For the beginning SF readers, here is a list of 12 novels that are wide ranging and a good place to start.
Twelve Great SF Novels Chronologically
01: City (1952) by Clifford D. Simak actually is a collection of short stories the author wrote over the years in various SF magazines. It focuses on the collapse of the cities as people can do their work and everything else from home. He predicts the interconnection of society via electronic means and somewhat foreshadows the shrinking of American cities. Unfortunately, the personal helicopters still don’t exist.
02: Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke is a classic best read while listening to Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin’s song “Kashmir.” It is about the evolution of mankind to its next level.
03: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) by Walter M. Miller Jr. is about a post-apocalyptic earth and how the survivors far in the future remember the once great society that thrived before the cataclysm.
04: Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein may be remembered now mostly for Stranger in a Strange Land, but he once was a great SF writer. He took a brief time-out from his philosophizing in his dreadful 1960s novels to write Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, his last truly great novel. It is about a penal colony on the moon and how the inhabitants overcome their political predicament.
05: Dune (1966) by Frank Herbert. OK, Dune is on most “best-of” lists, but for good reason. It is an expansive, brilliant novel of the far future that not a single one of its myriad sequels could live up to.
06: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) by Arthur C. Clarke. Yes, the film is based on Clarke’s story “The Sentinel,” but it is his novelization of the film that really works. In fact, it clears a lot of things up the film leaves vague.
07: UBIK (1969) by Philip K. Dick. Dick became best known for the Blade Runner and Total Recall movies, but his earlier work is good, too. UBIK is utterly insane, it seems, yet makes a great deal of sense as it progresses. One of his best.
Into the 1970s and Beyond
08: Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven focuses on a unique world in his “known space” series. The concept, derived from scientist Freeman Dyson’s Dyson Sphere—a world engineered to enclose its sun at earth-orbit distance—is about an abandoned world that is a ring entirely around its sun. He populates it with aliens from his series.
09: Foundation Trilogy (c.1975) by Isaac Asimov. This is another collection of short stories and novellas woven into three novels. There were more later, but the original set is best.
10: Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, while dated now, is one of the best end-of-the-world novels written to date.
11: Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson started the subgenré Cyberpunk. Many followed, but the first, typed on a manual typewriter, is best.
12: Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card is his best. It focuses on humanity facing a devastating intergalactic war that only the innocent can win.
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