The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Most pandemic novels end the world; this one asks what survives it. Mandel's traveling Shakespeare troupe makes the apocalypse feel almost worth attending.

A world so starved of living things that artificial humans pass unnoticed among us. Dick's melancholy bounty hunt asks a central genre question: what counts as human?

First contact with a political conscience. Liu sets an alien invasion against the Cultural Revolution, and the result feels like no other first-contact novel on this list.

Orwell's dystopia of rewritten history and permanent surveillance remains a benchmark for the genre. Decades on, it reads as warning, not period piece.

Ravn tells a voyage through staff memos, and the format works strangely well. Humans and humanoids grow attached to alien objects until mutiny looms.

Huxley's engineered, medicated future is the gentler nightmare, which is the point. Where Orwell forbids, this classic distracts us into compliance.

A time travel technician fixing other people's paradoxes while stuck in his own. Yu turns the genre inside out and finds a family story in the wreckage.

Asimov's Robot stories introduce the Three Laws and continue to influence thinking about machines. Engineers later programmed those laws into real computers, with odd results.

Benevolent aliens end war, poverty, and apparently human striving. Clarke asks what a golden age costs, and the answer gets stranger with every page.

Aliens came and left, and no one knows why. The Strugatsky brothers' Zone of warped physics inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker and still feels unexplained in the best way.

Esquire called it Vonnegut's best book, and it dares to answer the meaning of life. A mad spin through space with a moralist at the controls.

Lessing trades realism for cosmic archives, telling Earth's story through reports from an alien emissary. A Nobel laureate cutting loose is reason enough to look.

The colonization novel that treats Mars like a real place with real politics. If you want your interplanetary drama argued over in committee meetings, this is the one.

Pilgrims head for a world where tombs move backwards in time, guarded by the Shrike, and Simmons builds a vast civilisation on the brink around them.

Atwood does apocalypse through the eyes of possibly its last survivor. A love triangle and a biotech catastrophe, told with her usual refusal to look away.

A planet where a deadly virus killed most colonists and changed the rest, and an anthropologist sent to test a vaccine. Griffith makes first contact a story about becoming someone new.