10 of the Best Science Fiction Authors That Everyone Should Read
Science fiction is a fascinating genre. It allows authors to explore unique facets of the human condition. It allows them to extrapolate on modern-day issues to their eventual often incredible conclusions.
Science fiction is an exercise of imagination based on technology and logic. There have been some incredible science fiction authors who have created wild and alien imaginings predicting or even inspiring future technological advancements. Perhaps most importantly, sci-fi often teaches us all a little bit more about what it means to be human.
In this article, we take a look at some of the best science fiction authors and some of their top literary achievements.
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Arthur C Clarke
2001 a Space Odyssey
Published in 1968 this classic science fiction novel captures and expands on the vision of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal film. It was inspired initially by Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel".
This book works as an allegory about humanity’s exploration of the universe—and the universe’s reaction to humanity. The story follows the crew of the spacecraft Discovery as they embark on a mission to Saturn. Their vessel is controlled by HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent supercomputer capable of the highest level of cognitive functioning that rivals the human mind.
2001: A Space Odyssey grapples with space exploration, the perils of technology, and the limits of human power.
The City and The Stars
The city of Diaspar is a perfect Utopia. For millennia its protective dome has shut out the rest of the Universe and held humanity in a sort of stasis.
It was built when a great threat came to earth and legend has it drove humanity to the brink forcing them to take refuge. But not everyone is entirely content and one man seeks to uncover the truth about the past and the reason for the seemingly infinite inertia of Diaspar.
Read our full review of The City and The Stars by Arthur C Clarke
Ursula K Le Guin
The Dispossessed
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a fiercely passionate and critical novel that questions our use and reliance on societal norms, highlights the ridiculousness of gender inequalities, and shines a light on the goods and ills of both capitalist and communist systems.
In this novel, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is constrained by the very system that created him. He is twisted by loyalty to Anarres, and a desire to fulfil what he sees as his mission, a purpose he truly believes will help everyone.
He decides to take action and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
The Left Hand of Darkness
A groundbreaking work of science fiction, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose - and change - their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.
Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
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Isaac Asimov
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot launches readers on an adventure into a not-so-distant future where man and machine struggle to redefine life, love, and consciousness.
In this book, Asimov introduces his now famous three laws of robotics and explores what it means to be human and what it means to truly be alive. I, Robot is a powerful reading experience from one of the master storytellers of our time.
Foundation
The first book in Asimov's Foundation series, Foundation explores the death of the Galactic Empire and the birth of a new galactic society created by Hari Seldon, the mind behind the revolutionary science of psychohistory.
The new Foundation, however, quickly finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun - or fight and be destroyed.
Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 focuses on the historical role of book burning, a particularly disturbing act that has been used by totalitarian and fascist rulers on various occasions in an effort to control or restrict knowledge. In the story the lead character Guy Montag is a fireman, a man tasked with destroying books.
Guy becomes disillusioned with his role in society, with his role in censoring literature and destroying knowledge. Eventually, he quits and commits the sin of the preservation of literature himself.
The Martian Chronicles
The strange and wonderful tale of man’s experiences on Mars, filled with intense images and astonishing visions. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection.
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up.
But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them – and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame.
H.G. Wells
The War of The Worlds
When an army of invading Martians lands in England, panic and terror seize the population. As the aliens traverse the country in huge three-legged machines, incinerating all in their path with a heat ray and spreading noxious toxic gases, the people of the Earth must come to terms with the prospect of the end of human civilization and the beginning of Martian rule.
Inspiring films, radio dramas, comic-book adaptations, television series and sequels, The War of the Worlds is a prototypical work of science fiction that has influenced every alien story that has come since and is unsurpassed in its ability to thrill, well over a century since it was first published.
The Time Machine
After travelling across hundreds of thousands of years he doesn’t know what to expect. When the Time Traveller courageously steps out of his machine for the first time, he finds himself in the year 802,700. In this unfamiliar, utopian age creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvellous beings. He thought he could unearth their secret, find out how this came to be, and then return to his own time. But he soon discovers his machine has been taken, and everything is not as utopian as he first believed.
