Dragonflight

by Anne McCaffrey

The story of a young woman being recruited to telepathically bond with a queen dragon to lead her people and battle Thread on the planet of Pern has been a beloved favorite among all ages of readers for decades. McCaffrey was the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula Awards — and with great reason.

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18

Dune: Deluxe Edition

by Frank Herbert

The first rule of Dune is: do not read the whole series. Frank Herbert’s hypnotic vision of a feudal far future shaped by the mind-altering powers of a substance called spice, centered on the planet, Arrakis, where the spice is mined, is a classic that still feels groundbreaking today.

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19

Dust

by Elizabeth Bear

This is generation ship fiction like you’ve never read before. Artificial intelligence, angels, and humans all coexist (albeit not entirely peacefully) on the Jacob’s Ladder, which has been stuck in orbit for centuries. The story follows a noblewoman, a serving girl, and an angel as they journey through the crumbling ship in an attempt to stop a war between their houses — and in the process, change the order of their world.

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20

The Female Man

by Joanna Russ

Jeannine, Joanna, Janet, and Jael – four women from four alternate realities, one an altered past where the Great Depression never ended, one a mirror of our own world, one a utopian all-female earth, and one where men and women live in separate, warring enclaves. When these four women meet and visit each other’s realities, their notions of womanhood clash and change, and they must reexamine everything they know.

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21

The Fold

by Peter Clines

When DARPA researchers stumble upon a way to fold dimensions, enabling humans to travel long distances in a matter of seconds, they’re certain their discovery will change the course of human history. But Mike Erikson isn’t so sure. The researchers who test the doorway are coming back… off. And it’s up to Mike to unravel the science and save his team — and everything else. The Fold is an intricate yet fast-paced sci-fi thriller you can devour in a single sitting.

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22

Foundation

by Isaac Asimov

One of the seminal works of hard science fiction, Foundation reimagines the fall of the Roman Empire as taking place on a galactic scale and an effort on a remote planet to protect humanity from a 30,000-year-long dark age. Jumping decades within the narrative and focused on economics and history, Asimov’s most famous book can be a tough read but it’s well worth the investment.

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23

Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

Although it is an unquestioned Gothic classic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is among the earliest and purest examples of the science fiction genre. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Frankenstein and its enormous impact on both literature and pop culture. In the 200 years since its initial publication, the narrative DNA of the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his creature can be found in the countless stories that have followed in its considerable wake.

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24

The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

When a Navy SEAL murders his family and disappears, an NCIS agent is tasked with determining whether or not the crime is connected with the Terminus: a mysterious world-destroying event encountered by a top secret team of government time travelers. This dark work of science fiction may be new, but it is on my personal list of all-time great reads.

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25

The Handmaid’s Tale (Movie Tie-in)

by Margaret Atwood

America has fallen, leaving in its place the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic state with a fatal weakness: a low birth rate. Fearful of what the future will bring, the exclusively male leadership of Gilead has enslaved fertile women to bear their young. Offred is one of these women: a handmaid. This is her story. The Handmaid’s Tale is a perennial classic of feminist literature, and the basis for the Hulu series of the same name.

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26

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

by Douglas Adams

For sheer absurdist audacity, imagination, bombast, and pure fun, The Hitchhiker’s Guide is tough to beat. It’s an utterly irreverent and wildly imaginative adventure that simultaneously skewers and builds on the tropes and confines of traditional sci-fi. It’s biting satire and pure absurdist humor, all shot through with a vein of cynicism and a surprisingly firm internal logic. Basically, there’s nothing quite like The Hitchhiker’s Guide and you really should read it.

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27

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

Charles Yu is searching for his father through quantum space-time, while also performing his job as a time travel technician — helping to save people from themselves after time traveling trips gone awry. Assisted by a nonexistent dog and an operating system with self-esteem issues, his journey to find his missing father is at times hilarious, thought-provoking, and truly poignant.

