The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Evelyn's husband cheats on her with a clone of Evelyn herself, grown from her own research. Gailey turns domestic betrayal into sharp, nasty bioethics—come for the affair, stay for the identity crisis.

Zelazny frames a colony-ship rebellion in Hindu mythology, with tech lords posing as gods and a mortal heretic resisting. A 1967 original that still reads strange.

Faber keeps the premise simple—a woman picks up well-muscled hitchhikers—and then makes it terrifying. If you like being unsettled rather than reassured, this is your stop.

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.

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

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

A woman convinced she's an alien reporting home via fax machine—Bertino makes feeling like a stranger on Earth literal, and somehow tender. For readers who like their sci-fi quiet and aching.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most recent entry here, Gish Jen's 2020 novel brings a literary novelist's eye to the collection's newer end of the genre.

Stapledon attempts nothing less than a history of all life in the universe, billions of years of it. Small wonder later writers kept stealing from him.