Science fiction that is actually about something

RP

Roadside Picnic

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Aliens came, left, and nobody found out why. The Zone is a workplace hazard before it is a mystery, which is what makes it believable.

B

Blindsight

Peter Watts

A first-contact novel with a bibliography, arguing that consciousness may be a detour. Cold, difficult, and the most interesting hard SF of its decade.

AF

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge

A galaxy where the laws of physics change by region, so distance is the plot. The pack-mind aliens are the best invention in it.

TT

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

Chinese science fiction that thinks in millennia rather than in characters, and the Cultural Revolution opening is not decoration. The trilogy is one argument.

TF

The Female Man

Joanna Russ

Four versions of one woman in four worlds, written to be angry and formally strange at the same time. Not comfortable, and not meant to be.

K

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler

A twentieth-century woman is pulled back to a slave plantation whenever an ancestor is in danger. Time travel used as a device for making history unbearable rather than exotic.

TM

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick

An alternate history where the interesting part is not the alternate history but the characters reading a book about ours. Dick at his most controlled.

DA

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

Much stranger and more religious than the film made from it, and the empathy machine is the real subject. Short enough to read in two sittings.

N

Neuromancer

William Gibson

The book that named the genre, written before most of it existed. Hard to follow on purpose, and the prose is better than cyberpunk ever got again.

TF

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

Relativity means a soldier returns from each tour to a society he no longer recognises. Written by a Vietnam veteran and it shows in the best way.

CO

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Terraforming goes wrong and the spiders inherit the planet, and the uplift chapters are far better than that sounds. The sequel is worth it too.

TC

The City & the City

China Miéville

Two cities occupy the same space and citizens are trained not to see each other. A crime novel that is really about how much noticing we agree to suppress.

SE

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

A pandemic collapses civilisation and the book is about a travelling orchestra. Written to be about what survives rather than what is lost.

PH

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

Problem-solving as plot, with the science doing genuine work and the humour landing more often than it should. The most purely enjoyable book on this list.

H

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims tell seven stories in seven styles, from horror to farce, and the frame holds. The structure is the achievement.

E

Exhalation

Ted Chiang

Short stories where the premise is always in service of a question about free will, memory or causality. The best entry point to his work.

TH

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Still the funniest thing written about the end of the world, and the jokes are load-bearing rather than decoration. Start with the first book and stop where you like.