The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Earth gets demolished to make room for a bypass, and the humor drives the story from there. A sharp, comedic take on space adventure.

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.

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.

Gibson coined cyberspace before the web existed, and Case's last-chance hack launches the cyberpunk genre. The digital future rarely gets imagined this well.

A patched-up ship, a mismatched crew, no war in sight. Chambers centers found family in a space opera setting, and it works.

Tchaikovsky spans centuries of evolution on a terraformed world while humanity circles desperately, delivering big-idea SF with emotional depth.

A starship AI reduced to one fragile body, out for revenge against the many-bodied Lord of the Radch. Leckie explores personhood through a revenge plot, and this is where it starts.

A soldier fights a thousand-year war and comes home to an Earth that has moved on without him. Haldeman makes time dilation the cruelest weapon of all.

An ambassador inherits her predecessor's murder mystery and an empire too seductive to resist. Martine combines political intrigue with lyrical prose.

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.

Monks guard the scraps of science after the world burns itself, and humanity repeats its mistakes across centuries anyway. Miller's satire cuts deep.

Murakami's Tokyo splits into a parallel world with a question mark in its name, following two lives that unravel across realities. Long, and deliberately strange.

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.

A meteor wipes out most of Earth, so the space race starts early—and a mathematician fights to be on the rocket. Kowal's alt-history swept the Hugo and Nebula, and deservedly.

First contact as a Jesuit's crisis of faith, told with the ending known and the horror withheld. Russell's first-contact narrative is a harrowing one, not a space adventure.

Burke's colonists discover the local plants are the intelligent ones, and negotiation, not conquest, becomes survival. A quiet, thoughtful first-contact story that stays with you.

Thompson sets his alien-contact story in a Nigerian town grown around a healing dome, told by a psychic ex-criminal with no interest in being a hero. Fresh, wry, and quietly political.

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.

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.

A drifter walks into a dying city and the novel never quite lets you get your bearings. Delany's cult classic rewards readers who like their sci-fi disorienting on purpose.