The best science fiction novels about outsiders

I love this book because it chronicles the ups and downs of being married to a time traveler who may disappear at any moment and be gone for weeks. Henry DeTamble has a genetic disorder that causes him to take sudden, uncontrolled journeys through time. He first meets Clare Abshire, his future wife, when she is six in the meadow behind her house and visits her often as she grows up. They finally get together when Clare introduces herself to Henry at the library where he works, but he doesn’t know who she is because he hasn’t traveled back to her meadow yet. Told in chapters alternating between Henry’s and Clare’s points of view this story will keep you eagerly turning pages from beginning to end.

Perennial bestselling author Stephen King has written many stories about outsiders, but his first novel, Carrie, is my favorite—maybe because I would have loved to have had a power like Carrie’s when I was in high school, although I wouldn’t have used it in such a gruesome and destructive way. I hope.

Carrie White is a shy, unpopular high school girl with the ability to make objects move by just thinking about them. She has kept her talent bottled up inside her, but when a “mean girl” plays a prank on her at the prom, she unleashes the full fury of her power on the school gym packed full of people—guilty and innocent alike—the town, and her fundamentalist mother.

This bittersweet story about a mentally challenged man who becomes a genius moved me deeply when I first read it. With his new found intelligence comes a new, unsettling perspective on a his life.

Charlie Gordon has an I.Q. of 70. He has a job at a bakery where he considers his co-workers to be his best friends. He has his own apartment, and he attends a special school. Charlie volunteers to have an experimental operation that makes him a genius. But as his intelligence grows, Charlie discovers that his world is not the safe and happy place he’d thought it was. For instance, he learns that his coworkers who he believed were his best friends actually were making fun of him because of his disability.

This novel captured my imagination when I first read it in high school, a time when I felt especially isolated. Not only is it a good outsider story, it’s a good come-uppance story (the evil forces get their come-uppance in the end).

When he’s eight years old, Horty Bluett runs away from his abusive adoptive family and his classmates who torment him. Some carnival people, also outcasts, take him in. Horty doesn’t realize until he’s older that he is an alien, grown by alien organisms from another world, and his special power is the ability to duplicate, or “mimic”, other life forms. This talent helps him thwart the sinister carnival owner’s plans and, as an added bonus, exact revenge on his cruel adoptive father, Judge Bluett.

I like this novel because it contrasts two vastly different worlds—both in the same country on the same planet, but in different time periods. 

Dana Franklin, a young black woman, is suddenly swept out of her 1970s California home to an early Nineteenth Century Maryland plantation where she saves Rufus Weylin, the plantation owner’s five-year-old son, from drowning. She is “called” back many times over Rufus’ life when he’s in a jam, and each time she stays longer in the past. Over the course of her sojourns on the plantation, she must pass for a slave, which proves to be challenging for a late Twentieth Century African American woman. Dana learns first hand about the life of a slave, something she had only read about before.