26. This epic descendent of George Orwell’s 1984 covers that fateful year in two storylines—one fictional, one “real.” Bridging that gap are two long-lost lovers: Aomame, an assassin targeting domestic abusers, and Tengo, an aspiring novelist ghostwriting a dyslexic teenager’s bestseller. When Aomame discovers that the world is not what it seems and works to take down a dangerous cult leader, she and Tengo are drawn into a distorted reality, searching for one another across the chasm. It’s often said that a novel should contain the world; in 1Q84, Murakami makes good on that promise, weaving everything from recipes to music into this mammoth tale of love and longing in a contemporary Tokyo lit by two moons.

25. In this chilling dystopian triumph, an American master warns against a world gone mad. When evolution runs in reverse, leading to babies born with primitive traits, government squads begin imprisoning pregnant women; meanwhile, religious extremists plot to take control of the nation. Enter twenty-something Cedar Hawk Songmaker, four months pregnant at exactly the wrong time, whose search for her Ojibwe birth parents leads her into the maw of danger. Like The Handmaid’s Tale before it, Future Home of the Living God’s nightmarish vision of theocracy and reproductive dystopia rings all too true.

24. When anthropologist Marghe Taishan touches down on the mysterious planet Jeep, she soon finds that she’s in over her head. Centuries ago, Earth colonized the planet; then, a fatal virus wiped out all the men, and contact with the remaining colonists was lost. Generations of radio silence later, Marghe arrives to test a promising vaccine while a greedy corporation waits in orbit, hoping to ransack the unspoiled planet. As Marghe’s stay progresses, she becomes fascinated by Jeep’s powerful women, and ever more enmeshed in its tribal mythologies and conflicts. When Marghe endangers her life to unravel the biological mystery of how Jeep’s inhabitants procreate, Ammonite asks: when does a human become an alien? Gripping and gutsy, rich in layers of feminist and queer thought, Ammonite gleefully throws a stick of dynamite into the sci-fi firmament.

23. “Last man on Earth” narratives are rarely as taut and morally provocative as Oryx and Crake, the first volume in Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. Our protagonist is Snowman, the lone survivor of a plague that destroyed mankind. Now living among the Crakers, a bioengineered race of childlike humanoids, Snowman mythologizes their origin story, with some creative embellishments. The tale takes him back to the Before Times, when life was a corporatocracy characterized by genetic engineering and consumer culture. Oryx and Crake isn’t for the faint of heart (here there be child pornography, ritualized killings, and animal abuse) but if you can stomach it, reading this prescient novel is like looking in a funhouse mirror of our own failings.

22. Welcome to AutoAmerica, where AIs have put many people out of work, the privileged Netted live on high ground, and the rest of the population, known as Surplus, live in swamplands wracked by consumerism. Teenage Gwen plays baseball with fellow members of the Surplus in an underground league, but when the government takes notice of her talents, she’s shipped off to the Olympics in ChinRussia, playing in dangerous territory alongside the Netted. Like Brave New World before it, The Resisters explores our consent in our own subjugation. "No one would have chosen the extinction of frogs and of polar bears… and yet it was something we humans did finally choose," Jen writes. In this funny and tender novel, she makes the impossible look easy, grafting a heartfelt story about family onto big questions about freedom and resistance.

21. Though it was likely Doris Lessing’s long and varied career that netted her the Nobel Prize for Literature, we like to think that her ambitious excursion into science fiction, via her Canopus in Argos: Archives series, also had something to do with it. The first installment, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, is a visionary work of imagination. Compiled from ephemera like documents, letters, and journal entries, the novel is structured as a history book for residents of the planet Canopus, who long ago colonized a little blue marble they call Shikasta. Shikasta is clearly the planet Earth, shaped from Genesis to World War III by the Canopians and their colonial rivals. Lessing’s perspective on history is downright cosmic in scope, but occasionally cheeky, too. (When Earthpeople complain that their heavenly leaders have abandoned them, the Canopians retort, "We've regularly sent people to guide and comfort them! Well, except for a brief period during the last fifteen hundred years.") Lessing’s ambitious vision of human life—and human folly—offers alternate history on an eschatological scale.

