My favorite science fiction/fantasy books
Discover my top picks for the best science fiction and fantasy books. Explore a curated list of must-read favorites that will transport you to incredible worlds and adventures.
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The Great Book of Amber
by Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber have earned their place as all-time classics of imaginative literature. Now here are all ten novels, together in one magnificent omnibus volume. Witness the titanic battle for supremacy waged on Earth, in the Courts of Chaos, and on a magical world of mystery, adventure, and romance.
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The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G. Wells
by H. G. Wells
Includes fantasies of travel in time and space, of personal madness and megalomania, and of practical and grotesque utopias
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Dragon's Egg
by Robert L. Forward
“In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind—and this is one of them.”—Arthur C. Clarke In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms—the cheela—living on Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers. Praise for Dragon’s Egg “Bob Forward writes in the tradition of Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity and carries it a giant step (how else?) forward.”—Isaac Asimov “Dragon’s Egg is superb. I couldn’t have written it; it required too much real physics.”—Larry Niven “This is one for the real science-fiction fan.”—Frank Herbert “Robert L. Forward tells a good story and asks a profound question. If we run into a race of creatures who live a hundred years while we live an hour, what can they say to us or we to them?”—Freeman J. Dyson “Forward has impeccable scientific credentials, and . . . big, original, speculative ideas.”—The Washington Post
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The Futurological Congress (from the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy)
by Stanisław Lem
Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure. Translated by Michael Kandel.
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The Cross-time Engineer
by Leo Frankowski
Accidentally plunged back in time to Poland in the year 1231, Conrad Schwartz is determined to build up the country before the Mongol invasion that will come ten years later
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The Runes of the Earth
by Stephen R. Donaldson
Ten years after the death of Thomas Covenant, his one-time companion, Linden Avery, returns home to discover her child building images of the Land with blocks and is once again summoned to take part in an epic battle against evil.
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Deep Wizardry
by Diane Duane
During a summer vacation at the beach, thirteen-year-old wizard Nita and her friend Kit assist the whale-wizard S'reee in combating an evil power.
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Weapons of Choice
by John Birmingham
In a first installment of a three-part alternate history epic, America's World War II fleet is decimated by a multi-national task force sent back in time from the year 2021, forcing Admiral Nimitz and Rear Admiral Spruance to make the potentially consequential decision to fight their own possible descendants. Original.
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Dies the Fire
by S. M. Stirling
An electrical storm over Nantucket island causes all electrical devices to cease function, and as some people band together, others are building armies for conquest.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
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The Time of the Dark
by Barbara Hambly
Gil, a graduate student, discovers that her nightmares of people fleeing in panic from a hideous evil are not dreams and that she is standing in the doorway to another world.