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28

Hyperion

by Dan Simmons

A crew of pilgrims swap stories of love, horror, and religious devotion during a long journey to the home of the Shrike: a spike-covered metal horror worshiped like a god. This science fiction take on The Canterbury Tales is an unforgettable, imaginative work of cross-genre fusion.

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29

Illuminae

by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Following a pair of teens evacuating Earth during an invasion, Illuminae is a masterwork of young adult sci-fi, a story winding its way through a dossier of hacked documents: emails, chatrooms, classified military files, and more that the protagonists discover during their search for the truth behind the invasion.

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30

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

The power of science and its role in discovery is oft at the heart of great science fiction. At its heart, Jurassic Park questions how humanity wields the power of science while creating an action-packed story filled with characters just trying to survive science gone wrong.

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31

The Last Policeman

by Ben H. Winters

Hank Palace may be the world’s last policeman: as humanity waits for an impending asteroid impact to destroy them all, Palace begins an investigation of what looks to outside eyes like a commonplace suicide. The Last Policeman is a sci-fi murder mystery that explores one question we hopefully will never need to ask ourselves: why bother solving a murder if everyone’s going to die anyway?

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32

The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Le Guin’s novel explores the effect of gender and sex on an alien culture where an individual can be ambisexual, and how one Terran man’s rigid ideas on those topics are confronted. Labeled as one of the most important feminist stories of all time, it is a powerhouse tale written with Le Guin’s wonderful prose.

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33

Legend

by Marie Lu

This dystopian tale of two teenagers is so much more than meets the eye. June is a member of the ruling Republic (formerly the western United States), and on the hunt to find the nation’s most wanted criminal, Day. He’s the prime suspect in her sister’s killing, and she’s determined to get her revenge. But a darker truth has brought them together, and together they begin to realize just what the country is willing to do to protect its secrets.

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34

The Martian

by Andy Weir

Andy Weir’s The Martian is the sort of novel that grips a reader from its very sentence — after all, “I’m pretty much fucked” is a pretty great opening line. With his debut novel, Weir deftly balanced a truly thrilling story of survival with laugh-out-loud doses of black humor and real, cutting edge science. It has a surprising ring of authenticity, but more importantly is an ultimately inspiring testament to humanity’s ingenuity, spirit of adventure, and our better angels.

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35

Neuromancer

by William Gibson

One of the seminal works of cyberpunk, Neuromancer taps into the counterculture movements and excitement about computers found in the 1980s to tell a story of a world where hackers and cyborgs work together to perform daring heists against massive corporations. It’s a must-read for fans of everything from “The Matrix” to Ready Player One.

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36

Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

The works of Margaret Atwood rarely, if ever, fit neatly into the confines of any particular genre. Oryx and Crake, the first volume in the MaddAddam Trilogy, is the closest she’s come to pure sci-fi. Taking issues of inequality, climate change, and corporate power to bleak and terrifying conclusions, Atwood creates a powerfully imaginative and disconcertingly plausible dystopia that is as thought-provoking as it is difficult to put down.

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37

Otherland: City of Golden Shadow

by Tad Williams

Virtual reality existed long before Ready Player One and one of its best examples is Otherland, a four-book epic SF tale examining corporate control, greed, and an individual’s wish to become someone else. Williams weaves great SF and fantasy settings into his virtual world, making it a fun read for the well-read!

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38

Pandora’s Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

The first in Hamilton’s excellent duology about a future where humans are practically immortal and have used wormholes to colonize hundreds of planets, Pandora’s Star is perhaps most notable for its extremely alien extraterrestrials from the genocidal Prime to the fey Silfen. Combining aspects of a detective novel with hard science fiction, Hamilton explores the perils and pleasures possible in humanity’s future.

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39

Planetfall

by Emma Newman

When Lee Suh-Mi offered a chance to escape the over-populated, polluted planet of Earth, Renata Ghali followed her into the unknown, along with hundreds of other hopeful colonists. Years later, however, Lee Suh-Mi has disappeared into a mysterious alien structure, and Ren is harboring a secret that may tear the colony apart.

