The best 40 science fiction novels I have read

Blade Runner poster

Lists of favorite books have always existed, and with the rise of the Internet they have proliferated. That’s why I decided to make a new list (in case there were not enough). But what I’m showing here is not just the list of my favorite books in this genre, but something a little more complex.

To build the list, I started with four lists made by others, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. For example, one of those lists has been created in Goodreads, the social network for books, is called Best Science Fiction and contains over 2,000 books. In order to build this list, the members of Goodreads vote (almost 1000 people have voted for at least one book), together with the book’s score and the number of people who have read it (in some cases several million).

To form my new list I used the following criteria:

1. It just contains books that I have read.
2. It does not contain books that I have read, but did not like at all (i.e. those I would assign one star in the Goodreads or Amazon ratings). As an example of these books I will mention Do androids dream with electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Its argument is based on an interesting idea, but the way it has been developed in the form of a novel is deplorable, sometimes absurd. This is one of the rare cases where the film based on a book (Blade Runner) turned out to be far superior to the original work.
3. Therefore, if one of your favorite books is not listed here, it may be for three reasons: because I have not read it, because I did not like it at all, or because it didn’t come among the top 40 in the average of the lists I have used to build mine.
4. It only contains science fiction books. The Lord of the Rings, for example, has not been included, although it is on one of these lists, because I don’t consider it science fiction.

This is the resulting list:

Or-der	Novel	Author	Or-der	Novel	Author
1	1984	George Orwell	21	Voyage au centre de la Terre	Jules Verne
2	Ender’s game	Orson Scott Card	22	Speaker for the dead	Orson Scott Card
3	Dune	Frank Herbert	23	A princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs
4	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury	24	The stars my destination	Alfred Bester
5	Foundation	Isaac Asimov	25	A canticle for Leibowitz	Walter M. Miller Jr.
6	2001 a space odyssey	Arthur C. Clarke	26	The caves of steel	Isaac Asimov
7	Randezvous with Rama	Arthur C. Clarke	27	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley
8	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	28	A wrinkle in time	Madeleine L’Engle
9	The war of the worlds	H.G. Wells	29	War with the newts	Karel Capek
10	I robot	Isaac Asimov	30	The lathe of heaven	Ursula Le Guin
11	Starship troopers	Robert A. Heinlein	31	La invención de Morel	Adolfo Bioy Casares
12	The day of the triffids	John Wyndham	32	The Space Trilogy	C.S. Lewis
13	The time machine	H.G. Wells	33	Starship	Brian Aldiss
14	Brave new world	Aldous Huxley	34	A scanner darkly	Philip K. Dick
15	The left hand of darkness	Ursula Le Guin	35	Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut
16	Flowers for Algernon	Daniel Keyes	36	Dr.Jekyll & Mr. Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson
17	Solaris	Stanislaw Lem	37	Animal farm	George Orwell
18	The clockwork orange	Anthony Burgess	38	Flatland	Edwin Abbott
19	Hyperion	Dan Simmons	39	The ilustrated man	Ray Bradbury
20	20.000 lieues sous les mers	Jules Verne	40	We	Yevgeny Zamyatin

 In this list the following authors appear:

• Two are represented by three novels: Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.
• Six have two novels: Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, George Orwell, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
• Twenty-two with just a novel: Edwin Abbott, Brian Aldiss, Alfred Bester, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Anthony Burgess, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karel Capek, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Aldous Huxley, Daniel Keyes, Stanislaw Lem , Madeleine L'Engle, CS Lewis, Walter M. Miller Jr., Mary Shelley, Dan Simmons, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kurt Vonnegut, John Wyndham and Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

As for dates, this list includes 7 books from the 19th century, 4 between 1900 and 1940, 18 of the Golden Age of Science-Fiction (1940-1965) and 11 modern (1965-1990). Of the last 27 years, there are none.

I repeat that this is not the list of my favorite books. My personal preferences have only influenced by removing books from the list, or changing the order slightly. As a comparison, I include here the list of my favorite science fiction novels, excluding those I have written (:-):

  

Or-der	Novel	Author	Or-der	Novel	Author
1	A canticle for Leibowitz	Walter M. Miller Jr.	4	At the Earth’s core	Edgar Rice Burroughs
2	Orbit unlimited	Poul Anderson		Xenocide	Orson Scott Card
3	The caves of steel	Isaac Asimov		The sands of Mars	Arthur C. Clarke
	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury		Randezvous with Rama	Arthur C. Clarke
	Ender’s game	Orson Scott Card		Brave new world	Aldous Huxley
	Perelandra	C.S. Lewis		The forgotten planet	Murray Leinster
4	Flatland	Edwin Abbott		Dark benediction	Walter M. Miller Jr.
	Guardians of time	Poul Anderson		1984	George Orwell
	I robot	Isaac Asimov		Comet dust	C.D. Verhoff
	Foundation	Isaac Asimov		Voyage au centre de la Terre	Jules Verne
	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury		20.000 lieues sous les mers	Jules Verne
	The warrior’s apprentice	Lois McMaster Bujold		De la Terre a la Lune+Autour de la Lune	Jules Verne
	A princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs		Short stories	H.G. Wells

It can be seen that my list of favorite books has a greater granularity than the other lists I have used. Essentially, I would give between 4.5 and 5 Goodreads stars to the six books in places 1, 2 and 3; the other 20 would receive between 3.5 and 4.5 stars. 14 of my 26 favorite books of this genre are also in the previous list, while 12 have been left out, so it can be said that my personal preferences didn’t have a lot of influence on the other list.

The same post in Spanish
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Manuel Alfonseca
Happy 2018 for everyone