Over the years, there have been countless sci fi tales depicting all different ideas of what the future may be like. And – in most cases, thankfully – they haven’t come true yet. But since we’re not in a future where your every move is being monitored, that’s all the more reason to enjoy these sci fi classics. So, check out the best Classic Sci Fi Books now!
1984 – George Orwell
In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger simply because his memory still functions.
The War Of The Worlds – HG Wells
Written between 1895 and 1897, H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories that detail a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. Filmed numerous times, this science fiction classic retains its power to disturb readers more than a century later.
The Time Machine – HG Wells
The Time Traveller, a dreamer obsessed with traveling through time, builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. He lands in the year 802701. The world has been transformed by a society living in apparent harmony and bliss. But as the Traveler stays in the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
In a technologically-advanced future, humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order. At the cost of their freedom, full humanity and perhaps also their souls.
Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag returns each day to his bland life and wife, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Stranger In A Strange Land – Robert A. Heinleinl
Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever…
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters…
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn. First a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars and then is conquered by it. Lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein
Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelly
Committed science student Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. So, he assembles a human being from stolen body parts but – upon bringing it to life – he recoils in horror at the creature’s hideousness. And then the once-innocent creature turns evil.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States – now known as the Republic of Gilead. A monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
First published in 1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea remains one of the most widely read adventure novels. The story follows the experiences of marine biologist Pierre Arronax and his companions, as guests – or prisoners – aboard the startlingly advanced submarine Nautilus under the command of the mysterious Captain Nemo.
Parable Of The Sower – Octavia E. Butler
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
Ringworld – Larry Niven
Louis Wu, accompanied by a young woman with genes for luck, and a captured kzin – a warlike species resembling 8-foot-tall cats — are taken on a space ship run by a brilliant 2-headed alien called Nessus. Their destination is the Ringworld, an artificially constructed ring with high walls that hold 3 million times the area of Earth. Its origins are shrouded in mystery.
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet Urras. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust..
Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
When German professor Otto Liedenbrock finds a coded message in an original runic manuscript of Snorri Sturluson’s Icelandic saga, Heimskringla, he discovers what he believes to be a secret passage to the center of the Earth. Professor Liedenbrock embarks immediately for Iceland on a journey of scientific discovery to prove his belief.
The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
You could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. In this phantasmagoric sideshow, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.
Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
The Invisible Man – HG Wells
A mysterious man named Griffen appears in a snowstorm at the local inn of the English village of Iping. Rarely emerging from his room, Griffen works continuously with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus. He’s a former medical student who has invented a chemical process to render bodies invisible. Having impulsively tried the formula upon himself, Griffen turns to crime to continue his experiments.
The Man In The High Castle – Philip K Dick
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In this world, we meet characters like Frank Frink, a dealer of counterfeit Americana who is himself hiding his Jewish ancestry; Nobusuke Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, unsure of his standing within the bureaucracy and Japan’s with Germany; and Juliana Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, who may be more important than she realizes.
The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Bill Masen misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. But the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, someone else who managed to retain their sight. Together they leave the city and try to survive in this post-apocalyptic world.
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Pragmatic gambler Phileas Fogg has made a gentlemanly wager to the members of his exclusive club: that he can circle the world in just eighty days, right down to the minute. Fetching his newly appointed French valet, Fogg embarks on a fabulous journey across land and sea—by steamer, rail, and elephant—to win the bet of a lifetime.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Henry Jekyll no longer wants to inhibit his dark side. He concocts a potion to create the alter ego of Mr. Edward Hyde. With the burden of evil placed on Hyde, Jekyll can now take pleasure in his immoral, nefarious fantasies—free of conscience and guilt. It’s when Hyde turns to murder that Jekyll realizes how monstrous his impulses are and how hard they are to suppress.
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C Clarke
The crew of the spacecraft Discovery are embarking on a mission to Saturn. Their vessel is controlled by HAL 9000. It’s an artificially intelligent supercomputer capable of the highest level of cognitive functioning that rivals—and perhaps threatens—the human mind.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent. Until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route. And Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. After that, things get much, much worse.