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40

The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

You won’t find The Plot Against America in the science fiction section of your local bookstore, but rest assured, this is a work of alternative history. In Roth’s book, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh becomes President of the United States. When Lindberg starts a cozy relationship with Adolf Hitler, Young Philip Roth and his family watch as the America they thought they knew swiftly descends into fascism and anti-Semitism. This is a sobering look at the politics of fear and hatred, and a warning of the dangers of demagoguery.

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41

The Real Story

by Stephen R. Donaldson

While best known for his Thomas Covenant epic fantasy, Donaldson has also written one of the best science fiction stories. The Real Story and its four sequels are riveting. Nothing is quite what it seems and the gritty, complex characters drive a narrative where anything is possible.

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42

Red Rising

by Pierce Brown

A breakout author in recent years! The story of slave Darrow rising above his status to take on his overlords is new and fresh and is filled with amazingly-wrought characters and action-packed sequences. An instant classic.

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43

Ringworld

by Larry Niven

The 1970 classic about a crew of humans and aliens investigating a massive ring built around a sunlike star is so influential that theoretical alien megastructures have come to be called Niven rings. Beyond its ideas about how advanced societies might colonize space, it’s also an entertaining adventure story with compelling views about humanity’s place in the universe.

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44

Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

In the course of Doris Lessing’s long Nobel Prize-winning career, she wrote more than fifty books in many genres. Shikasta is the first in her Canopus in Argos series, a sequence of five science fiction novels examining the ways in which societies evolve. Shikasta is written as an archival history of a thinly-veiled Earth and its development through the influences of three advanced alien civilizations, especially the Canopus, who try to steer humanity away from mass destruction and a third World War. The series was strongly influenced by Lessing’s interest in Sufism in the 1970s, and eventually inspired its own religious cult.

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45

Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut weaved together the disparate strands of science fiction and his personal experiences as a World War II prisoner of war to create Slaughterhouse-Five‘s Billy Pilgrim: a soldier who has become “unstuck in time.” We witness the horrors of war and the uncertainties of peacetime as Billy bounces back and forth across the timeline of his birth, life, and eventual death. Gutsy, strange, and sympathetic, Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut at his best.

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46

Sleeping Giants

by Sylvain Neuvel

The first book in The Themis Files trilogy, which was completed this year, examines how the discovery of an ancient alien artifact on earth affects both individuals and the world. It’s true to science fiction’s mission of asking big questions about human nature and the pursuit of knowledge.

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47

Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

Both a spoof on cyberpunk tropes and an entertaining story in its own right, Snow Crash follows the adventures of Hiro Protagonist and Yours Truly as they try to uncover the cause of a virus infecting hackers that may be connected to the Tower of Babel. Stephenson combines excellent world building with research into linguistics and history. Check it out soon as an Amazon television show based on the book is in the works.

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48

The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

My personal favorite book on this list. The Sparrow is a profoundly empathetic novel about a Jesuit mission to an inhabited planet. Russell demonstrates a preternatural understanding of human behavior while at the same time building an alien civilization with an anthropologist’s eye. Her characters grapple with faith in a way I’ve rarely seen in science fiction. This book moved me to tears.

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49

The Stand

by Stephen King

Stephen King’s sprawling apocalyptic opus is a long-time favorite among his devoted fans — it’s also one of his finest novels. Beginning with a computer error in a laboratory that releases a global pandemic, King builds an epic story of survival, resilience, and the ultimate struggle of good vs. evil. It melds elements of horror, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi into a 1,100 page doorstop of a novel that cemented Stephen King as the pre-eminent horror writer of his generation.

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50

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

A flu pandemic devastates humanity, killing off almost everyone and bringing modern civilization to a grinding halt. Station Eleven explores the first days of the epidemic, as well as the future it created. This oddly optimistic work of apocalyptic literature teaches us that survival alone is insufficient, and that we must have art to give it meaning.

