Jane is 16 years old and by her own account isn’t much good at being alive. The Silver Metal Lover (1981) – Tanith Lee Image Credit: ABE Books. The vision of future freedom is as bracing as the relentless chronicle of present oppression is unbearable. Or maybe she time travels to a feminist utopia. A poor, mentally ill Mexican-American woman is committed to a mental institution. But Marge Piercy’s masterpiece is even bleaker because it’s more rooted in the everyday. The Handmaid’s Tale is the feminist sci-fi dystopia everyone knows these days. Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) – Marge Piercy Image Credit: ABE Books. War is an experience of impotence, terror, panic and dislocation. Instead, it explores the misery of training, the alienation from the home front, and the myriad ways death can seek you out in the military. Haldeman’s great war novel, inspired by his experiences in Vietnam, mostly avoids staged battles. Soldiers are shot into space until time dilation separates them entirely from the homes they knew, to fight a conflict they don’t understand for unclear purposes.
The Forever War (1974) – Joe Haldeman Image Credit: ABE Books. The book brilliantly makes you believe anarchy could work by showing you exactly how it doesn’t. Or are they? Physicist Shevek believes a real anarchist society should always be overthrowing itself. Everyone is equal, everyone works together. The Dispossessed imagines a functional but imperfect anarchist society. The Dispossessed (1974) – Ursula Le Guin Image Credit: RA:AZ, VIA There are few science-fiction books that tie your brain in knots quite the way this one does. The plot loops back and forth through history and prehistory – just as the title promises, getting more and more tangled as our hero learns the pleasures and pains of following his own, less than straight, path. It’s an explicitly gay time travel story about finding love and meaning with your (older and younger time-displaced) selves. The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) – David Gerrold Image Credit: ABE Books.ĭavid Gerrold is most famous for writing the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” But The Man Who Folded Himself may be an even greater achievement. In the heavy gravity and poison atmosphere, unfreedom has the grinding weight of nightmare. Set after the conquest of Earth, two human resisters infiltrate one of the central city of the alien Tripods, pretending to be happy mind-controlled slaves in order to gather information.
#The expanse reading order series#
The second of John Christopher’s classic YA alien invasion series is the bleakest and the best. The City of Gold and Lead (1967) – John Christopher Image Credit: ABE Books. There’s a catch though you can’t use a language without it using you. But the real protagonist is the language, Babel-17, which is so efficient it enables those who use it to perform amazing feats of intellect. Our hero is the beautiful starship captain Rydra Wong. One of Delany’s most accessible books, a rip-roaring adventure novel disguised as a work of linguistic theory, or maybe vice versa. Babel-17 (1966) – Samuel Delany Image Credit: Jim Linwood via If you’re a Han Solo fan, this just might be one of his prototypes. Still, the plot never stops thumping and the pages turn quickly. The novel is basically a cowboy story with Jim as the swashbuckling loner enforcing order on the frontier. Soon he gets entangled with the law enforcement Special Corps and a seductive mass murderess just a little smarter than he is.
The first is a briskly break-neck adventure yarn as con-man Jim diGriz robs and grifts his way through a too orderly galaxy. Harry Harrison wrote a dozen Stainless Steel Rat books over fifty years. The Stainless Steel Rat (1961) – Harry Harrison Image Credit: Jim Linwood via
Here are some sci-fi novels that every fan should know about. But there are still a ton of novels and series with lower profiles that haven’t reached cultural saturation.
More and more science-fiction books are getting turned into high-profile adaptations, from The Handmaid’s Tale to The Expanse to Dune and Station Eleven. Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest
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