The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Evolution runs backwards and women give birth to primitive infants. Erdrich applies a literary eye to the societal upheaval that follows.

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.

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.

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.

A trench in the Atlantic leads a marine biologist from ancient life forms to a space agency. MacInnes connects the deep sea to the stars without breaking stride.

One lab breach, one super-flu, and American civilization gone in weeks. King's pandemic epic is less about the plague than about what people build in the rubble.

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.

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

A routine murder case in the decaying city of Beszel points Borlú toward a border like no other. Miéville uses a detective story to examine borders and belief.

Valente rebuilds the solar system as an alternate 1986 of talking pictures and inhabited planets, following a documentary maker through cults and saloons. Odd in the best way.

James imagined 2021 as a Britain gone infertile and dictatorial, aging toward extinction. The premise sounds familiar now; the bleakness still doesn't.

Crowley's coming-of-age tale unfolds in a world cycling between busy times of discovery and quiet times of understanding, rewarding readers who enjoy mythic futures.

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

Whitehead sends a sweeper named Mark Spitz to clear zombies from lower Manhattan, then uses the rubble to dissect a civilization that was already hollow.

A man wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory and only the scientific method for company. Weir drives the amnesia premise with relentless problem-solving.

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

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 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.

Bester's revenge-driven teleportation thriller remains a high-velocity classic with a moral hangover. Seventy years on, the jaunting still feels fresh.

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.

Nayler's octopuses have language, culture, and the misfortune of being discovered by humans. A first-contact story that stays wet and close to home.

Solomon sets a generation ship's decks up like the antebellum South, and Aster's quiet rebellion carries the whole voyage. Grim, gorgeous, and not for readers wanting comfort.