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The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey
Kowal’s outstanding alt-history Lady Astronaut series begins with a disaster: when a meteorite hits the Eastern Seaboard in 1952, millions of people are killed, including the president and most other government officials. Mathematician and pilot Elma York calculates that the resulting climate shift will wipe out life on Earth in a matter of decades, meaning that the only solution is to establish a colony on Mars. Elma longs to become an astronaut, but because of the sexism, racism, and antisemitism of the time, she and other women are benched as “human computers.” Against the thrilling backdrop of this burgeoning space race, Elma and her colleagues wage an increasingly public war against discrimination, fighting for their right to become astronauts.Textured with strong scientific research and achingly real characters, The Calculating Stars is a lively time machine to an alternate past.
Not all science fiction has to be serious. Scalzi sets this metafictional satire on the starship Intrepid, where low-ranking crew members reach a grim realization: on the ship’s frequent away missions, it’s always the ensigns who die a cheap, gruesome death. If that sounds like a riff on Star Trek’s ill-fated “redshirts,” that’s because it is: these ensigns are the expendables of their own third-rate Star Trek rip-off, doomed to become cannon fodder. “Sooner or later, the Narrative will come for each of us,” one muses. Like a sci-fi comedy crossed with The Truman Show, Redshirts follows the ensigns’ efforts to transcend their own narrative. “You’re making bad science fiction, and we have to live in it,” one complains. Snappy and surprising, Redshirts takes a comic premise and elevates it into a clever meditation on fiction and free will.
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In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fantastical fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behavior of earthlings (for instance: “human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracized by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is a modern classic in the making—an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.
This recent debut earned its place on our list for two reasons: its innovative mosaic structure and its nightmarish satire of life under algorithmic rule. In the technocapitalist hellscape of Apex City (formerly known as Bangalore), citizens live in thrall to the odious Bell Corp and its Bell Curve: a modern-day caste system determined by productivity and social media virality. The elite Twenty Percent enjoy luxurious privileges, while the middling Seventy Percent lead workaday lives and the precarious Ten Percent risk becoming Analogs, forced to live a dehumanizing existence without electricity or running water. But when the elusive “Ten Percent Thief” steals from the Twenty Percent to give to the Analogs, like a cyberpunk Robin Hood, a revolution brews. Told through various perspectives all across Apex City, this biting satire considers how we live now—our unfettered capitalism, our “hustle and grind” culture, our obsession with “correct” opinions—and shows it to us through a dystopian kaleidoscope, hideous and true.
When we head for the stars, we take culture with us—and Midnight Robber exemplifies how sci-fi writers can build the world we know into the worlds we imagine. On the technologically advanced planet Toussaint, descendants of Caribbean immigrants live under the watchful supervision of Granny Nanny, an all-seeing AI who guides the fate of humanity. When young Tan-Tan is spirited to a planet of exiles by her abusive father, she escapes his clutches and finds refuge among the douen, an alien race inspired by Afro-Caribbean folklore. To survive on this new planet, Tan-Tan becomes the stuff of myth herself: the Robber Queen, a Carnival legend who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Told with magic and music in a unique patois, this bildungsroman reads as much like a futuristic folk tale as it does sci-fi.
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Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Some of the best science fiction makes us ask, “What the hell did I just read?” Star Maker is one of those books—an enormously ambitious history of the universe, told by an Englishman who floats into the cosmos one evening while contemplating their vastness. Disembodied and imbued with god-like powers, he speeds through extraordinary galaxies in search of intelligent life, encountering several exotic alien civilizations along the journey. It all culminates in an encounter with the Star Maker himself, which unspools like a brain-bending creation myth. This eschatological acid trip is a singular work of imagination—one that will leave you with more questions than answers.
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Contact, by Carl Sagan
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Haunting and dreadful, Under the Skin blends horror with sci-fi to create something unforgettably disturbing. In the Scottish Highlands, a strange-looking drifter named Isserley cruises the highways picking up hunky hitchhikers, who often vanish into thin air after entering her beat-up vehicle. Through her taut conversations with her passengers, Isserley teases out clues about their lives, wondering who might miss them if they disappear. To say too much about Isserley and her agenda is to spoil the book’s mysteries, but through this character, Faber toys with sci-fi’s fundamental questions, like: what makes us human? Beneath our different appearances, are we all the same? Under the Skin reminds us that not every sci-fi novel needs to contain a treatise on interstellar travel; in fact, this one lingers because of its masterful friction between the quotidian and the strange.
In the backwoods of Wisconsin, there lives a hermit named Enoch Wallace. Though Enoch is 124 years old, he doesn’t look a day over thirty—that’s because Enoch is a caretaker, and for over a century, he’s been running a rest stop for intergalactic travelers inside his rickety Civil War-era farmhouse. Enoch’s neighbors look the other way, but when the government catches wind of a strange man who never ages living in a house that no human can enter, their investigators come knocking, with disastrous consequences. Simak was a fine practitioner of what’s now called “pastoral science fiction”—think of it as classic sci-fi set in the countryside, inflected with that familiar Bradbury-esque Midwestern sentimentalism. The sub-genre has fallen into disuse, but if you ever find yourself longing to be transported to a cornfield at dusk, looking up at the stars and wondering what’s out there, let Simak be your guide. Warm, wise, and bittersweet, Way Station is his masterpiece.
