As the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing said, 'Science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.”Ĭhoosing the fifty best science fiction books of all time wasn’t easy, so to get the job done, we had to establish some guardrails. Our favorite works in the genre make good on this promise, meditating on everything from identity to oppression to morality.

Through the enduring themes of sci-fi, we can examine the zeitgeist’s cultural context and ethical questions. Sci-fi brings out the best in our imaginations and evokes a sense of wonder, but it also inspires a spirit of questioning. It’s also remarkably porous, allowing for some overlap with genres like fantasy and horror. Now, two centuries later, sci-fi is a sprawling and lucrative multimedia genre with countless sub-genres, such as dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, and climate fiction, just to name a few. Some scholars argue that science fiction as we now understand it was truly born in 1818, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the first novel of its kind whose events are explained by science, not mysticism or miracles. Science fiction’s earliest inklings began in the mid-1600s, when Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin wrote pioneering stories about voyages to the moon. Today, we call those dreams science fiction. And what remarkable dreams they are-dreams of distant worlds, unearthly creatures, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, and so much more. Since time immemorial, mankind has been looking up at the stars and dreaming, but it was only centuries ago that we started turning those dreams into fiction.

Great space opera books