Esquire wrote a list of the 75 best sci-fi books of all time – all such lists are by nature subjective, but I think they do a fairly good job of arguing why each is worth reading.
As a sci-fi reader, who has been bad at reading much the last few years, I love such lists. It allows me to see what I have missed, and to agree or disagree with the choices.
I have copied the list below, starting with number 75 moving towards 1. I will bold the books I have read, mark books I already wanted to read with italics. Books I own will be marked with a star *. I will add occasional remarks as well.
75 The Echo wife – Sarah Gailey
74 The calculating stars – Mary Robinette Kowal *
73 Redshirts – John Scalzi *
72 Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino
71 The ten percent thief – Lavanya Lakshminarayan
70 Midnight robber – Nalo Hopkinson
69 Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson *
68 Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
67 Contact – Carl Sagan
66 Under the skin – Michael Faber
65 Way station – Clifford D Simak *
64 Sea of rust – C Robert Cargill
63 What mad universe – Fredric Brown – I have read his fantastic Martians, Go Home! and his haunting short story “With Folded Hands”, both of which leads me to want to read anything he has written.
62 The book of phoenix – Nnedi Okorafor
61 Semiosis – Sue Burke
60 Excession – Iain M Banks
59 The Claw of the conciliator – Gene Wolfe * – Dark and complex, but certainly worthy on being on the list.
58 Lord of light – Roger Zelazny * – A masterpiece by a master of science fiction. I have in the past heard of Zelazny that is is probably more read by sci-fi authors than by the general sci-fi audience. If that is true, it is a pity.
57 This is how you lose the time war – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone * – I am actually currently reading this. For me it is interesting, but a bit of a slog.
56 The Resisters – Gish Jen
55 Rosewater – Tade Thompson
54 Children of time – Adrian Tchaikovsky
53 Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
52 A Clockwork orange – Anthony Burgess
51 The Moon is a harsh mistress – Robert Heinlein *
50 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle – A much beloved classic which I didn’t think much off. It is one of those books that probably blows you away if you read it at the right age, but if you read it when you are older, is heavy handed, and is of dubious morality.
49 The Time Machine – HG Wells
48 The Body Scout – Lincoln Michael
47 An unkindness of ghosts – Rivers Solomon
46 The mountain in the sea – Ray Nayler
45 Neuromancer – William Gibson *
44 The stars my destination – Alfred Bester
43 The sparrow – Maria Doria Russell
42 The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams * – I have reread this book more times than I can count.
41 A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M Miller Jr * – Read it as both the brilliant short story, and the novel, which was a lesser work, in my opinion.
40 Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
39 Zone one – Colson Whitehead – I didn’t know about this book before, but after reading the description I definitely want to pick it up.
38 The long way to a small angry planet – Becky Chambers
37 Engine Summer – John Crowley
36 The Children of Men – PD James
35 Radiance – Catherynne Valente
34 The City & The City – China Mieville *
33 A memory called empire – Arkady Martine *
32 Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie *
31 The Stand – Stephen King
30 In Ascension – Martin MacInnes
29 Dhalgren – Samuel R Delany *
28 The Forever War – Joe Haldeman *
27 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
26 Future home of a living god – Louise Erdrich
25 Ammonite – Nicola Griffith
24 Annihilation – Jeff Vandermeer *
23 Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood *
22 Hyperion – Dan Simmons * – I got the book long before Dan Simmons turned out to be such rightwinged asshole. I plan on reding the book one day, but I won’t buy more of his work.
21 Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson *
20 Shikasta – Doris Lessing
19 The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
18 Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
17 Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
16 The Complete Robot – Isaac Asimov – I find these books rather dated
15 How to live safely in a science fictional universe – Charles Yu
14 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – This one has been on my to-read list for longer than I care to admit.
13 The Employees – Olga Ravn – A, for me, new Danish author that I hear really great stuff about
12 1984 – George Orwell *
11 The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu *
10 Do Androids dream of electric sheep? – Philip K Dick
9 Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel
8 Exhalation – Ted Chiang
7 Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
6 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin * – I am unsure if I have read it in my youth
5 Kindred – Octavia Butler *
4 The Fifth Season – NK Jemisin *
3 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury *
2 Dune – Frank Herbert *
1 Frankenstein – Mary Shelly *
There are a lot of new books for me on the list, and I will definitely check most of them out and some stage.
There is something wrong with the post header. You can’t click on it from the Freethought home page. I had to take the indirect route of clicking on Pro-Science and comment from your list of posts.
The list itself looks reasonable. 16 The Complete Robot shows one of the basic problems with creating a list that is best of all time. A lot of what Asimov wrote was cutting edge stuff when he wrote it but now all of that is everyday standard stuff. When he was writing space travel was a wild idea, now many stories take it as a mundane element. His idea of AIs having their own rules and logically implementing them in ways not intuitive to humans was new but now it’s the basis of hundreds of stories.
I think 11 The Three-Body Problem is rated too high. It’s a fascinating piece of work but a lot of it is because the story is written from a distinctly non-western world point of view. Without that it’s just a better then average story.
Have read 33 of those titles, and have a handful of the others waiting on the shelf. Am appalled at myself at how many titles & authors I don’t recognize.
Agree particularly with your note on Fredric Brown – his works are all dated, but all good.
The Claw of the Conciliator is the second volume in the “Book of the New Sun” tetralogy, and should not be read alone or out of sequence (but the whole story, plus a 5th book epilog, does belong in every “best science fiction” list).
Ammonite had an excellent concept, but Griffith would have done better to have made it much shorter (or to have added to the plot).
At least eight of these titles belong to series, trilogies, or other extended sets. Hyperion in particular basically just introduces the characters who interact in Endymion and Endymion Rising and feels incomplete standing alone (hadn’t known that about Simmons’s politics – but Burgess, Heinlein, Wells, and Bradbury don’t look too good that way these days either).
No Sturgeon? No Tiptree? No Niven? No Waldrop? No Lafferty? No Willis? Neither Bear? Neither Vinge? Harrumph!
You may want to have a support person nearby when finishing The Sparrow.
Does The City & The City really count as sci-fi? It’s alternate reality fiction, but I always got the impression that it basically takes place here and now, even if it’s a different here and now.
It’s well worth reading, though, so if it reaches more people, I guess that’s good.
Thank you for letting me know – we are trying to look at the issue and get it fixed
They missed this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
.
If we are talking short stories, I’d agree that Flowers for Algernon, but in my opinion, the novel was much weaker than the short story
I preferred the longer version. I felt the additional detail made it more engaging.
I’ve not read either in years because remembering the story makes me cry.