“Robot western,” you say? Say no more! In Cargill’s speculative future, machines have proven victorious in the much-feared war between man and machine; now humans have been extinct for over three decades and two supercomputers (called One World Intelligences) are vying to become king of the ruins. Enter Brittle, a former caregiver robot now scavenging to survive in the barren Sea of Rust (formerly the Rust Belt). When an OWI launches a scheme to assimilate millions of robots into the mainframe, Brittle and a merry band of gunslingers travel through the robot underground to defend their individuality. On its surface, Sea of Rust is a rip-roaring shoot’em-up, but underneath, it’s an Asimovian meditation on sci-fi’s most enduring questions. Is an artificial life still a life? Are human creations doomed to repeat human mistakes? Cargill is a fine standard-bearer for the next frontier of this time-honored subgenre.
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Published in 1949 during the waning glory of science fiction’s golden age, What Mad Universe is a dazzling high-wire performance—at once a cheeky satire of classic pulp magazines and an excellent pulp tale in its own right. In a near future setting, pulp magazine editor Keith Winton is transported to a parallel universe through a freak rocket launch accident. This alternate reality looks just like home, but with some key differences: here, everything from Keith’s magazines is a fact of daily life, from interstellar travel to war with extraterrestrials. Soon enough, Keith becomes a fugitive on the run in New York City, desperate to get back to his own timeline. What Mad Universe is packed with daffy, self-referential details for the devoted sci-fi reader; for instance, in Brown’s alternate universe, H.G. Wells never wrote a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth, but rather a political manifesto condemning the human colonization of Mars. Campy and comical, this novel is both an homage and a send-up, not to be missed.
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The Book of Phoenix, by Nnedi Okorafor
In this outstanding debut, Burke blitzes beloved genre tropes (like colony ships and first contact) into a character-driven story about manifest destiny gone galactic. In the 2060s, a group of humans flee their ravaged Earth; 158 years later, they settle on a lush planet and christen it Pax (Latin for “peace”). But the settlers won’t find any peace here, because Pax’s abundant native plants are sentient, and they aren’t keen on sharing their world. Narrated by successive generations of colonists (and even the plants themselves, who think of the human settlers as “their” animals), Semiosis charts the turf war between these two factions. Sometimes that war is downright lethal, while other times it’s a nuanced struggle for two cultures to communicate without a shared language. In this magnificently alien world, Burke tells a powerful story about the dangerous hubris of colonialism.
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Banks’ The Culture series, spanning ten installments published over 25 years, centers on the titular Culture, a post-scarcity intergalactic empire dominated by the Minds, a cabal of (mostly) harmless artificial intelligences. In this futuristic landscape of “space socialism,” as the author calls it, each volume centers on an agent of the Culture tasked with influencing specific change. Through this diversity of protagonists, Banks assesses his ambiguous utopia from ever-changing perspectives. Our favorite volume is Excession, the most cerebral of the lot—and one that speaks to us all the more powerfully in the age of AI. When a black sphere fifty times older than the universe appears in remote space, the all-knowing Minds are stumped. For the first time ever, they’ve encountered what Banks calls “The Outside Context Problem”—a dilemma they lack the frame of reference to solve. Following the Minds as they deliberate and disagree about the sphere, Excession stands out in its series (and in the sci-fi canon) for its high-minded characterization of AI.
Revered as “the Melville of science fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe’s dense and heady books aren’t for the faint of heart. But for serious sci-fi readers, there are immense rewards to penetrating Wolfe’s baroque prose and visionary imagination. His best-known work is The Book of the New Sun, a dazzling tetralogy about Severian, a torturer exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner. Our favorite volume is The Claw of the Conciliator, the second installment in the series, wherein Severian heads to the city of his exile, only to be waylaid along the journey by love, fantastical creatures, and a mysterious artifact with ancient powers. Erudite and intricate, this series is a colossus of imagination and language—a must-read for any serious student of the genre.
As a key architect of science fiction’s New Wave (a 1960s and 1970s movement for the genre to become more experimental), Roger Zelazny’s boundary-breaking books pushed the field in a new direction. His best novel, Lord of Light, fuses heady concepts from religion and philosophy with the familiar trappings of sci-fi. On a colony planet, crewmembers from the original expedition (the “Firsts”) have biohacked themselves into immortality through reincarnation; meanwhile, their descendants worship them as Hindu gods, eager for their own chance at another lifetime. The Firsts achieve reincarnation through a technology that transfers minds between bodies, but they keep a tight grip on the process, subjecting the population to mind scans to determine worthy subjects. Sam, a young commoner who embraces Buddhism over Hinduism, plans to seize the tech (à la Prometheus stealing fire from the gods), deliver it to the people, and usher in a new era of enlightenment. Epic in scope and richly imagined, Lord of Light is a pivotal example of sci-fi’s ability to fold multiple disciplines into one story.
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This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
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