Essential Sci Fi Books

By George Orwell, 1949

ISBN 0451524934

Orwell's final novel, 1984, is the story of one man's struggle against the ubiquitous, menacing state power ("Big Brother") that tries to dictate nearly every aspect of human life. The novel is a classic in anti-utopian fiction, and a trenchant political satire that remains as relevant today as...

By Douglas Adams, 1979

ISBN 1400052920

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1979), the characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home to the now-collapsed planet-building industry, and meet Slartibartfast, a planetary coastline designer who was responsible for the fjords of Norway. Through archival recordings, he...

By Aldous Huxley, 1932

ISBN 0060850523

Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations...

By Michael Crichton, 1991

ISBN 0345370775

An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Creatures once extinct now roam Jurassic Park, soon-to-be opened as a theme park. Until something goes wrong...and science proves a dangerous toy.

By Orson Scott Card, 1985

ISBN 0739464736

Orson Scott Card's first published science fiction was based on an idea that came to him when he was 16 years old. Inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac, he got to thinking about a Battle Room, an environment where future soldiers would be trained for combat...

By Frank Herbert, 1965

ISBN 0441013597

Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Maud'dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family--and would bring to...

By Isaac Asimov, 1950

ISBN 055338256X

I, Robot is a collection of nine science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, first published by Gnome Press in 1950 in an edition of 5,000 copies. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The stories are...

By Audrey Niffenegger, 2003

ISBN 015602943X

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures...

By Ray Bradbury, 1954

ISBN 8445074873

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and...

By H. G. Wells, 1895

ISBN 9781101090404

The Time Machine is a novella by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895 and later directly adapted into at least two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in all media. This...

By Arthur C. Clarke, 1968

ISBN 0451457994

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film version and published after the release of the film. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably "The Sentinel" (written in 1948 for...

By H.G. Wells, 1897

ISBN 0451528522

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells published in 1897. Wells' novel was originally serialised in Pearson's Magazine in 1897, and published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who theorises that if a person's refractive index is...

By Philip K. Dick, 1968

ISBN 0345404475

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick first published in 1968. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter of androids, while the secondary plot follows John Isidore, a man of sub-normal intelligence who befriends some of the...

By Jules Verne, 1869

ISBN 1406554308

Widely regarded as the father of modern science fiction, Jules Verne wrote more than seventy books and created hundreds of memorable characters. His most popular novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is not only a brilliant piece of scientific prophecy, but also a thrilling story with...

By Isaac Asimov, 1951

ISBN 0553382578

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years.

By Michael Crichton, 2008

ISBN 006170315X

The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the...

By William Gibson, 2004

ISBN 0441012035

Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, notable for being the most famous early cyberpunk novel. It was Gibson's first novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. The novel tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to work on the ultimate hack. Gibson...

By Robert A. Heinlein, 1991

ISBN 0441788386

Valentine Michael Smith is the stranger. A young human, reared by Martians on Mars, he is brought to Earth where he must adapt not only to the planet's social injustices and its population's foibles, but to its strong gravitational field and rich atmosphere.

By Ray Bradbury, 1997

ISBN 0380973839

Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The Martian ChroniclesRay Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors.

By Stephenie Meyer, 2008

ISBN 0316068047

The author of the #1-bestselling Twilight series delivers her brilliant first novel for adults that's also suitable for teen readers: a gripping story of love and betrayal in a future with the fate of humanity at stake, featuring what may be the first love triangle involving only two bodies.

By Neal Stephenson, 2000

ISBN 0553380958

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison--a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip...

By Suzanne Collins, 2008

ISBN 0439023483

Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one...

By Larry Niven, 1985

ISBN 0345333926

A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed.

By Margaret Atwood, 2006

ISBN 0307264602

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood?s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and...

By Robert A. Heinlein, 1997

ISBN 0312863551

Robert A. Heinlein was the most influential science fiction writer of his era, an influence so large that, as Samuel R. Delany notes, "modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like the sky or an ocean.

By Neal Stephenson, 2000

ISBN 0553380966

In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson took science fiction to dazzling new levels. Now, in The Diamond Age, he delivers another stunning tale. Set in twenty-first century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell.

By Ursula K. Le Guin, 2000

ISBN 0441007317

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender.

By Dan Simmons, 1990

ISBN 0553283685

The winner of a 1990 Hugo Award follows seven pilgrims on a voyage to the world of Hyperion--dominated by the all-powerful creature, the Shrike--where they hope to learn the secret that will save humanity. Reissue.

By Walter M. Miller Jr., 2006

ISBN 0060892994

Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature -- a chilling and still-provocative...

By Cory Doctorow, 2008

ISBN 0765319853

Seventeen-year-old techno-geek 'w1n5t0n' (aka Marcus) bypasses the school's gait-recognition system by placing pebbles in his shoes, chats secretly with friends on his IMParanoid messaging program, and routinely evades school security with his laptop, cell, WifFnder, and ingenuity. While skipping...

By John Scalzi, 2007

ISBN 0765348276

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common.

By Robert Charles Wilson, 2006

ISBN 076534825X

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the...

By Frederik Pohl, 2004

ISBN 0345475836

Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe...and on reaches of unimaginable horror. When prospector Bob Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune. Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich...

By Greg Bear, 2000

ISBN 0345435249

Ancient diseases encoded in the DNA of humans wait like sleeping dragons to wake and infect again--or so molecular biologist Kaye Lang believes. And now it looks as if her controversial theory is in fact chilling reality. For Christopher Dicken, a "virus hunter" at the Epidemic Intelligence...

By Vernor Vinge, 1993

ISBN 0812515285

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent...

By Connie Willis, 1999

ISBN 0613152425

In her first full-length novel since her critically acclaimed Doomsday Book, Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, once again visits the unpredictable world of time travel. But this time the result is a joyous journey into a past and future of comic mishaps and historical...

By Charles Stross, 2006

ISBN 0441014151

Expanding on his award-winning short story cycle from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction, Charles Stross delivers the story fans and peers have been expecting with Accelerando, a novel destined to change the face of the genre.

By Octavia E. Butler, 2004

ISBN 0807083690

The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the classic novel that has sold over 250,000 copiesDana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.

By Lois McMaster Bujold, 2003

ISBN 067187845X

Miles turns 30, and--though he isn't slowing down just yet--he is starting to lose interest in the game of Wall: the one where he tries to climb the wall, fails, gets up, and tries again. Having finally reached a point in his life where he can look back and realize that he has managed to...

By Samuel R. Delany, 2001

ISBN 0375706682

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man, a poet, lover, and adventurer known only as the...