Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale is the most culturally active dystopia of the present era — its red cloaks now appear at actual legislative hearings — and Atwood's prestige carried speculative fiction into rooms that had pretended not to…
Dystopia
Nightmare societies engineered to perfection: surveillance states, engineered castes and futures designed as warnings.
The authors (12)
J. G. Ballard
The most important literary stylist British SF has produced, the New Wave's central planet, and a prophet whose obsessions — media spectacle, manufactured desire, communities seceding from reality — simply became the news.
Ray Bradbury
The writer who proved science fiction could be literature without apologising.
Octavia E. Butler
The writer who put race, gender and the body at the centre of American SF and made the field reckon with slavery as its own subject matter.
Philip K. Dick
The genre's great metaphysician.
Harlan Ellison
The most decorated short-fiction writer in genre history and the editor who dragged American SF into the New Wave.
Aldous Huxley
Co-author, with Orwell, of the modern political imagination: every debate about engineered consent, designer babies and medicated happiness reaches for Brave New World.
N. K. Jemisin
The defining SFF writer of the 2010s: the unprecedented Hugo three-peat marked the genre's centre of gravity shifting — formally, demographically and thematically — and the Broken Earth is already canon, taught from secondary…
China Miéville
The central figure of the New Weird and the most formally restless major fantasist of his generation: Miéville re-opened the weird tradition for the twenty-first century and made genre hybridity itself a respectable literary…
George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most politically consequential novel of the twentieth century, in or out of genre: the book that armed ordinary language against totalitarianism.
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
The defining SF writers of the Soviet world and among the most influential anywhere: Roadside Picnic seeded Tarkovsky's Stalker, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
H. G. Wells
The single most influential science fiction writer who ever lived.
Essential books, oldest first (21)
The Time Machine
Effectively invented time travel as a fictional device and the far-future vision as a literary mode.
Brave New World
One of the two definitive dystopias of the century, the necessary complement to Orwell: control by pleasure rather than pain.
Animal Farm
The most effective political allegory in the language, permanently in print and on syllabuses worldwide; with Nineteen Eighty-Four it made Orwell's name an adjective.
The Humanoids
The definitive 'benevolent AI catastrophe' — the alignment problem stated in 1947 with a clarity AI researchers still cite.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The most influential dystopia ever written: its vocabulary is the global currency of anti-authoritarianism, its surveillance state the permanent reference point, and its sales still spike with the…
Fahrenheit 451
One of the most-taught novels in the English-speaking world and a perennially renewable warning.
The Space Merchants
The founding classic of sociological satire SF, endlessly cited (Kingsley Amis devoted much of New Maps of Hell to it) and never out of print.
The Chrysalids
A staple of school syllabuses across the Commonwealth and arguably the best thing Wyndham wrote; its influence runs through YA dystopia's entire bloodline.
Hard to Be a God
The masterpiece of interventionist-ethics SF, decades ahead of Star Trek's Prime Directive debates; twice filmed, including Aleksei German's monumental 2013 version.
'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Hugo winner (1968) and the foundational evil-AI text; its shadow lies over everything from The Terminator to modern AI-risk rhetoric, and the 1995 game adaptation (with Ellison voicing AM) is a…
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Source of Blade Runner (1982), which transformed SF cinema while keeping perhaps a third of the book.
The Lathe of Heaven
Locus Award winner, twice filmed for television, and her tribute-in-kind to Philip K.
High-Rise
The definitive vertical-dystopia novel, endlessly cited in architecture and sociology as well as fiction; filmed by Ben Wheatley in 2015 with Tom Hiddleston.
Dhalgren
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it.
A Scanner Darkly
BSFA Award winner, Dick's most personal novel, and the basis of Linklater's rotoscoped 2006 film.
The Handmaid's Tale
Governor General's Award winner, first-ever Arthur C.
Parable of the Sower
The novel that made Butler a prophet: a New York Times bestseller decades after publication, source of an opera and a graphic novel, and the founding text of modern climate dystopia.
Oryx and Crake
Booker and Orange shortlisted, the founding volume of the MaddAddam trilogy and a cornerstone of modern climate-and-biotech dystopia: the engineered apocalypse as corporate deliverable.
The City & the City
Hugo (tied), World Fantasy, Clarke and BSFA winner — a near-sweep — and the book that carried Miéville furthest into the literary mainstream; its 'unseeing' entered critical vocabulary as…
The Fifth Season
Hugo winner 2016 — first volume of the unprecedented three-peat — and an instant canon entry: the most influential fantasy novel of its decade, on syllabuses from sixth forms to doctoral programmes.