A Science Fiction Reader

I have seen this question pop-up frequently on reddit, so I made a list. This list was spurred by a discussion with a friend that found it hard to pick out well-written science fiction. There should be around 100 titles here. You may disagree with me both on literature and science fiction–genre is fluid anyway. All of this is my opinion. If something isn’t here that you think should be here, then I probably haven’t read it yet.

Titles are loosely categorized, and ordered chronologically within each category. Books I enjoyed more than most are bolded.

Utopia and Dystopia

1516, Thomas More, Utopia
1627, Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
1666, Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
1872, Samuel Butler, Erewhon
1924, Yevgeny Zamiatin, We
1932, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
1949, George Orwell, 1984
1974, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
1985, Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
1988, Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

Re-imagined Histories

1889, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
1962, Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
1968, Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration
1976, Kingsley Amis, The Alteration
1979, Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
1979, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
1990, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
2004, Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

Human, All Too Human

1818, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
1920, David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus
1920, Karel Čapek, R. U. R.: A Fantastic Melodrama
1940, Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
1953, Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human
1960, Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
1962, Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
1966, Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
1968, Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
1969, Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
1989, Dan Simmons, Hyperion
1999, Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life
2005, Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Apocalyptic Futures

1898, H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
1949, George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
1956, Harry Martinson, Aniara
1962, J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World
1962, Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
1965, Thomas M. Disch, The Genocides
1967, Anna Kavan, Ice
1975, Giorgio de Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin
1980, Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun
1982, Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker
1982, Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira
1982, Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
1995, Jose Saramago, Blindness
1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
2002, Vladimir Sorokin, Ice Trilogy
2006, Cormac McCarthy, The Road
2012, Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

The Alien Eye of the Beholder

1752, Voltaire, Micromegas
1925, Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
1950, Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
1952, Clifford D. Simak, City
1953, Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
1965, Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
1967, Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
1967, Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
1972, Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
1976, Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star
1987, Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas
1996, Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String

Shattered Realities

1909, E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops
1956, Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
1962, William S. Burroughs, Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket that Exploded)
1966, John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
1975, Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
1977, Guido Morselli, Dissipatio, H. G.
1984, William Gibson, Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)
1986, William Gibson, Burning Chrome
1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
2004, David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
2018, David R. Bunch, Moderan

The World in a Grain of Sand

1865, Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
1937, Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
1957, Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale
1965, Frank Herbert, Dune
1981, Ted Mooney, Easy Travel to Other Planets
1992, Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Scientific Dreamscapes

1848, Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka
1884, Edwin Abbott, Flatland
1895, H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
1925, Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs
1927, Aleksey Tolstoy, The Garin Death Ray
1931, Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
1956, Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
1966, Samuel Delany, Babel-17
1969, Philip K. Dick, Ubik
1970, Larry Niven, Ringworld
1972, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
1985, Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

Gender Blender

1928, Virginia Woolf, Orlando
1969, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
1975, Joanna Russ, The Female Man
1976, Samuel Delany, Trouble on Triton
1976, Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
1977, Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve
1987, Octavia E. Butler, Xenogenesis