Defining “science fiction” (so that one can say, definitively, this book is a sci-fi book) is a little like defining “spiritual” or some other vague belief category that includes so many contradictory and peripheral and quasi-mystical tenants and offshoots that your friend who swears by it probably has no idea what it really is. “Sci-fi” is a term that says everything and nothing simultaneously. We know what it means, intuitively, but not so much definitionally. It involves, we think, kombucha.



Some works that seem obviously sci-fi (like Star Wars) are really not (Star Wars is a space western inspired by myth and samurai films, damnit. Fight us.) While other works that seem far from sci-fi (the early nineteenth-century’s Frankenstein, for instance) are the genre’s very DNA.

At its core, science fiction is a conceit. It’s a thought experiment beginning with a “what if X” or an “imagine a world in which Y.” It has something we might call a Device. And the Device cannot be peripheral, some incidental feature of the world. No, the narrative must turn upon this make-believe conceit. It must be its axis, it’s inciting incident, its reason for existence. The story cannot be the story without the Device. (You might then say, well isn’t “the Force” this Device? Or is more of a “power,” closer to the superhero genre. But would you not call something like X-Men science-fiction? Yes? You can see how tricky this becomes.)

The Device can be both a Thing or an Event. And so works centered on some “extinction-like event”—books like The Road, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Leftovers—do, in effect, count as science-fiction. (Though, we’ve included far less of this type of sci-f, what we’ll call “naturalistic sci-fi,” versus other, more traditional tech-driven sub-genres.)

And while loosening the sci-fi definition may open up just about the entire library, we’ve narrowed a list down to (in no particular order) some amazing reads. Here are the best sci-fi books for all readers, whether you haven’t touched a book since high school or you daily burn incense to the alter of Arthur C. Clarke.