20. Solomon’s intricate and imaginative debut novel takes place on the HSS Matilda, a generation ship carrying survivors of a destroyed Earth toward a new star system. Throughout the generations, life on the ship has become harshly segregated, with people of color confined to a grueling routine of hard labor on the lower decks. Here, we meet Aster, a brilliant and rebellious healer whose search for answers about her mother’s suicide stands to galvanize a shipwide uprising. Peopled with a rich array of queer and neurodiverse characters, An Unkindness of Ghosts makes dazzling use of science fiction’s trappings to tell a gutting story about slavery and intergenerational trauma.

19. In this spectacular blend of science fiction and climate fiction, VanderMeer sets his sights on Area X, a lush and remote landscape that has turned against humankind, producing brain-bending effects on scientists who venture into the territory to investigate. As the secrets of Area X reveal themselves not just to the scientists, but to the disorganized agency that monitors these expeditions, the bureaucratic and ecological consequences pile upward. Dreadful, Lovecraftian, and downright existential, Annihilation is a dizzying descent into a metaphysical wilderness leagues away from our lived reality.

18. Perhaps you expected to see Slaughterhouse Five on this list instead, but bear with us. The Sirens of Titans takes Slaughterhouse’s science fiction slant and leans into it full throttle, making for something even more spectacular, strange, and side-splittingly funny. In The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant, the richest man on a future Earth, hopscotches across the solar system, suffering the slings and arrows of fortune at every turn. Constant has come into the crosshairs of Winston Niles Rumfoord, a malevolent space traveler who’s become “chrono-synclastic infundibulated” by his voyage. Now, like a vindictive god, Rumfoord is determined to teach the entire human race a lesson by pitting them against the belligerent Martians. Pulpy and surprisingly poignant, The Sirens of Titan trafficks gracefully in some of sci-fi’s most enduring questions about fate, free will, and predestination.

17. Sci-fi godfather Arthur C. Clarke wrote dozens of acclaimed novels, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, but he considered Childhood’s End to be one of his favorite works. Who are we to disagree with him? In this formidable novel, the space race grinds to a halt when vast alien spaceships appear over Earth’s major cities. The Overlords (or, as they prefer to be known, The Guardians) have arrived on what seems like a mission of peace, determined to end war, ignorance, disease, and poverty. A new golden age begins, but utopia has a price: creativity stagnates, science loses forward momentum, and the human race, by and large, is stifled. As the Overlords’ secret motives come into view, Clarke reflects on the messy striving that makes us human. (Nominated for a Hugo Award in 1954, Childhood’s End ultimately lost to Fahrenheit 451, but the novel remains timeless.)

16. Asimov’s landmark Foundation series could easily have landed on this list—awarded the one-time Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966, it’s certainly made a mark on science fiction. But Asimov was at his best, both as a fiction writer and a conceptual thinker, when he wrote about robots, those rascally bags of bolts. The Complete Robot contains 37 of those stories, including the famous I, Robot. Here, Asimov laid down the highly influential Three Laws of Robotics, which would go on to shape both a genre and a field of study. From hostile to heroic to everything in between, the robots in these stories evolved as Asimov’s vision did. The world hasn't been the same since.

15. National Book Award winner and Westworld writer Charles Yu is one of today’s most exciting speculative fiction talents. His metafictional debut centers on Charles Yu, a lonesome time machine mechanic for Time Warner Time, which turns a profit by operating alternate universes. Charles oversees Minor Universe 31, a science fiction phantasmagoria where he encounters Linus Skywalker (who offed his famous father), but all the while, he’s deep in mourning for his own father, a time travel pioneer who vanished. When Charles shoots his future self in a kneejerk moment of panic, he's soon stuck in a time loop that may see him colliding with his long-lost parent. Trippy and clever, playful and full of heart, this bittersweet novel speaks volumes about our all-too human desire to change the past.