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s first novel, is a tale of Darwinian evolution taken to its extreme. Its hero, a young scientist, travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers the earth populated by two strange humanoid species: the brutal Morlocks and the gentle but nearly helpless Eloi.
H. G. Wells's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895. It won him immediate recognition and has been regarded ever since as one of the great masterpieces in the literature of science fiction.
The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man is another masterpiece of science fiction by H.G Wells. It explores the fascinating story of Griffin, a scientist who creates a serum that renders him invisible. However, unable to turn himself back he slowly descends into madness.
Frank Herbert
Dune
Dune is set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the “spice” melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for...
When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.
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Philip K Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was adapted into the award-winning film titled Blade Runner. It explores the idea of artificial intelligence gaining sentience gaining consciousness in it these androids are treated as slaves to humanity. The book explores the theme of resistance and independence against an overpowering societal structure.
The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. Earth's life has been damaged by nuclear war. The story follows Rick Deckard a bounty hunter, who was tasked with retiring escaped Androids. In it, we get opposing views, you have the system which stipulates that these androids are just machines, machines that are out of control. But then you also have the point of view of the Nexus six models androids who seem human.
They are desperately clinging to life and hoping to escape the lives they were created for.
The Man in A High Castle
Set in America in 1962, The Man in A High Castle speculates what would have happened if Nazi Germany had won the war. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.
Jules Vern
Journey to the Center of the Earth
When an adventurous geology professor chances upon an old manuscript that claims to have found a route to the earth's core, professor Lidenbrock can't resist investigating. With his nephew Axel, he sets off across Iceland in the company of Hans Bjelke, a native guide. Journey to the Center of the Earth follows an expedition into an extinct volcano toward a sunless sea, where they encounter a subterranean world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic marine life — a living past that holds the secrets to the origins of human existence.
Around The World In 80 Days
One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Around The World In 80 Days passes through exotic lands and dangerous locations, in it the protagonists seize whatever transportation is at hand—whether train or elephant—overcoming setbacks and always racing against the clock.
Ian M Bank
Consider Phlebas
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, and billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Consider Phlebas explores an individual crusade within this unravelling cosmic conflict. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.
Player of Games
The second book in Ian M. Banks Culture series, Player of Games, takes a closer look at what The Culture really is - a humanoid/machine symbiotic society. However, while there are elements of Utopia sewn through the Culture, the human traits of greed and empire have not disappeared, they’ve just changed, become more civilised.
One of the best Game players in the culture is Jernau Morat Gurgeh, Player of Games, master of every board, computer and strategy. However, he is bored with success, he’s bored with the lacklustre life of games and pleasure. When he is approached and asked to go on a mission for the culture to travel to the Empire of Azad, cruel & incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game he leaps at the chance.
The game of the Empire of Azad is so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Gurgeh quickly realises this is no peaceful diplomacy mission, he’s mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered but the game has him and despite the risks he’s going to play it to the end.
Dorris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Briefing for a Descent into Hell is a fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly “mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures with strange customs. Later, he is carried off on a cosmic journey into space. Throughout it, the reader is left guessing where the lines of reality truly sit.
The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4, and 5
The Marriages Between Zones, 3, 4, and 5 is the second novel in the classic series "Canopus in Argos: Archives". Doris Lessing explores themes of gender conflict. The story concerns two ordained marriages that link the patriarchal and militaristic Zone Four with the matriarchal and egalitarian Zone Three, and the tribal and barbaric Zone Five. It strikes a stark comparison between the zones and looks into ideas of transcendence.
Final Words
Great sci-fi stories often enable us to reflect on how we interact with people and technology. In creating a link between the present, and extrapolating very real possibilities to where fiction and reality merge, science fiction invites us to consider the complex ways our choices and interactions contribute to generating the future. We’ve listed some of the very best science fiction authors in this article alongside some of the best works to help you find the next book to transport you.
Not sure these are for you or perhaps you’ve already read them all and are looking for something new? In which case you might want to check out ‘Sunset In The East’ - sci-fi short stories by Ben Luxon
