29 Best Near Future Science Fiction Books

The Classics of Science Fiction

The Classics of Science Fiction list, compiled by James Wallace Harris and Michael Jorgensen, is an attempt to create a definitive list of the best Science Fiction books. Harris and Jorgensen collected 65 SF book recommendation lists and generated a cumulative list of books that included any title that was on at least 10 of those lists. The result is a ranked list of 139 books.

This is the recently updated version 4 of the Classics list. Be sure to visit for more information including an extensive essay on the methodology used to create the list.

13 of the best science fiction books everyone should read

Wired Culture | September 2 13 of the best science fiction books everyone should read Looking for your next read? Take a trip into the future with our pick of the best science fiction novels of all time

Looking for your next sci-fi must-read? Cyberpunk, space operas, dystopias – we’ve pulled together some of the WIRED team’s favorite science fiction novels. Some are eerily plausible, others are wild trips of the imagination, but all present compelling visions of our possible future. We recommend you take a look at our comprehensive guide to the best sci-fi movies, too. And, if you’re after more reading inspiration, try our selection of the best fantasy books.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

Frantic, fun and almost suspiciously prescient, Snow Crash grabs you from its opening sequence – a high-speed race through an anarchic Los Angeles that has been carved up into corporate-owned ‘burbclaves’ – and barely lets up. The book follows main character Hiro Protagonist (yes, really), an elite hacker and swordsman, as he tries to stop the spread of a dangerous virus being propagated by a religious cult. It combines neurolinguistics, ancient mythology and computer science, and eerily predicts social networks, cryptocurrency and Google Earth. Buy here

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov (1951)

Asimov was a prolific writer, but many of his best works are classic short stories such as Nightfall, or The Last Question, which play out like long jokes with a punchline twist at the end. In the Foundation series, he’s in another mode entirely, charting the rise and fall of empires in sweeping brush strokes. Asimov’s prose can be stilted, and betrays the attitudes of its time in the portrayal of female characters, but it has left a lasting legacy.

The Foundation series follows Hari Seldon, who is the architect of psychohistory – a branch of mathematics that can make accurate predictions thousands of years in advance, and which Seldon believes is necessary to save the human race from the dark ages. You can see why it’s one of Elon Musk’s favorite books (along with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Moon is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein – also recommended). A long-awaited screen adaptation is one of the flagship launch offering’s of Apple’s new streaming service. Buy here

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester (1957)

This landmark novel begins with a simple proposition – what if humans could teleport? – and sprawls into a tale of rebirth and vengeance that winds across the Solar System: The Count of Monte Cristo for the interstellar age. First published as Tiger! Tiger! in the UK, named after the William Blake poem, it follows Gully Foyle – a violent, uneducated brute who spends six months marooned in deep space, and the rest of the book seeking retribution for it. Buy here

Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965)

In 2012, Wired US readers voted Dune the best science-fiction novel of all time. It’s also the best-selling of all time, and has inspired a mammoth universe, including 18 books set over 34,000 years and a terrible 1984 movie adaptation by David Lynch, his worst film by far. A hopefully better effort is currently in production, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The series is set 20,000 years in the future in galaxies stuck in the feudal ages, where computers are banned for religious reasons and noble families rule whole planets. We focus on the planet Arrakis, which holds a material used as a currency throughout the Universe for its rarity and mind-enhancing powers. Lots of giant sandworms, too. Buy here

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

Le Guin alternated between genres during her prolific career, and this intricate novel came out the year after the classic fantasy book A Wizard of Earthsea. The bulk of the action takes place on Winter, a remote Earth-like planet where it’s cold all year round, and everyone is the same gender. It was one of the first novels to touch on ideas of androgyny – which is viewed from the lens of protagonist Genly Ai, a visitor from Earth who struggles to understand this alien culture. Buy here

A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K Dick (1977)

A curious novel that reads less like sci-fi and more like a hallucinated autobiography detailing the author’s struggle with drug addiction. In a near-future California, vice cop Bob Arctor lives undercover with a community of drug addicts hooked on devastating psychoactive dope Substance D. Arctor, who needs to don a special “scramble suit” to hide his face and voice when meeting his fellow cops, has to grapple with gradually losing his sense of self. Buy here

Neuromancer, by William Gibson (1984)

