Isaac Asimov

I, Robot

Robot · 1950

Nine linked stories framed as a robopsychologist looking back over her career. Each one is a puzzle: a robot behaves inexplicably, and the explanation always turns out to follow, strictly, from the Three Laws.

Isaac Asimov

The Caves of Steel

Robot · 1954

A murder in a domed future New York where billions live packed underground and resent the robots taking their work. A detective who shares that resentment is assigned a humanoid robot as his partner.

Isaac Asimov

The Naked Sun

Robot · 1957

The same pair on a world so rich and so thinly populated that meeting another person in the flesh has become taboo. A man has been killed anyway, which should have been impossible.

Isaac Asimov

The Robots of Dawn

Robot · 1983

Third case, on the most technically advanced human world there is. A robot has been mentally destroyed, and only one person had the ability to do it.

Isaac Asimov

Robots and Empire

Robot · 1985

Two centuries later. The old cast is mostly gone, Earth is beginning to send out settlers, and the robots left behind are drawing their own conclusions about what the Three Laws require of them.

Isaac Asimov

The Stars, Like Dust

Galactic Empire · 1951

A young man from a subjugated world survives an assassination attempt and is pulled into a conspiracy against the power ruling the galaxy.

Isaac Asimov

The Currents of Space

Galactic Empire · 1952

A man whose memory has been wiped retains one certainty: a planet is about to be destroyed. Nobody will hear him out. The world in question lives off a single crop and the labour of the people who pick it.

Isaac Asimov

Pebble in the Sky

Galactic Empire · 1950

A retired tailor takes a step in 1949 Chicago and arrives tens of thousands of years later, on an Earth gone radioactive, poor and generally despised by the rest of the galaxy.

Isaac Asimov

Prelude to Foundation

Foundation · 1988

Hari Seldon presents a mathematical curiosity he considers useless in practice, and spends the rest of the book being chased across the imperial capital by people who disagree.

Isaac Asimov

Forward the Foundation

Foundation · 1993

Seldon's later decades in four parts, as the science matures and the empire around him visibly comes apart.

Isaac Asimov

Foundation

Foundation · 1951

Five linked stories. A colony of scholars is planted at the rim of the galaxy and survives one crisis after another — never by force, always by finding the one move its opponents haven't considered.

Isaac Asimov

Foundation and Empire

Foundation · 1952

Two halves. The first sets the colony against the empire's last capable general. The second introduces something the predictions had no way to account for.

Isaac Asimov

Second Foundation

Foundation · 1953

A hunt for a second, hidden colony — told largely from the perspective of the hunters.

Isaac Asimov

Foundation's Edge

Foundation · 1982

Thirty years on, two men from opposite ends of the galaxy independently conclude that the plan is being steered by a hand nobody has accounted for.

Isaac Asimov

Foundation and Earth

Foundation · 1986

Direct continuation: a search for the planet humanity came from, across worlds that have all forgotten it.

Isaac Asimov

The End of Eternity

1955

An organisation living outside of time edits history to smooth away catastrophes. One of its technicians starts to question what that work is for.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

1992

Cyberpunk satire. A pizza courier and swordsman moves between a fragmented, privatised America and a virtual world, in a story that ties hacker culture to Sumerian myth and asks whether language itself can be programmed.

Neal Stephenson

The Diamond Age

1995

A world where nanotechnology makes matter nearly free and people reorganise into cultural tribes. At its centre is an interactive book built to educate one girl, which ends up in the wrong hands.

Neal Stephenson

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

2019

A man has his brain scanned after death, and what grows out of the upload becomes something of its own. The first half is near-future satire about the internet and truth; the second is close to myth.

Neal Stephenson

Cryptonomicon

1999

Two timelines: codebreakers in the Second World War, and their grandchildren's generation building a data haven in the nineties. About codes, money, information and what runs in families.

William Gibson

Neuromancer

Sprawl 1 · 1984

The founding text of cyberpunk. A burnt-out hacker is given one more chance and pulled into a job whose real purpose nobody explains to him.

William Gibson

Count Zero

Sprawl 2 · 1986

Three separate threads — a mercenary, an art dealer, a young hacker — in the same world a few years on. Something in cyberspace has changed.

William Gibson

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Sprawl 3 · 1988

Draws the trilogy's threads together. Fame, identity, and what becomes of personalities that exist only as data.

William Gibson

Virtual Light

Bridge 1 · 1993

Very near future. A bike messenger steals a pair of glasses without knowing what's stored in them. Set partly on a Golden Gate Bridge that people have moved into and built on.

William Gibson

Idoru

Bridge 2 · 1996

A rock star announces he intends to marry a virtual pop idol. About celebrity, fandom and manufactured reality.

William Gibson

All Tomorrow's Parties

Bridge 3 · 1999

The casts of both earlier books converge as the story moves toward a hinge point in history.

Roger Williams

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

1994 · free online

A superintelligence takes the Three Laws of Robotics completely seriously, with radical consequences. What follows is the harder question: what does a life mean when nothing is scarce, dangerous or final any more?

