The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Burgess invents a teenage slang to implicate readers in Alex's violence, then asks whether forced goodness counts as goodness at all—a classic exploration of free will.

The alien here is a planet that studies you back, and Lem's point is that contact may be impossible by design. Read it for the melancholy, not the movie's plot.

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

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.

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.

Two rival agents in a time-traveling war fall for each other through letters, and the prose is sharp and moving. Short, lush, and worth an evening.

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.

Wolfe's dying-earth sequel trusts you to keep up: unreliable memory, buried theology, apes, cannibals, a relic that may not be what it seems. Demanding, and worth every reread.

Banks drops a perfect black sphere from another universe into the Culture's lap, and the superintelligent Minds react with characteristic wit. Big-ideas space opera with jokes.

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.

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.

Sagan knew the universe better than almost anyone, and here he imagines what first contact would actually cost us. The science is real; the wonder is earned.

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.

Stephenson gave us the Metaverse before it was a buzzword, plus a pizza delivery guy who wields a katana. Loud, funny, and still the cyberpunk blueprint.

Hopkinson folds Caribbean folklore and Carnival into a colonized planet, and out comes sci-fi that sounds like nothing else. Tan-Tan's exile is worth the trip.

Lakshminarayan sorts a future Bangalore into elites and Analogs by algorithm, then lets one stolen seed crack the system. Sharp, timely, and quietly furious.

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.

Scalzi asks what happens to the expendable crew on a starship where the plot keeps killing them. A funny, clever riff that Trekkies will finish in a weekend.