4.26 avg rating — 151,090 ratings

"The Dispossessed is Le Guin's best novel, in my opinion, and presents philosophical, social and political challenges that increasingly confront the world as resources (and time) grow more scarce."

4.09 avg rating — 68,789 ratings

"Isaac Asimov's best novel, though not his most famous. It's ecological commentary was ahead of its time, as was much of the sexual behavior among members of an alien race. An expanded mind is called for to read it, and by completing the novel, a reader's mind will have expanded even further. "

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 17,843 ratings

"The four-book story arc Book of the New Sun, opening with 'Claw,' broke new ground in SF, reading as either fantasy or SF, in that the poetic language and far-future setting called on tropes common to both genres. Wolfe, though, transcends genres and rescues ancient, forgotten terms from English and other Western languages, giving them new life in the story of Severian, a man without memory, roaming a post-holocaust landscape with a woman he may love and others."

4.12 avg rating — 184,193 ratings

"Arthur C. Clarke's best novels were 'Childhood's End' and '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but many elements of their sense of wonder and near-mystical awe at the possibilities of finding evidence of super-advanced intelligent species in the galaxy fill this lyrical novel. Clarke did not bother with standard cliches of plot tension or using violence to hold attention: the mystery is space itself, and the scientists working to solve riddles presented by a massive cylindrical object created by another civilization."

3.86 avg rating — 88,698 ratings

"Robinson accomplishes a kind of nature writing and transcendent travel writing--imagining vivid settings on a planet humans have yet to explore in person."

3.72 avg rating — 11,573 ratings

"With environmental catastrophes piling up, physicists in our world and time, while under the usual pressures for grants, lab time, time at home, etc., send a message back in time, to 1962, in hopes of diverting humanity's course off this destructive path. It is received, in 1962, by physicists also struggling in their own community, with insufficient funding or recognition or family/spousal support. The worlds of scientists, the sense of wonder common to great science fiction, and the sense of humanity hopefully uniting us, in time, toward self preservation, make this one of the all-time classics."

4.10 avg rating — 220,549 ratings

"A late 1960s visionary SF novel on the prejudices around gender relations. Ursula Le Guin knew the timeless relevance of the issue, as did and does everyone on the brunt end of prejudice, especially during the time when Le Guin wrote this. The women and men then forming the women's liberation and gay liberation movements were among those who made this an "underground campus hit" beyond what the media thought of as the usual audience for science fiction. A conservative publishing genre in many ways, some publishers--and many readers--were finding was to use the fantastic for important work. A serious book for serious readers, not for those seeking quick pulp thrills or sword and sorcery. George R. R. Martin could never pull this off."

3.81 avg rating — 3,760 ratings

"A young is female, raised in a narrow, confined world within a starship, is tested for survival on a harsh colony world. These are humans surviving after Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. Mia Havero and other youth who survive the Trials will either lead the colonies and their struggling societies forward with reason and rationality, or these human outposts will fall back into the age-old conflicts and self-destruction."

3.95 avg rating — 31,740 ratings

"The ever-inventive Arthur C. Clarke was climbing a high mountain in Ceylon with friends when he had an epiphany, a vision that filled him with hope. He imagined a space elevator, a device that could bypass the cost, pollution and expense of rocket launching to get people and material into orbit. Being enough of a scientist that he invented the concept in 1949 of the synchronous communications satellites we depend on today, Clarke set about putting his idea down and seeing how it could work. The fictional result is in Fountains of Paradise. The mechanical, political and economic hurdles are worked over in the novel, toward getting the 24,000-mile-high strands of diamond-based cable suspended down, then back up, to make the elevator. In the second decade of the 21st Century, scientists are working slowly, with little funding, toward Clarke's goal."

3.61 avg rating — 1,916 ratings

"An archaeologist in the Yucatan, her daughter and the remaining power of ancient inhabitants interweave this strong mix of fantasy and science fiction. It emerged in the late 1980s in the middle of Pat Murphy's wave of novels and stories (she continues in the 20th Century). Here in Feb. 2013, at the used/new store BookmanBookwoman where I part-time in Nashville, I sold a trade paperback of Falling Woman to a woman who'd looked for it for years, and somewhere it has probably changed her in good ways."

4.24 avg rating — 794,948 ratings

"This tragedy of Promethean intelligence brought back to the ground was required reading when I was in high school, and for good reason. Worth re-reading or discovering at any age."

