14. Aldous Huxley wrote dozens of far-out books, but Brave New World rises above the pack for a reason. In this nightmarish vision of the future, Huxley imagines a world of mood-flattening pharmaceuticals, information overload, and on-demand sex. The masses are mollified by this endless cycle of consumption, allowing the totalitarian World State to rule unchallenged, but sleep scientist Bernard Marx is unsatisfied by life without passion or pain. When he dares to fight back against the World Controllers, Brave New World veers headlong into a thrilling story about nonconformity and individuality that still rattles us today. In 2002, the novelist JG Ballard said it best: “1984 has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere.”

13. The Employees accomplishes more in 136 pages than some sci-fi novels do in 500. On a ship hurtling through deep space, humans and humanoids work together under a rigid corporate hierarchy. When they land on New Discovery, crew members retrieve mysterious objects that exert a strange power over man and machine alike, awakening dreams, memories, and longing. Humans mourn their lost connections on Earth, while their humanoid colleagues yearn for connections they’ve never known. Constructed as a series of witness statements from the crew, gathered after tensions with their oppressive employer boil over, The Employees is an unforgettable novel about the psychic costs of labor under capitalism. Yet it also reaches deeper to explore science fiction's animating questions: What makes us human? Which of us is more human, person or robot? Is a synthetic life still a life? Dreamlike and sensual, The Employees shouldn't be missed.

12. In a world where concerns about privacy, government overreach, and freedom of information are more relevant than ever, 1984 continues to frighten and astound. Published in 1949, Orwell’s masterpiece is the chilling story of a rebellious Ministry of Truth bureaucrat; through his eyes, we glimpse a terrifying, tyrannical society, where independent thought is a crime and truth is a fiction. All these decades later, 1984 still looms large in our cultural imagination, from its perch in our curriculum to its pervasive influence on our language. It’s difficult to imagine any science fiction novel with more influence.

11. One of China’s most acclaimed science fiction writers opens his Hugo Award-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy with The Three-Body Problem, a gripping first contact thriller set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution. When a young physicist comes to work at the government’s secretive Red Coast Base, she soon learns that frontier scientists are communicating with extraterrestrials—and they’re planning to make a hostile visit. Enormous in scope, rich in both twisty-turny mysteries and big ideas about progress, The Three Body-Problem marks the ascension of a writer bound to become every bit as canonical as Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. This series will soon become a Netflix series from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, so get in on the ground floor while you still can.

10. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? famously became the basis for Blade Runner, but if you’re a movie fan who hasn’t read the novel, you’re in for something new, as it’s more of a complement than a faithful adaptation. Some of the familiar bones are here, like bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his mission to retire rogue androids, but you won’t find the term “blade runner” anywhere. Set in an abandoned San Francisco after World War Terminus’ radioactive fallout has destroyed the earth, this short gut-punch of a novel finds its central theme in empathy. Can androids experience it? Are humans who lack it any better than machines? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? asks more questions than it answers, reveling in ambiguity about just what separates man from machine. Like all the best science fiction, its weighty foray into what makes us human will linger with you for a long time.

9. Set before, during, and after the lethal Georgian Flu snuffs out 99% of the world’s population, taking the familiar contours of human civilization along with it, Station Eleven is the incandescent tale of the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare for the scattered settlements of the Great Lakes region. Along the road, they encounter a violent cult leader known only as the Prophet, who preaches that the virus was an act of God—a divine cleansing of the unworthy. Where so many post-apocalyptic novels traffic in the forces that divide us, Station Eleven celebrates that which allows us not just to survive, but to live: making art, belonging to something bigger than ourselves, searching tirelessly for what it means to be human. Haunting and lovely, Station Eleven is at once an elegy for a lost world and a paean to the human spirit.

