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The Esquire 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

  • July 14, 2024
  • 75 Books
  • Stats
  • esquire.com

Since time immemorial, mankind has been looking up at the stars and dreaming, but it was only centuries ago that we started turning those dreams into fiction. And what remarkable dreams they are—dreams of distant worlds, unearthly creatures, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, and so much more. Today, we call those dreams science fiction.

Science fiction’s earliest inklings began in the mid-1600s, when Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin wrote pioneering stories about voyages to the moon. Some scholars argue that science fiction as we now understand it was truly born in 1818, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the first novel of its kind whose events are explained by science, not mysticism or miracles. Now, two centuries later, sci-fi is a sprawling and lucrative multimedia genre with countless subgenres, such as dystopian fiction, postapocalyptic fiction, and climate fiction, to name just a few. It’s also remarkably porous, allowing for some overlap with genres like fantasy and horror.

Sci-fi brings out the best in our imaginations and evokes a sense of wonder, but it also inspires a spirit of questioning. Through the enduring themes of sci-fi, we can examine the zeitgeist’s cultural context and ethical questions. Our favorite works in the genre make good on this promise, meditating on everything from identity to oppression to morality. As the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing said, “Science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.”

Over two years ago, we published a version of this list featuring 50 books. But why stop at 50? Now, as part of our latest Summer Fiction Week, we’ve cast a wider net and expanded the list to 75 titles. Choosing the 75 best science fiction books of all time wasn’t easy, so to get the job done, we had to establish some guardrails. Though we assessed single installments as representatives of their series, we limited the list to one book per author. We also emphasized books that brought something new and innovative to the genre—to borrow a great sci-fi turn of phrase, books that “boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Now, in ranked order, here are the best science fiction books of all time.

Table
Position
Readers Count
#11,049 reads
#21,861 reads
#3338 reads
#4707 reads
#5278 reads
#6405 reads
#7538 reads
#8278 reads
#9659 reads
#10617 reads
#111,056 reads
#122,433 reads
#1338 reads
#141,212 reads
#1566 reads
#1639 reads
#17250 reads
#18163 reads
#19196 reads
#202 reads
#21174 reads
#22539 reads
#23252 reads
#24578 reads
#2515 reads
#2624 reads
#27256 reads
#28319 reads
#2925 reads
#3017 reads
#31558 reads
#32363 reads
#33346 reads
#34165 reads
#3545 reads
#3660 reads
#373 reads
#38551 reads
#3936 reads
#401,342 reads
#41208 reads
#421,676 reads
#43179 reads
#44131 reads
#45591 reads
#4679 reads
#4784 reads
#484 reads
#49485 reads
#50682 reads
#51173 reads
#52406 reads
#53201 reads
#54514 reads
#5562 reads
#568 reads
#57768 reads
#5864 reads
#5948 reads
#6080 reads
#6156 reads
#6211 reads
#632 reads
#6435 reads
#6562 reads
#6655 reads
#67207 reads
#6819 reads
#69556 reads
#7010 reads
#715 reads
#727 reads
#73341 reads
#74203 reads
#75106 reads