Consider this summer the summer of The Booktopia Ten Tens. We’ll be looking at our Top 10 Romance Novels, Sport, Young Adult, Self Help, Villains, Heroes, and plenty more. Today we look at our Top Ten Sci-Fi Novels.
Choosing a Top Ten in one of fiction’s most popular categories was always going to be tricky… Lucky for us, Booktopia has our fair share of Sci-Fi nerds experts.
Are you an old hand at everything extra-terrestrial? Think that we ticked all the boxes or missed a crucial classic? Let us know below!
10) War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naive locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge.
Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey. The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear.
9) Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card
The human race faces annihilation. An alien threat is on the horizon, ready to strike. And if humanity is to be defended, the government must create the greatest military commander in history.
The brilliant young Ender Wiggin is their last hope. But first he must survive the rigours of a brutal military training program – to prove that he can be the leader of all leaders.
A saviour for mankind must be produced, through whatever means possible. But are they creating a hero or a monster?
8) Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme.
Now it is dying.
But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future–to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years.
7) Dune
by Frank Herbert
In 1965, after being rejected by more than a dozen publishing houses, a book called “Dune” was brought out by the Chilton Book Company. Its respected author, journalist Frank Herbert, had written “Dune” with nothing more in mind than to entertain his readers with the telling of a particularly complex story, one which had occupied his thoughts for more than six years.
No one – not Herbert, not Chilton, not the science fiction community at the time – had any idea that “Dune” would be adopted and read by successive generations with a fervor bordering on cult worship.
6) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
It’s an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and his best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. At this moment, they’re hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and an innocuous-looking book inscribed with the big, friendly words: DON’T PANIC.
The weekend has only just begun…
5) Slaughterhouse 5
by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim is the son of an American barber. He serves as a chaplain’s assistant in World War II, is captured by the Germans, and he survives the largest massacre in European history the fire bombing of Dresden. After the war Billy makes a great deal of money as an optometrist, and on his wedding night he is kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore.
So begins a modern classic by a master storyteller…
4) Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
The astonishing novel “Brave New World,” originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley’s legendary vision of a world of tomorrow utterly transformed. In Huxley’s darkly satiric yet chillingly prescient imagining of a “utopian” future, humans are genetically designed and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order.
3) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey.
When he wasn’t ‘retiring’ them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal – the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward…
2) Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Guy Montag is a fireman.
His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness.
1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
by Arthur C. Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey is the classic science fiction novel that changed the way we looked at the stars and ourselves….
2001: A Space Odyssey inspired what is perhaps the greatest science fiction film ever made — brilliantly imagined by the late Stanley Kubrick….
2001 is finally here….
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