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51

Arrival (Stories of Your Life MTI)

by Ted Chiang

Despite his relatively small body of work, Ted Chiang has made a serious impression on the science fiction landscape. The best-known story in this collection is, of course, the titular one, which was the basis for the film “Arrival,” but the other stories here are absolutely not to be missed. Chiang does what the best sci-fi writers do — he doesn’t invent for solely for invention’s sake, but rather uses his remarkable imagination to tell poignantly human stories that cut straight to your heart.

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52

Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

A seminal, genre-defining work and a perfect distillation of the ways in which speculative fiction examines what it is to be human. This is the story of a human man raised by Martians, entirely isolated from his own species — and on his return to Earth, he finds he has just as much to learn from humanity as he does to teach them.

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53

Survival

by Julie E. Czerneda

Czerneda is a prolific author with a dedicated fanbase — it’s hard to choose just one book from her oeuvre. Survival, the first book in the Species Imperative trilogy, is the story of a Mackenzie Connor, a biologist in the Pacific Northwest who finds herself drawn into an interstellar interspecies conflict when an envoy from an alien species who hopes she can help him determine the fate of a mysterious dead zone in space known as the Chasm.

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54

Trading in Danger

by Elizabeth Moon

Ky Vatta is the only girl in a family of sons, and the only one to ditch the family business of trade in favor of a military career. When an error in judgment forces her back to Vatta’s Transport Ltd., she decides to make the best of a bad situation and take on a risky trading contract that could bring enormous profit to the business — of course, she’ll have to survive the mission first.

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55

Valor’s Choice

by Tanya Huff

Humans may have been granted membership to the Confederation, but the price is service as soldiers to protect the more “civilized” races. When Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr and her platoon are pulled from leave for a supposedly easy mission, they have no idea that they are about to walk into a conflict greater than any they had faced before.

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56

Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

Two lovers are separated in a world of mutant meerkats, decadent cities, and underworld labyrinths full of stitched-together monsters in this classic work of unclassifiable but brilliant literature from Southern Reach trilogy Jeff VanderMeer. Veniss Underground is like a nightmarish fever dream, but one you won’t want to wake up from.

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57

Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

Viriconium is the story of a city, or rather, versions of the same city. Reminiscent of the works of Jack Vance and even Michael Moorcock, this classic of the “New Weird” revels in ambiguity, subverting the reader’s expectations of how fantastic settings are supposed to work.

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58

The War of the Worlds

by H. G. Wells

Who can forget this classic tale of alien invasion? As the widely-told story goes, the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds briefly incited panic among millions of American listeners as they believed the nation was truly under attack by alien invaders (although it might not have happened exactly like that). Regardless, the tale now holds a firm place in our pop-cultural history, and has inspired countless adaptations and original works of science fiction throughout the hundred years since it was published.

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59

Watchers

by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz has made a career out of infusing sci-fi and speculative trappings into his particular brand of horror. Watchers came during a stretch in the mid-80’s that made Dean Koontz a perennial bestseller. Featuring a super-intelligent Golden Retriever and relentless genetically engineered monstrosity, Watchers explores themes that would become common in Koontz work going forward — shady government organizations and the ethical quandaries of unchecked scientific advancement. With Watchers, Koontz really began to find his footing as a writer.

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60

Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

In the 1970s, Connie Ramos finds herself wrongfully imprisoned in a mental institution, where she is contacted by Luciente, an emissary from a utopian society in the year 2137, who shows her a classless, highly individualistic future focused on social justice and self-actualization. But this is only one possible future — the other potential timeline is a hypercapitalist, class-stratified nightmare, and Connie’s actions alone will decide which eventuality comes to pass.

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61

World War Z

by Max Brooks

World War Z is a chronicle of the end of the world — or, as its subtitle indicates, an oral history of the zombie apocalypse. The novel’s written style is unlike many zombie stories in that it’s written not as narrative prose, but as a series of recordings of witnesses during the war. The audiobook edition is especially compelling: it’s performed by a full cast, making it an incredibly immersive reader experience.