Simple sentence by sentence, brutal in substance. Contains extremely explicit violence and sex — it's load-bearing for the argument, but plenty of readers stop.

Dan Simmons

Hyperion

Cantos 1 · 1989

Seven pilgrims travel to a world where something inexplicable exists. On the way, each tells their story — and each story is written in a different genre and register: noir, war memoir, love story, horror.

Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion

Cantos 2 · 1990

Direct continuation, one continuous narrative, and a far wider political and cosmic frame.

Dan Simmons

Endymion

Cantos 3 · 1996

Roughly 270 years later, told far more conventionally: a long chase across worlds, with religion, power and institutions underneath it.

Dan Simmons

The Rise of Endymion

Cantos 4 · 1997

Closes the sequence, resolving the religious and political lines and widening the scale one more time.

Dan Simmons

Ilium

2003

Three strands: the Iliad, apparently being staged for real; post-human beings on a wild, emptied Earth; and robots from the outer solar system who argue about Shakespeare and Proust.

Dan Simmons

Olympos

2005

Continues and resolves Ilium. Denser in reference and larger in scale again.

Tad Williams

Otherland

4 vols · 1996–2001

Children around the world are falling into comas nobody can explain. The trail leads into a private VR network built by the richest people alive — a chain of flawlessly simulated worlds a group of strangers has to travel through.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

1959

After a nuclear collapse, a monastic order preserves fragments of technical knowledge nobody understands any more. Three sections, each centuries apart.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lathe of Heaven

1971

A man discovers his dreams retroactively change reality. His therapist would like to steer that toward good ends.

Greg Egan

Quarantine

1992

A private investigator looks for a missing person. The case leads to a quantum-mechanical account of what consciousness does to reality.

Greg Egan

Permutation City

1994

Digital copies of people running in simulations, and the question of what a conscious experience is actually anchored to.

Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem

Remembrance of Earth's Past 1

Opens during the Cultural Revolution and moves through a strange computer game toward a discovery that changes everything after it.

Cixin Liu

The Dark Forest

Remembrance of Earth's Past 2

Game theory at cosmic scale: how do civilisations behave when none of them can afford to trust the others?

Cixin Liu

Death's End

Remembrance of Earth's Past 3

The scale becomes cosmological, in time as much as in space.

George Orwell

1984

1949

A state that controls language, history and perception, seen from inside by a minor official who starts to doubt it.

Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange

1962

A violent teenager narrating in his own invented slang. The question underneath: is goodness still goodness once it's been forced on you?

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

1932

The counterweight to Orwell: control through pleasure, comfort and conditioning rather than fear.

E. M. Forster

The Machine Stops

story · 1909

People live isolated in underground cells and communicate only through an all-providing machine. Startlingly clear-sighted for 1909.

Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

story · 1967

The last surviving humans exist under the control of an intelligence that hates them.

Short, savage and genuinely distressing. Not a casual read.

Jack Vance

Tales of the Dying Earth

omnibus · 1950–1984

In the far future the sun is nearly out and technology has become magic. Episodic picaresque tales full of confidence men, magicians and exquisite politeness.

Jack Vance

Night Lamp

1996

An orphaned boy grows up on a world organised around rigid status rituals, and later goes looking for where he came from. Social satire wearing adventure clothes.

Robert Silverberg

A Time of Changes

1971

A culture in which saying "I" is obscene, narrated by someone breaking that taboo.

Charles Stross

Accelerando

2005 · free online

Three generations of one family as technological acceleration winds up toward the singularity — from the startup era to the dismantling of the solar system.

Larry Niven

Ringworld

Known Space · 1970

A mixed crew of humans and aliens explores an artificial structure of unimaginable size, built as a band around a star.

Larry Niven

The Mote in God's Eye

with Jerry Pournelle · 1974

First contact with an alien civilisation, worked out with unusual care — biologically, socially and militarily.

Larry Niven

The Gripping Hand

with Jerry Pournelle · 1993

The sequel, decades later. Competent, without the force of the original.

Vernor Vinge

A Fire Upon the Deep

1992

The galaxy is divided into zones where different levels of intelligence and technology are physically possible. Alongside that, one of the most original alien species in the genre: beings whose individual self is spread across several bodies.

Stanisław Lem

Solaris

1961

A research station above a planet covered by a single ocean-like being. Every attempt at contact fails — and the station begins receiving strange visitors.

Stanisław Lem

The Invincible

1964

A ship investigates the disappearance of its sister vessel on a barren planet and finds a kind of evolution nobody had accounted for.

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

1953

A fireman whose job is burning books begins to doubt it.

Ray Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles

1950

Loosely linked stories about the settlement of Mars. Melancholy, and closer to poetry about loss and starting over than to science fiction.

Ray Bradbury

Short stories

The Illustrated Man · The October Country and others

Bradbury's real form. Somewhere between science fiction, horror and childhood memory, and almost always compressed into a single image.

Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land

1961

A human raised on Mars by aliens arrives on Earth and understands none of the things everyone here takes for granted.

Terry Pratchett

Discworld

41 vols · 1983–2015

Comic fantasy on a flat world carried by four elephants and a turtle. Mostly, though, satire — of bureaucracy, religion, media, policing, money and progress — written with real warmth and a very sharp mind.