4.04 avg rating — 33,386 ratings

"David Brin reached a career peak, one of several, early with the beginning of his series in which dolphins are up-lifted by aliens for genetic and intelligence advancement. And Brin knew better than to name his fictional water world "Hydros," as Robert Silverberg did some years later in a lesser work. Brin gets it right with countless, inspiring ideas and images."

3.69 avg rating — 1,853 ratings

"Scarborough, who was a nurse during the Vietnam War, interprets her experiences here through the character Lt. Kitty McCulley, with hard realism mixed with mystical elements: an old Vietnamese holy man, a Vietnamese boy who has lost a leg, and the auras she is able to see with an amulet from back home."

4.32 avg rating — 84,358 ratings

"Parable of the Sower, the first novel, is an SF classic which should have won the Nebula."

3.75 avg rating — 22,769 ratings

"A sequel of sorts to his post-Vietnam War novel 'Forever War,' this novel came during the period when the U.S. seemed to have learned the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War. The country was hell-bent on proving its military might in the first Iraq war, in Panama, in a forgotten backwater called Grenada, etc. Haldeman, a Vietnam War vet, is a writer first, though, and 'Forever Peace' is not a didactic novel. It is a well-done work of fiction. Universal peace and universal war hang in the balance."

4.14 avg rating — 180,459 ratings

"Published in the 1970s only after Vietnam War vet Haldeman went through over a dozen publishers. They may have been uneasy with the novel's hard look at an endless war and a reluctant grunt who, alienated when he returns home, re-enlists, following the Vietnam War debacle. Haldeman milked the potential for all it was worth, just like Dalton Trumbo in 'Johnny Got His Gun.'"

3.69 avg rating — 3,700 ratings

"Philosophical science fiction from the experimental early 70s, and I support it against the tide in Goodreads of young adult and militaristic adventure SF/fantasy. Silverberg, a prose stylist when he wanted to be (as in this case), was there as the "me decade" started and had this concept of a future human colony world in which, because of reasons unique to its settlement, the rulers forbade the terms "I, me, mine" etc. as punishable by exile or death. Along comes Kinnall Darival, narrating the novel in first person, after experiments with a mind-altering drug lead him to see how he can free his people from the rigidly conservative customs."

3.75 avg rating — 8,722 ratings

"Pohl did something different with a forward-thinking vision of wars over scarce Earth resources (this was written in the mid-1970s), during which Mars exploration for eventual colonization is carried out by a team who an astronaut through cybernetics. He is able to survive in the harsh Martian environment, at great cost to his humanity."

4.29 avg rating — 1,627,265 ratings

"Vast in scope and populated with human and non-human characters, Dune can be read as a stand-alone adventure with literary merits. Herbert went on to write several sequels (but please avoid the minor industry of Dune space operas his son cranks out with a collaborator). I found the idea of a feudal society in the far future hard to take when I read this in college, but in the early 21st Century, swaying between militarism and anarchy, all bets are off about any future, especially since a portion of humanity has an endless self-destructive taste for authoritarianism. "

3.85 avg rating — 7,841 ratings

"I liked the concepts, including Mars colonists rebelling against the control of Earth's massive corporations, more than I cared for some of the characters and romance. "

3.75 avg rating — 78,208 ratings

"A post-oil scarcity future Earth, set in Bangkok with bio-terrorism routinely set up for corporate profits (you'll think Monsanto!), with vivid environments and characters. If you can get your mind around extrapolating to a world based on calorie-counts and how everyone except Thais are downtrodden, lower caste, genetically engineered (with windup springs to generate electricity?), with insufficient explanations on how this world came to be, it is otherwise a dark, timely, dystopian SF novel suitable for the post-apocalypse readers. The descriptions can be slow, and the book is in present tense, for an even greater distancing effect I don't myself prefer."

3.88 avg rating — 11,261 ratings

"On the borderline of science fiction and fantasy, this late '70s novel featured a female protagonist, then still a rare enough thing to make it stand out. Multiple love partners in a quest/road story also gave it some appeal."

3.86 avg rating — 4,205 ratings

3.62 avg rating — 2,314 ratings

3.94 avg rating — 128,876 ratings

4.05 avg rating — 47,516 ratings

3.72 avg rating — 20,069 ratings

3.54 avg rating — 6,261 ratings