great themes of science fiction

Let's try something ambitious — a bigger, broader reading compilation. This column is divided according to unique interest-categories, beginning with...

dire warnings and self-preventing prophecies

These novels and shorter works inspire the reader to imagine the dreadful-but-avoidable dangers that may lurk down the road ahead. A few of these books even attained the most powerful status any work of fiction can achieve: they changed the future by alerting millions, who then vowed that the bad things should never happen.

Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl

Stephen Baxter: Flood

John Brunner: The Sheep Look Up

Harry Harrison: Make Room! Make Room! (basis for the film Soylent Green)

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Dani Kollin & Eytan KollinThe Unincorporated Man

Walter M. Miller Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz

Frederik Pohl: The Cool War

Nevil Shute: On the Beach

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: "Harrison Bergeron" in (Welcome to the Monkey House)

Philip Wylie: The Disappearance

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We

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harbingers of hope

These tales offer something almost as important as warnings... a tantalyzing glimpse at (guardedly and tentatively) better tomorrows. (It's actually much harder to do than issue dire warnings!)

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas

John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar

Robert A. Heinlein: Beyond This Horizon

Aldous Huxley: Island

Kim Stanley Robinson: Pacific Edge

Vernor Vinge: Rainbows End

John C. Wright: The Golden Age

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huh! I never realized!

Some tales simply rock readers back with wondrous stories that also broaden their perspective... from strange cultures to alternate social systems to unusual ways of thinking.

Frank Herbert: Dune

Donald Kingsbury: Courtship Rite

Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

Vernor Vinge: A Deepness in the Sky

Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

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the hard stuff

Take us someplace new. Boggle us with possibilities grounded in the strange-real universe of science!

Poul Anderson: Tau Zero

Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy

Greg Bear: Eon

Gregory Benford: Timescape

Greg Egan: Diaspora and Quarantine

Wil McCarthy: To Crush the Moon

Linda Nagata: Vast

Larry Niven: Ringworld

Robert Sawyer: Flashforward

Charles Sheffield: The Web Between The Worlds

Robert Charles Wilson: Spin

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fantasy — with brains

Just because there's magic and wizards and kings and such... doesn't mean it has to be lobotomizing. There really are exceptions!

Tim Powers: The Drawing of the Dark

Cherie Priest: Boneshaker

JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings

Eliezer Yudkowsky (aka Less Wrong): Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (free online fanfiction)

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gedankenexperiments

Or... what if things were different?

Poul Anderson: Brain Wave

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination

Robert Silverberg: Dying Inside

Peter Watts: Blindsight

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rip-snorting good storytelling

Just go along for the ride.

William Goldman: The Princess Bride

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye

Frederick Pohl: Gateway

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alternative histories & parallel worlds

Extra points if it seems plausible that this might-have-been really might have been. And even more points if the reader goes, "That world seems more plausible than this one I'm living in!"

L. Sprague de Camp: Lest Darkness Fall

Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle

Eric Flint: 1632

Ward W. Moore: Bring the Jubilee

Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon

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time travel

Here the biggest test is whether you can offer a new or surprising logical twist. Bring on them paradoxes!

David Gerrold: The Man Who Folded Himself

Harry Harrison: The Technicolor Time Machine

Robert A. Heinlein: All You Zombies and By His Bootstraps

Fritz Leiber: The Big Time

Robert Silverberg: Up the Line

Connie Willis: Doomsday Book

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humor

The hardest thing of all to do well. Dare to try this most-difficult type!

Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson: Hoka! (or any book in the Hoka world)

Terry Pratchett: The Color of Magic

Connie Willis: "Blued Moon" in Fire Watch

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sheer beauty

Forget science, logic and other superficialities. Just love it. The words... the words...

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker

Dan Simmons: Hyperion

Cordwainer Smith: The Rediscovery of Man

Theodore Sturgeon: More Than Human

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quirky classics

Hey, it's a kind of time travel!

Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie: When Worlds Collide

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland

Aldous Huxley: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

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predictive successes

SF authors often disclaim any intent to foretell the future. We explore it, test possibilities, perform gedankenexperiments, even warn or entice. But predict it? Well, at times we do try... and even keep score! Brin fans maintain a wiki tracking hits and misses from my most predictive near-term book to date, Earth. Here are some looks-ahead that have been impressively on-target.

John Brunner: The Shockwave Rider

William Gibson: Neuromancer

E. E. Hale (1865): The Brick Moon

Robert A. Heinlein: Beyond This Horizon

Frederick Pohl: Age of the Pussyfoot

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SF isn't just Anglo-American

International contributions to this genre are undeniable.

Sakyo Komatsu: Japan Sinks

Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic

Tetsu Yano: The Paper Spaceship

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