Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)

Everybody can fall in love with the little boy who is the hero of this story and then enjoy his ascent to the leadership of the space navy. This book is enjoyable without its three sequels, and I recommend it to those who may not normally read science fiction.

Nicolas Pelletier, Montréal, Canada

Little, Big; or, The Fairies' Parliament by John Crowley (1981)

Praised by Harold Bloom (who included it in The Western Canon) and Ursula K Le Guin, who said that "all by itself it calls for a redefinition of fantasy", this is a multigenerational story of families and fairies, all twined about their house in the country, Edgewood, though it takes sidelines - from the return of the Emperor Barbarossa to writing soap-operas in New York City. It is a story about growing up and about falling in love, as well as what it's like to be inside of a story; it plays with echoes of Alice in Wonderland, Frances Yates and Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream), as well as fairy tales and the Tarot.

Zvi Gilbert, Toronto

Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson (1999-)

Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (eight volumes and counting) is high fantasy in a weird, weird world which has many thousands of years of civilisation and war behind it, meaning the characters have held their grudges for a very long time. You're thrown into a battle between armies with no backstory, no long-winded explanations of historical allegiances and past wars, just smoke and blood and sorcery. It admittedly takes an effort to get to the end of the first book, but after that your attention is repaid a thousandfold with an astonishingly wide canvas of characters and locations, asking difficult questions about religion along the way. It's absolutely bloody brilliant. Made me cry a lot, too.

Jo Tacon, London

Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933)

The long-lived inhabitants of a community have pledged to preserve, in secrecy, the best of civilisation until the world is once again in a fit state to receive and understand what the best can teach us. Hilton's premise strikes a deep chord in today's "everything is relative" society. His utopia retains all its charm and, in his creation of Shangri-La, he added something permanently to the language.

John Colmans, London

Island by Aldous Huxley (1962)

Huxley remains one of the most intelligent people ever to write a novel, and I see Island as his most important work. While Brave New World is excellent at painting a picture of a humanity gone wrong, Huxley himself acknowledged that a much more difficult task was to create a novel in which humanity was the opposite; awakened, enlightened, cured. As such, Island reads both as a beautiful story and as a guide to living.

Daryl Sweet, Belfast

Canopus in Argos by Doris Lessing (1979-83)

Lessing considers the five books in this series to be her finest works. It would be hard to find better written or more profoundly explored utopias/dystopias that cast light on the state of the world we live in now. The novels range across politics, global warming and personal relationships, particularly gender and sexual politics. No list of SF and futurism would be complete without them.

Voula Grand, London

The Boys From Brazil by Ira Levin (1976)

A number of 65-year-old male civil servants around the world are to be killed in order to fulfil "the destiny of the Aryan race". Gradually, we learn that this is part of a sinister experiment to reproduce another Hitler. Written when cloning was still in the realms of fantasy, the novel explores genetics, environment and ethics. Levin makes the premise disturbingly credible, setting the plot against the backdrop of real events and people - the rise of the Third Reich; Josef Mengele, the angel of death; and the Nazi-pursuer, a barely disguised Simon Wiesenthal.

Dorrie Swift, London

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by HP Lovecraft (1941)

HP Lovecraft's first novel (though published posthumously) concerns a young antiquarian, Charles Dexter Ward, in the 1920s researching his family history, especially an ancestor from witch-haunted Salem. He unearths an abominable tale of necromancy, vampirism and other world horrors that start manifesting in the present age, affecting him mentally (and even more strangely physically) so that he descends into a deepening spiral of insanity.

Vince Pennell, Loughlinstown, Co Dublin

The Wave Theory of Angels by Alison Macleod (2005)

This novel defies bland categorisation: although it explores realms where science and dreams meet, it transcends both SF and fantasy. Its journey in time moves the reader between medieval Beauvais and a research centre in modern Chicago. Macleod's is a powerful tale about various kinds of love and desire. It is part-thriller, part-philosophical speculation, part-exploration of postmodern physics, and is quite beautifully written, combining play with poetry and with moments of deep emotion and powerful realism.

John Saunders, Oxford

The Confidence Man by Herman Melville (1857)

It's April Fool's day and the devil boards a Mississippi steamboat, sardonically named the Fidèle. Under a number of guises he engages the passengers (who make up a representative cross-section of antebellum society) in dizzying philosophical and theological disputations on the subjects of trust and belief. Punning on the concept of confidence, Melville's last novel is a satire on 19th-century liberal optimism in all its varied manifestations. That one of the devil's avatars should be a broker who trades in non-existent shares merely lends added piquancy to a novel which has much to say to our own precarious times.

Vincent Taggart, Essex

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)

Ostensibly a child's book, this is a major work of literature which manages to make the impact of war, family cruelty and love, and Victorian mores accessible to all ages without sacrificing complexity and honesty. The final meeting of Tom and Hatty (as an old woman) is unbearably moving.

Fay Dolnick, Chicago

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967)

Set on a colonised planet in an unspecified future, where the gods of the Hindu pantheon use their very real powers to ensure a rigid caste system and stifle any independent thought, Lord of Light follows hero Sam, an archetypal trickster, as he is granted a second opportunity to challenge his fellow "gods" by reviving Buddhism as a challenge to their theocracy. Imaginative and beautifully written, Lord of Light addresses religion as a tool for social control, yet balances this with heroic fantasy and hi-tech science fiction, all carried along by perfectly judged self-reflective humour.

Jamie Miller, Glasgow