I’m a professional science fiction writer, and a lifelong devotee of the genre. It lets us taste the future, reflect on the past, careen into alternate realities, and plunge into places of dream and nightmare. My own contributions appear in the world’s leading magazines, numerous anthologies, and novels of the far future (including Redspace Risingand TenThousand Thunders). I simply adore the genre, and how it dares us to walk into utopias, dystopias, and the depths of human spirit.
Although it was published in 1956,The Stars My Destinationreads in a modern and accessible way, with a fast-paced plot and delirious knack for creativity. Truly cosmic in scope, it offers a sci-fi spin onThe Count of Monte Cristowith exquisite results. We have teleportation, space travel, a range of interesting future technology, vibrant characters, psychic powers, unique cultures, top-secret weapons… and that’s just the beginning. The book was so ahead of its time that it is still ahead of its time.
Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class, is the only survivor on his drifting, wrecked spaceship. When another space vessel, the Vorga, ignores his distress flares and sails by, Gully Foyle becomes a man obsessed with revenge. He endures 170 days alone in deep space before finding refuge on the Sargasso Asteroid and then returning to Earth to track down the crew and owners of the Vorga. But, as he works out his murderous grudge, Gully Foyle also uncovers a secret of momentous proportions...
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” One of the seminal cyberpunk novels, Neuromanceris as lean, mean, and dazzling as ever. Gibson creates a world that you can smell, and explores the concept that better tech doesn’t make better people (and the future may be just as seedy and violent as any other time in history). Biomodifications, mirror-shade anti-heroines, computer hacking, artificial intelligence, mega-corporations, and a world perched on the cusp of a self-made hell, Neuromancerset the standard for all who followed.
The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term 'cyberspace' produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.
More than three decades later, Gibson's text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions of…
Foundation was inspired by Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it shows. The series spans millennia, with dark ages and rediscoveries, civilization versus barbarism and naked imperial aggression. Asimov was not the first writer to create a “future history” (Olaf Stapledon’s Starmakerpredates it by more than a decade) but he certainly brought the concept to popular consciousness. Thought-provoking and dizzying in scope, Foundationremains a bedrock of modern science fiction.
The first novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series
THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION, NOW STREAMING • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings…
There aren’t many writers who are comfortable exploring cosmological themes, but Clarke did just that in this book about evolution, technology’s impact on a species, and the notion that our place in history is the merest beachhead—the human equivalent of lungfish making the transitional leap to bigger tomorrows. The novel’s Overlords operate in complete antithesis to Star Trek’s Prime Directive; they come to Earth specifically to tamper with humanity, guiding our development. There are transhuman and bioethical debates aplenty to be found here, and no one really does it better than Clarke.
Arthur C. Clarke's classic in which he ponders humanity's future and possible evolution
When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to offer an end to poverty and crime. When they finally showed themselves it was a shock, but one that humankind could now cope with, and an era of peace, prosperity and endless leisure began.
But the children of this utopia dream strange dreams of distant suns and alien planets, and…
Often in the shadow of his other sci-fi classics like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, this one always stood out to me as a creepy and unsettling exploration of the “uplift” subgenre... far before anyone else was doing it.Moreau’s island is nightmare-fuel, but it’s so much more than a zoo of oddities. His uplifted animals struggle to make sense of their world, and their attempts at recreating human society is both a commentary on us but also on how tenuous human society is in the face of the “inner beast”. In a way, it anticipates the central theme ofLord of the Flies. Disturbing, full of movement and action, and impossible to forget.
In the far future revenge does not stop with death.
Harris Alexander Pope is the man who ended the Partisan War on Mars. All he seeks now is solitude and a return to the life that was stolen from him. Yet when he learns that the worst war criminals are hiding in other bodies, he is forced into an interplanetary pursuit. Teaming up with other survivors eager for their own brand of vengeance, Harris begins to suspect a darker truth: Maybe what he remembers about the war isn't what happened at all…
A small town in the grips of evil... a single mom with nowhere to turn... and a madman who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
He is the Collector, and he's taking prized possessions, pets, and children, keeping what he wants, and burying his rejects in shallow graves. When he comes after Rachel Logan, an ordinary schoolteacher living on a ranch with her grandmother and her two children, she has no weapon except her wits.
But how can she stop a monster who outdoes Hannibal Lecter in cunning and depravity?
A small town in the grips of evil... a single mom with nowhere to turn... and a madman who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
He is the Collector, and he's taking prized possessions, pets, and children, keeping what he wants, and burying his rejects in shallow graves. When he comes after Rachel Logan, an ordinary schoolteacher living on a ranch with her grandmother and her two children, she has no weapon except her wits.
But how can she stop a monster who outdoes Hannibal Lecter in cunning and depravity?