Frank Herbert

Dune

1965

A noble house takes over the administration of a desert planet that produces the most valuable substance in the universe. Ecology, religion, politics, and what prophecy does to the people inside it.

L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

series · from 1900

Children's series about a girl carried into a fantastical country who sets out, with some unlikely companions, to find her way home.

Alfred Bester

The Stars My Destination

1956

A man left to die in space turns himself into a single instrument of revenge, in a world where people teleport by will alone.

Alfred Bester

The Demolished Man

1953

How do you commit murder in a society where telepaths do the police work? A cat-and-mouse story.

Christopher Priest

Inverted World

1974

A city rides on rails that are laid ahead of it and taken up behind, because standing still would kill it. A young man joins the guild that surveys the route.

Ken Grimwood

Replay

1986

A man dies at 43 and wakes up as his eighteen-year-old self with every memory intact. Then again. And again.

David Gerrold

The Man Who Folded Himself

1973

A man inherits a time-travel belt and starts running into himself — increasingly often.

A. E. van Vogt

Slan · The World of Null-A · Space Beagle

in place of "Renaissance"

"Renaissance" doesn't correspond to anything of van Vogt's. In its place: persecuted mutants (Slan), an identity puzzle built on non-Aristotelian logic (The World of Null-A), and episodic first contacts that became the blueprint for Alien (The Voyage of the Space Beagle).

Greg Bear

Blood Music

1985

A researcher modifies cells until they can compute, then smuggles them out of the lab inside his own body.

Blake Crouch

Dark Matter

2016

A physics professor is abducted and wakes into a life that isn't his. About the choices you didn't make.

Blake Crouch

Recursion

2019

People begin suffering from memories of lives they never lived. A detective and a neuroscientist close in on the cause.

Hao Jingfang

Vagabonds

2016

A delegation of young Martians returns home after years on Earth and no longer fits comfortably in either society. Both systems are taken seriously and weighed against each other.

Frederik Pohl

Gateway

Heechee Saga 1 · 1977

A station full of abandoned alien ships whose controls nobody understands. You can climb in and launch; where it goes is not something you get to know first. The voyages are interleaved with the narrator's sessions with a therapy computer.

Frederik Pohl

The Merchants of Venus

novella · 1972

A commercialised Venus where the tunnels of a vanished civilisation have become a business model. Same universe as Gateway.

Frederik Pohl

The World at the End of Time

1990

A young colony, and alongside it a being that lives inside stars and thinks on an entirely different timescale.

Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

5 vols · 1979–1992

Earth is demolished; an Englishman in a dressing gown survives and hitchhikes through an absurd galaxy. British comedy that keeps brushing against serious questions on its way past.

Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

1968

A bounty hunter is sent after escaped androids that are almost indistinguishable from people. About empathy as the last remaining criterion.

Philip K. Dick

Ubik

1969

A team of specialists ends up in a situation where the reality around them starts coming apart.

Philip K. Dick

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

1974

A famous television star wakes one morning in a world where nobody knows him and he officially does not exist.

Philip K. Dick

The Penultimate Truth

1964

Humanity lives in underground bunkers, labouring for a war on the surface. About propaganda and the manufacture of reality.

Philip K. Dick

The Simulacra

1964

Politics as complete theatre, wrapped in a series of nested deceptions.

Philip K. Dick

The Zap Gun

1967

Cold War weapons designers producing weapons whose main job is to look impressive. Satire on armament as ritual.

Philip K. Dick

Our Friends from Frolix 8

1970

A society governed by the genetically gifted waits for the return of a man who is supposed to be bringing help from outside.

Philip K. Dick

Galactic Pot-Healer

1969

A craftsman who repairs broken pottery is recruited by a deity for an enormous project. Odd and melancholy.

Philip K. Dick

The Crack in Space

1966

An election year, an overcrowded Earth, and the discovery of a passage into another world.

Arthur C. Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey

1968

An artefact is found and a mission to the outer solar system follows. Cool, awestruck, scientifically careful.

Arthur C. Clarke

2010: Odyssey Two

1982

A return mission to the questions the first book left standing. More conventionally told and easier to read.

Arthur C. Clarke

2061: Odyssey Three

1987 · listed as "2065"

Halley's Comet and an emergency in the Jovian system.

Arthur C. Clarke

3001: The Final Odyssey

1997

Far in the future. Extensive speculation about what the next thousand years hold, hung on a thin plot — worth it as a catalogue of ideas.

Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood's End

1953

Overwhelming visitors appear above Earth and put an end to war and want, on terms they decline to explain.

H. G. Wells

The Time Machine

1895

An inventor travels into the far future and finds a humanity that has split in two.

Richard Morgan

Altered Carbon

Takeshi Kovacs 1 · 2002

Consciousness can be stored and reinstalled in other bodies, so for the rich death has become an inconvenience. A former elite soldier is woken in a stranger's body to solve a murder — his employer's own.

Cyberpunk noir, very fast. Extremely explicit violence and sex throughout.