The 18 Best Sci-Fi And Fantasy Novels Of All Time

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll (1865)

It has been suggested that Alice’s trippy experiences are Carroll’s comment on his contemporary mathematical theory: that all the growing and shrinking is about Euclidean geometry and that episodes such as the caterpillar and the hookah are a send-up of symbolic algebra. Whatever the explanation, it endures.

2. The War of the Worlds

H G Wells (1898)

Does the county of Surrey make quite enough of the fact that Wells’s malevolent Martians first landed in Woking? Or that the hideous creatures in their tripods laid waste to Walton-on-Thames? Like all immortal science fiction, this is rooted in more earthly anxieties – here, belligerent European rival nations.

3. Dracula

Bram Stoker (1897)

Best enjoyed not as Gothic horror, but as a blazing late Victorian imperial adventure. Jonathan Harker may initially travel to the Count’s eerie fastness in Transylvania, but the Count is intent on some reverse colonisation, coming to London and spreading his undead activities into the very heart of bourgeois English society.

4. Titus Groan

Mervyn Peake (1946)

What must post-war readers have made of the denizens of Gormenghast? Of Lord Sepulchrave, Dr Prunesquallor, Nanny Slagg, and Steerpike? What did all that rich and mad Gothic detailing portend? The imagery remains unforgettable, not least Swelter’s infernal kitchens, and Flay hurling a white cat at Steerpike.

5. Brave New World

Aldous Huxley (1932)

Initially intended as a gentle send-up of H G Wells’s utopian “things to come” visions, Huxley instead conjured a nightmare 26th-century society of babies grown in “hatcheries”, promiscuous casual sex (marriage and families are obsolete) and hallucinogenic drugs. It is frequently pointed out that all such things have come to pass.

6. 1984

George Orwell (1948)

Had Orwell written this one year earlier, we would have associated complete totalitarianism with the year 1974. As it is, Double-Think, Room 101 and the utterly harrowing betrayal of love are attached eternally to every oppressive state regime. Orwell’s warning is undying.

7. I, Robot

Isaac Asimov (1950)

A series of spacey stories chronicling the evolution of man’s relationship with robots, and famous for establishing the law that they cannot harm us. What they can do, however, is create tense philosophical and ethical debates about the chasm between mind and machine, intention and consequence.

8. The Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham (1951)

A few years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this vivid horror story about a monstrous plant species with lethal stingers played on our ecological fears. Wyndham was writing as postwar agriculture was becoming a vast chemical-led industrial concern, and the Triffids were payback.

9. Lord of the Flies

William Golding (1954)

A boat-load of English boys are washed up on a desert island and have to create a self-governing society, which starts off with the best of intentions but, as ever, human nature will out, and pretty soon they have turned heaven into hell. A human version of Animal Farm.

10. Dune

Frank Herbert (1965)

A saga of off-world dynasties, harsh alien deserts, giant sandworms and an intricately worked-out ecosystem, this sprawling work of imagination made sci-fi mainstream and inspired much environmental thought.

11. High-Rise

J G Ballard (1975)

In arguably his most resonant work, Ballard postulated a tower block that contained everything its residents needed, from shops to pools to offices. They need never leave. And they don’t. The internal society begins to fragment, form classes, and savage civil war breaks out. It is a brilliantly unheimlich urban parable.

12. The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett (1983)

The first Discworld novel introduces us to a universe populated by wizards, witches and Death himself. To have these comic stories and gentle pastiches of Tolkien, and everymyth and fairy tale, lapped up by 70 million readers is a spectacular achievement.

13. Nights at The Circus

Angela Carter (1984)

An extraordinarily vivid and sensual journey following the circus through 19th-century London and Russia, which brilliantly – and movingly – blurs the lines between acute psychological drama, fairy tale and ancient myth.

14. The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood (1985)

Offred is a concubine in a future America where “handmaids” are used to provide children for sterile upper-class women. A tale of institutionalised misogyny and biological tyranny that Atwood explained was not exactly science fiction.

15. Mother London

Michael Moorcock (1988)

The heroes of this novel have emerged from mental institutions; but do they have special powers? In a narrative that sweeps from the Blitz to modern day, we encounter mindreading, preternatural empathy, and fascinating theories about the people who live under the streets.

16. American Gods

Neil Gaiman (2001)

America is now teeming with gods that have been brought over with each successive wave of immigrants – from Odin to Thor. But can these old gods do battle with the new gods spawned by technology?

17. Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell (2004)

Six narrators, six interlocking stories – ranging from a future dystopia to Seventies nuclear thriller, to 19th-century medical drama – Mitchell forces the reader to make the connections across time and space; how can interrupted stories still live on?

18. Darkmans

Nicola Barker (2007)

An M C Escher tapestry of history, time, language, legend – and all against the backdrop of Ashford in Kent. Here, history is as much absurd linguistic comedy as it is nightmare.

The Best Of The Rest:

Utopia

Thomas More (1516)

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift (1726)

The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe (1840)

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

Lewis Carroll (1871)

The Glass Bead Game

Hermann Hesse (1943)

Animal Farm