HERE ARE SOME OF THE BEST SCI-FI NOVELS OF ALL TIME!

1.DUNE BY FRANK HERBERT

As cliché as this might be (since this book seems to be the number one on every list), this book just seems to be a classic, a story that can be read over and over. Therefore Dune has turned up as the number one on my list. The novel is set about 20,000 years ahead with Dune Leto as the main character. The plot of this novel takes some excitingly shocking twists that leave the readers in suspense. The ending is definitely a cliff hanger which will make the reader want to keep reading on. The Dune series have been a popular hit since the 1990’s coming a long way up to 2009.

2.THE HICTHHIKER'S GUIDE TO TO THE GALAXY BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first book (1979) in the highly popular series of comic science fiction novels by British writer Douglas Adams. The saga mocks modern society with humour and cynicism. What if the world ended tomorrow—where would you get your favorite drink? That's the situation faced by Arthur Dent, totally normal English guy (favorite drink: tea). Arthur isn't a hero—he's actually pretty boring—but after Earth is destroyed, Arthur is thrust into a series of crazy adventures that he's totally unprepared for. That might sound like a tragedy (after all, Earth is where our favorite food is made), but take it from us: it's totally a comedy. Lots of comedies begin with the destruction of Earth, right?

3.SNOW CRASH BY NEAL STEPHENSON

Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program, which he called a nam-shub, that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

4.THE HANDMAID'S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel[6] by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England, in a strongly patriarchal, white supremacist, totalitarian theonomic state, known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The central character and narrator is a woman named Offred, one of the group known as "handmaids", who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders" — the ruling class of men in Gilead. The novel explores themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of women's reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and attempt to gain individuality and independence. The novel's title echoes the component parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which is a series of connected stories (such as "The Merchant's Tale" and "The Parson's Tale"). It is also an allusion to the tradition of fairy tales where the central character tells their story.

5.NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR BY GEORGE ORWELL

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party, who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the dictatorial leader of Oceania, enjoys an intense cult of personality, manufactured by the party's excessive brainwashing techniques. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker at the Ministry of Truth and Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He expresses his dissent by writing in a diary and later enters into a forbidden relationship with his colleague Julia and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power.

6.THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES BY RAY BRADBURY

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.

7.THE THREE BODY PROBLEM BY CIXIN LIU

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.

8.NEVER LET ME GO BY KAZUO ISHIGURO

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.

9.KINDERED BY OCTAVIA BUTLER

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.

10.ANNIHILATION BY JEFF VANDERMEER

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.