The books included in the list vary enormously: some have spaceships and robots, most don't. They are all well written and they all ask important questions about the world and human beings. The pairs show different approaches to similar themes.
Old Masters of Dystopia
George Orwell's 1984 is a true classic of dystopia, and an excellent example of speculative fiction which attempts to deal with political issues of its day. But the vision of a totalitarian society controlled by ever-present TV cameras and ruled by the Big Brother is not only now almost archetypal but carries ever-current warnings.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is perhaps a bit more dated in some aspects, but one often suspects that his tale of a genetically-modified and test-tube-produced Fordists society of hedonistic plenty and spiritual vacuum is even more pertinent now than the Orwell's classic.
Almost Now
William Gibson is credited as the inventor of sub-genre of cyber-punk but he has been dabbling in near-future speculations recently. His Pattern Recognition is beautifully written and poetises the language of neuroscience and marketing while painting an acutely accurate and oh-so-cool picture of modern web-linked world.
Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a strange creature, a techno-thriller set in a near-future, emerging from slightly alternative present. It is political, paranoid and full of multiple conspiracy theories. It is also, ultimately, very funny.
Post-Apocalypse
Margaret Atwood is a decidedly mainstream writer who occasionally writes s-f, not because she "does genre" but because it best fits what she wants to say. Handmaid's Tale is now a modern classic but it also offers a chilling vision of post-apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist state in the United States. It's not just abut gender issues, either – and the other content is perhaps even more pertinent now than originally.
J G Ballard is one of the New Wave masters of post-apocalypse as well as one of the most original writers in the English language with astonishing imagination. The Drowned World has melting polar ice caps which turned cities into swamps.
Alternative Past
Philip K. Dick's alternative history in which the Axis powers won the WW2 and the US are ruled by the Japanese established his position as one of the s-f's greats. Mixing Eastern philosophy, book-within-a-book complications and modern physic's notions of alternative worlds The Man in the High Castle is a genre classic.
Philip Roth explores slightly earlier pivot in The Plot Against America where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses his 1940 bid for a third term and Charles Lindbergh creates a fascist U.S. A compelling what-if that warns against complacency.
Other Worlds
Ursula Le Guin writes s-f, but her science is often sociology or biology rather than physics. Left Hand of Darkness is speculative fiction at its best, a vision of a society that is essentially human and yet incredibly different, with inhabitants who are neither male nor female, but can be either. Breathtakingly convincing and indispensable.
And finally, a book with spaceships, but written so well, and with such a breathtaking scope and enough character depth to serve three other genre novels, Ian M. Banks's Look to Windward deals with the themes of exile, bereavement, religious wars, artificial intelligence and presents advanced interstellar anarchist utopia and has plenty of fun in the process.
