The 10 Best Science Fiction Books

If you read one science fiction novel to see what the fuss is about, make it Dune. Frank Herbert drops a young noble heir onto a desert planet whose spice is the most valuable thing in the galaxy, then piles on religion, ecology and the politics of empire. The world feels lived in, down to suits that recycle a person's own sweat into drinking water. It opens slowly, and the made-up words take a few chapters to settle in.

A science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, and Project Hail Mary follows him as he pieces it together one puzzle at a time. Andy Weir keeps chapters short and explains the science in plain talk, and an unlikely friendship gives the story its heart. It stands alone, so there's no series to commit to. This edition is a hardcover, and the jokey narration isn't for everyone.

Few novels swing for an idea this big. The Three-Body Problem starts during China's Cultural Revolution, where a young astrophysicist makes a choice that will echo across light-years, then jumps ahead to a scientist who sees a countdown no one else can. Liu Cixin builds toward a first-contact story that changes how you think about the night sky, and Ken Liu's translation reads smoothly. The characters are thin, and the opening drags.

An envoy arrives alone on a frozen planet whose people have no fixed sex, and The Left Hand of Darkness traces his slow, wary friendship with an exiled politician. Ursula K. Le Guin uses that setup to ask how much of who we are comes from gender, without lecturing. The long trek across a glacier near the end is the part readers carry with them. Early chapters are thick with court politics and invented myths that take patience.

Built like The Canterbury Tales, Hyperion sends a band of pilgrims toward a deadly creature on a distant world, and each one tells why they came. The tales shift between war story, detective story, romance and a wrenching account of a father and his daughter. Dan Simmons ties them together into one mystery, then stops partway, so you'll want The Fall of Hyperion close by. Some passages are graphic, both violent and sexual.

Stranded on Mars after his crew leaves him for dead, the botanist in The Martian has to grow food, make water and patch broken gear to stay alive. Andy Weir first posted it free on his own website before a publisher picked it up, and it reads like a string of urgent problems solved with math and duct tape. Most of it is told in log entries, which keeps it quick. The swearing is constant.

The narrator of Ancillary Justice used to be a warship, a mind spread across thousands of bodies, and now she's down to one human body and a plan for revenge. Ann Leckie writes from inside that strange point of view, and her empire's language uses she for everyone, which nudges you to notice what you assume. It's a slow, confusing start that pays off. Two sequels finish the story.

Hackers plugging their minds into a digital world, mega-corporations and street samurai all trace back to Neuromancer. William Gibson follows a burned-out hacker hired for one last job, and the book became the only novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award. The prose is dense and full of slang, so the opening chapters can feel like static. Some of the gadgets now look dated.

Half of Children of Time belongs to spiders, and those are the chapters that make it special. Adrian Tchaikovsky follows the last humans fleeing a dead Earth on an ark ship, alongside a failed experiment that sets spiders evolving on a terraformed world. Watching their society, science and faith grow over thousands of years is the hook. The human chapters are weaker, and it's a long book to get through.

Teen readers often find their way into the genre through Ender's Game, about a gifted six-year-old taken to a battle school in orbit and pushed through war games by adults who need a commander. Orson Scott Card's zero-gravity battles are vivid, and the ending lands hard. It moves fast. Children hurt each other badly in it, and this edition's cover still carries an old movie banner.