The best science fiction novels with superior ideas from the 1950s that will literally blow your mind

Fahrenheit 451 is the best dystopian novel of the 1950s in which firemen work as enforcers burning books rather than putting out fires because a societal mob claims that the world’s unhappiness and discord are the result of ideas expressed in books. A woke mob that prefers to watch tv rather than read books has determined what is wrong with each book. Blacks are offended by Little Black Sambo so it must be burned. Whites are offended by Uncle Tom’s Cabin so it must be burned. Cigarette companies burn books that portray cigarette smoking as dangerous. There’s bound to be something offensive in every book, so every book is burned. A fireman named Guy Montag decides to fight back. Bradbury’s imaginative work is still fresh today.

This book starts with city-sized spaceships taking up residence above all the major world cities, much like the movie Independence Day. But instead of coming to conquer the Earth, they have come to help us reach the next stage in our evolution. They themselves cannot reach a higher level; they are known as the Overlords, and they look like Satan, but they are benign benefactors who wish to unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. They have a higher plan for Earth’s inhabitants. This book is meant to expand your mind with all of the thoughtful ideas that are presented. Fascinating.

This is a collection of short stories which detail Earth’s attempts to colonize Mars in the early 21st Century, and the parallels to early settlers' attempts to settle the West in the 19th Century are purposeful, with the Martians representing the Native Peoples of the West. Bradbury’s writing is very poetic and full of metaphors. The stories that form The Martian Chronicles are timeless ones that remind me of the best of The Twilight Zone, and Bradbury wrote for the TZ.

In 1971, I wrote a short story for a creative writing class at a Catholic HS in Chicago in which humans had just rebuilt the world after a 2,000-year-old apocalypse and were making their “first” landing on the moon (only to discover our Apollo mission had already gone there). My instructor, a Jesuit brother gave me Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz to read. I had never even heard of it, but it blew my mind. I found it to be imaginative and thought-provoking. While the novel had very little in common with my story, its kindred spirit presented a primitive post-apocalyptic world in which knowledge was key to both worlds. The fact that Jesuit brothers had stored knowledge in a monastery (in what was supposed to be Utah) for so many centuries waiting to reveal the truth expanded my mind even further. The novel itself is based upon 3 short stories written by Miller, then collected finally into this Hugo-winning novel. 

I Am Legend is the best Science Fiction novel ever written about vampires and the whole notion of surviving the end of the world. I read it once a year because it is short, and the novel never ceases to blow my mind. Several movies have been made from the book, with the best being The Omega Man with Charlton Heston as Robert Neville, the last living man on Earth in a world populated by (in the novel, vampires; in the movie version with Heston, zombies). The novel also inspired Night of the Living Dead. Matheson’s writing places you right in the middle of Neville’s living nightmare as he attempts to survive each day and night with only his intellect. Excellently written, you will not easily forget Neville’s struggle for existence as the book keeps asking you what would you do in Neville’s place.