The best sci-fi books to enjoy while expanding your mind

While I love the whiz-bang-pew of space battles, I also like to laugh. John Scalzi manages to make me do both. I love the wrinkle in this story—the main character enlists in the colonial military on his 75th birthday, knowing that once he leaves Earth, he will never be allowed to return. Watching an older man—he gets a younger body, but he’s still 75 mentally—who has put up with all the normal crap of life, and experienced a full lifetime, deal with the situation in space is really great, not only because the main character has a great sense of humor, but because he also has a finely-tuned BS detector, and it goes into overdrive the more he sees. 

This first came out just a few months prior to the first movie in 1977 and I still remember sitting in my dorm room reading every word with great expectation of how it would look in the coming movie. I had the same feeling reading it as I did when I first read Dune. A totally different story, but great world building.

Having started this list with the titan of gothic science fiction, Mary Shelley, it is appropriate to close out the list with another titan, Octavia Butler. Dawn is the first book of the Xenogenesis series, which—though long-recognised as a science fiction classic—has deep connections to the gothic genre with its “A live! Still alive. Alive…again” (surely a contender for the best opening to a novel), and its captors, strange Awakenings, creatures covered in writhing tentacles, and hybridisation of the human and alien. Underneath all of this, is the complex interrogation of what it means to be human—an exploration suited exceptionally well to both gothic fiction and science fiction.