The definitive cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer follows hacker-turned-junkie Henry Case as he tries to pull off one last, rather dodgy sounding job in the hope of reversing a toxin that prevents him from accessing cyberspace. Set in a dystopian Japanese underworld, the novel touches on all manner of futuristic technology, from AI to cryonics, and features a cast of creative characters that will stick with you long after you turn the last page. Buy here

Consider Phlebas, by Iain Banks (1987)

Back in 1987, after four acclaimed fiction novels, Iain Banks published his first sci-fi book, Consider Phlebas, a true space opera and his first book of many to feature the Culture, an interstellar utopian society of humanoids, aliens and sentient machines ostensibly run by hyper-intelligent AI “Minds”. A war rages across the galaxy with one side fighting for faith, the other a moral right to exist. Banks melds this conflict with something approaching a traditional fantasy quest: the search for a rogue Mind that has hidden itself on a forbidden world in an attempt to evade destruction. Buy here

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (2003)

While The Handmaid’s Tale describes a world that seems more plausible by the day, in Oryx and Crake Atwood spins a genetically-modified circus of current trends taken to their absolute extreme – a “bio-engineered apocalypse,” is how one reviewer put it. A number of television adaptations have been mooted, including a now-defunct HBO project with Darren Aronofsky, but this might be one to place alongside The Stars My Destination in the impossible-to-adapt file. The world of the book is vibrant, surreal and disturbing enough. Buy here

The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin (2008)

Liu Cixin is China’s most famous sci-fi writer – this year his short story The Wandering Earth was adapted into an epic blockbuster. But The Three-Body Problem, published in China in 2008, is his most famous work; Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg are fans, and Amazon is reportedly in talks to develop it into a billion-dollar TV adaptation. The premise is simple: humanity has made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization that prefers the climate on our planet, so they’re coming to take Earth. It’s going to take them hundreds of years to get here, though, so we’ve got time to prepare. Like Frank Herbert’s Dune, The Three-Body Problem and its sequels are notable for their sense of epic scale: they begin in 1967 and stretch to the year 18,000-and-something. Buy here

The Power, by Naomi Alderman (2016)

Margaret Atwood also had a hand in this gripping novel, which inverts the premise of The Handmaid’s Tale, and puts women in the ascendancy. Atwood mentored the author, Naomi Alderman, as she wrote this story about women and girls discovering a powerful new ability to emit electricity from their hands, up-ending civilisation as a result. The Power is paced like a television series, and it’s coming to screens soon after a fierce 11-way auction for the rights. Buy here

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (2011)

Ernest Cline’s virtual reality epic got the Steven Spielberg treatment last year, and not everyone was happy with it. What many find annoying about the book – and the movie – is its intricate web of geeky references to 1980s films, comics, and board games. Still, at its core, Ready Player One is a captivating quest story, with the added value of taking place in a VR world. Buy here

The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood (2015)

An odd cocktail of a novel: part techno dystopia, part satire, part sex comedy, part classic Atwood. In a bleak, postlapsarian version of the US, young lovebirds Charmaine and Stan endure a miserable existence sleeping in their car and dodging criminals’ knives. Salvation arrives under the guise of an offer to move to the Positron Project – a gated community modeled after an American 1950s suburb. The rub? All Positron’s couples must spend every other month working in a prison, temporarily swapping homes with another couple, called “alternates”. When both Charmaine and Stan start developing oddball sexual relations with their alternates, things move rapidly south. Buy here

29 Best Near Future Science Fiction Books

by Cindy Pon – 2017

Jason Zhou survives in a divided society where the elite use their wealth to buy longer lives. The rich wear special suits, protecting them from the pollution and viruses that plague the city, while those without suffer illness and early deaths. Frustrated by his city’s corruption and still grieving the loss of his mother who died as a result of it, Zhou is determined to change things, no matter the cost.

With the help of his friends, Zhou infiltrates the lives of the wealthy in hopes of destroying the international Jin Corporation from within. Jin Corp not only manufactures the special suits the rich rely on, but they may also be manufacturing the pollution that makes them necessary.

Yet the deeper Zhou delves into this new world of excess and wealth, the more muddled his plans become. And against his better judgment, Zhou finds himself falling for Daiyu, the daughter of Jin Corp’s CEO. Can Zhou save his city without compromising who he is, or destroying his own heart?