8. In this stellar collection of short stories, one of the most award-winning science fiction writers of our time tees up nine brilliant tales of time travel, artificial intelligence, and alternate universes. The collection opens with a Hugo Award-winning parable set in ancient Baghdad, where a merchant traveling through an alchemist’s portal learns a familiar lesson about the impossibility of erasing the past. In another standout, a software tester spends an emotional two decades raising an artificial intelligence as if it were a digital pet (Tamagotchi users, take note). The remarkable title story, structured as a journal entry by a mechanical scientist dissecting his own brain, offers profound wisdom about consciousness: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.” Through lean, thought-provoking prose, Chiang renders stories about man and machines deeply felt—and deeply human.

7. One can’t say too much about Never Let Me Go without spoiling the novel’s gut-wrenching twist. But here’s what we can reveal: in Ishiguro’s chilling magnum opus, we meet three students of Hailsham, a quixotic English boarding school where sheltered children are educated in the arts and taught nothing of the outside world. Only when they become adults do they learn the shocking truth about Hailsham’s nefarious activities, and the reality of their terrible purpose. At once an arresting mystery, a Gothic romance, and a tear-jerking work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is a masterpiece of tension and tone, as well as a powerful indictment of a future shaped by science without ethics.

6. In 1969, Le Guin put feminist science fiction on the map with The Left Hand of Darkness. According to The Paris Review, "No single work did more to upend the genre's conventions.” This barrier-breaking first contact narrative opens on the planet Gethen, where Earth-born emissary Genly Ai is dispatched to broker an interplanetary alliance. The ambisexual Gethenians live without gender binaries, meaning that they’ve developed a world without war, where children are raised communally. Ai’s inability to think beyond his own misogyny and homophobia threatens his mission, imperils his life, and endangers his growing connection with Estraven, Gethen’s disgraced prime minister. In this visionary work of radical imagination, Le Guin explores a world beyond the constraints of gender and sex, and takes us to the heights of love without limitations.

5. Octavia Butler’s contributions to science fiction and Afrofuturism are legendary, meaning that selecting just one of her works for this list was a tall order. But Kindred, perhaps her best-known novel, stood out above the rest as a master class in the ability of science fiction to speak to the contemporary moment. This is the story of Dana, a Black woman in Los Angeles circa 1976, who finds herself violently transported back in time to the antebellum plantation where her ancestors were enslaved. Each time she pinballs through past and present, Dana’s stays at the plantation become longer and more dangerous, forcing her to confront the gruesome legacies of slavery, misogynoir, and white supremacy. As Harlan Ellison once said, “Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact… the novel one returns to, again and again.” Almost like time travel, we keep coming back to it.

4. Like many science fiction writers, it’s impossible to categorize Jemisin in just one genre. Many of her works belong to the hybrid genre of science fantasy, including this paradigm-shifting first installment in her Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season introduces a characteristically Jemisinian feat of astonishing worldbuilding: the Stillness, a dangerous continent wracked with volcanoes, earthquakes, and tectonic chaos. There live the orogenes, who have the power to manipulate the elements, but face persecution and lynching. Through the linked narratives of three extraordinary women, Jemisin depicts the tragedy of an orogene’s life with brutal, unsparing detail. As these unforgettable characters seek safety and agency, Jemisin weaves a shattering story about systemic oppression, where gritty glimmers of hope shine through the bleak edges.

3. If you expected to see Fahrenheit 451 on this list, then you haven’t spent enough time with The Martian Chronicles, undoubtedly Bradbury’s masterpiece. Radically poetic and rich with metaphor, The Martian Chronicles was an astonishing leap forward for a genre until then not considered sufficiently “literary.” Bradbury’s succession of linked stories opens on an Earth ravaged by nuclear warfare. In search of a new beginning, Americans pack up their manifest destiny and blast off to conquer Mars, but little do they know, the red planet will conquer them in return. Bradbury’s Mars is a dreamlike landscape of wasted cities, populated by a dwindling race of ancient, unknowable beings. In glimmering stories that swing from dark tragedy to pure comedy, Bradbury showcases mankind’s exploration and desolation of Mars, all while dismantling midcentury mythologies of American exceptionalism. Told in language at once elegiac and sinister, fantastical and fable-like, The Martian Chronicles transforms and transcends its genre.