Frank Herbert – DUNE
If I were to pick one single favorite SF book, this masterpiece of the genre would probably deserve the title – and righteously so. Its magical blend of high drama, intrigue, breathless adventure and a potent element of mysticism mixed with philosophy captivated me in a way that no other book had done before it. I was sixteen when Frank Herbert first took me to a journey into this faraway future, to the mysterious desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, with its giant sandworms, its Bedouin-like inhabitants, the Fremen, and the secretive sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit. The novel tells the story of young Paul Atreides as he and his family relocate to Arrakis, the only source of the spice melange, the most important and valuable substance in the universe. The story explores complex interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, including human beings’ susceptibility to mass manipulation by political propaganda, religious dogma, and sexual temptation, and the importance of self-awareness and self-mastery in resisting these types of control. Intricate and lush, this is one of the most brilliant science fiction novels ever written, as engrossing and heart-rending today as it was when it was first published half a century ago. Once you leave your footprints in this vibrant world, the winds of Dune will forever call you back to its shifting desert sands...

Gene Wolfe – THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
Notorious for his uncompromising ambiguity, Wolfe is widely regarded as one of the most skilful and literate authors of speculative fiction, and this four volume saga is arguably his greatest and most celebrated work. Written in gorgeously baroque prose, it’s an extraordinary epic, enigmatic and darkly poetic confession of Severian, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when the sun is dying and our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian is an orphan raised by the Guild of Torturers who trained him in the crafts of their art, but when he commits the greatest sin of his order – shows compassion to one of his victims – he is exiled and set onto a journey that will bring him to his true destiny... Anyone familiar with Wolfe’s work knows what to expect – strange doings, complex and troubled characters, no guarantees of happy endings for anyone, images and events that stick in the mind long after the book is put down, layers and layers of subtle puzzles that will require multiple readings to be solved, and a command of the language beyond the ability of 90% of writers working today in or out of the SF field.

Orson Scott Card – ENDER’S GAME
Much of the books dealing with epic subjects, such as the fate of humanity under attack by a hostile alien force, tend to have a huge cast and are set upon a canvass as wide as the space itself. Here, however, the author chose simplistic approach to a serious matter, so that the fate of one gifted boy and the fate of the human race come together in a slender, direct book. In a near future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the “buggers”, an insectoid alien race, the world’s most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into “Battle School” at a very young age to supply commanders for the upcoming Third Invasion. Ender is a real, compassionate and empathetic character that the reader can truly care about; you will laugh, you will cry, you will track him through the highs and lows of this moving and gripping novel.

Robert Silverberg – DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH
Silverberg has won more awards than any other writer in the field, and choosing between his many excellent books is not an easy task; yet even though I love some of his other novels as much, none of them had such an impact on me as this intense, mythical masterpiece of mankind’s awakening. Citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Silverberg breaks the conventions of science fiction and creates an intelligent, somber tale of one man’s journey into his own heart of darkness, in search of redemption from guilt and sins of his past. Holman’s World, now known as Belzagor, once was a colonized alien planet and Edmund Gundersen’s home. Abandoned by man when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient, the planet is now a place of mystery. A mystery that haunts Gundersen and takes him on a long trek of discovery, not only to uncover this planet’s great secret, but to be part of it, fully and completely. Powerful, moving, beautifully written and completely engrossing, this is a book of endless wonder and amazement.

Ursula Le Guin – THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
This is the account of a man named Genly Ai, an ethnologist observing the people of the planet Gethen, a world perpetually in winter. The people there are androgynous, normally neuter, but they can become male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle. He is soon drawn into the complex politics of the planet, and, during a long, tortuous journey across the ice cape with a politician who has fallen from favour and has been outcast, he loses his professional detachment and reaches a painful understanding of the true nature of Gethenians... What makes this book a special treat is superb detail with which Le Guin creates this alien society – blending folklore, poetry, religion, politics and myth to conceive fully realized and completely believable world. A large part of the novel is an exploration of a neuter society – a society in which sexual difference plays no role, although love and jealousy remain. Le Guin’s most challenging assertion is that such a world, lacking a deep sense of duality implied by strong gender divisions, would have no history of war. Love story, polar adventure yarn and meditation on gender – what more can one ask for?

Arthur C. Clarke – THE CITY AND THE STARS
Clarke’s name is legendary even outside of SF, and this masterful long-term vision of the human race, millions of years hence, may arguably be the best work in his long and productive career. Earth is completely barren and empty, void of any life save in one place – the magnificent city of Diaspar. There had been cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar. For millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it had held powers that ruled the stars; but then, the legends said, the invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. And mankind gave up the stars, satisfied to spend the rest of their days in this haven of perfect peace and harmony. Yet, for one young man this may not be enough, and his longing for something out of the ordinary will take him farther than he ever imagined...

Iain M. Banks – THE PLAYER OF GAMES
Banks is quite possibly the greatest storyteller of the new generation of SF writers, and in this book he presents a distant future that could almost be called the end of history. The Culture – a human/machine symbiotic society – has filled the galaxy, and thanks to ultra-high technology everyone has everything they want, no one gets sick, and no one dies. It’s a playground society of sports, stellar cruises, parties, and festivals. Bored with success, Gurgeh, one of the greatest Game Players, is looking for something more and finds it when he’s invited at a small alien empire, The Empire of Azad, cruel, exotic, sensual and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life – and very possibly his death. Banks explores themes about the importance of games in a society where much of the danger, and therefore excitement, has been diluted by obsessive and overbearing technology – people cannot even die decently and eventually get bored and order themselves to be destroyed; it seems that even immortality will eventually suck. All the amusing ship names and foul mouthed witty droids are here, plus excellent alien races and sly and not so sly references to modern culture.

Dan Simmons – HYPERION
If you are searching for epic, literary science fiction with overtones of horror, look no further. Simmons has imagined a richly textured galactic civilization and within this milieu has created an intriguing story with multiple threads that work on many levels. Structured in a manner reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales and imbued with the poetry of John Keats, this is a complex and thought provoking novel full of action, adventure and mystery. It is the 29th century and the universe of the Human Hegemony is under threat. Invasion by the warlike Ousters looms, and the secretive schemes of the secessionist AI TechnoCore bring chaos ever closer. On the eve of disaster, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set fourth on a final voyage to the legendary Time Tombs on Hyperion, home to the Shrike, a lethal creature, part god and part killing machine, whose powers transcend the limits of time and space. The pilgrims have resolved to die before discovering anything less than the secrets of the universe itself. (You should be warned, though, that the book ends on its climax, with a cliffhanger that will make you yearn for The Fall of Hyperion, as the second book carries on the story right from where the first one ends, and finally provides closure and some answers to the many riddles presented in the first volume.)

Roger Zelazny – LORD OF LIGHT
On a colony planet, men have established a society based on technological means of imitating the Hindu religion. It is possible to reincarnate the “mind” or “soul” to a new body, even an animal. But some of the earliest colonists have additional powers, which give them the status of gods. Their names include Brahma, Kali, Krishna and also he who was called Buddha, the Lord of Light, but who now prefers to be known simply as Sam. He knows what his companions are doing is wrong and tries to liberate the planet of their dominion. But in order to do so, he must wage war against the gods... It is a unique blend of myth and mirth, legend and jarring anachronism, splendidly executed by one of the wittiest of SF writers.

Alfred Bester – THE STARS MY DESTINATION
You have probably seen this novel included in every SF Top 10 List there is. Half a century had passed since it was first published and it’s yet to be knocked out of the masters’ circle. That’s a pretty impressive statement - and this Bester’s classic has the stuff to back it up. Hugely influential on both the New Wave of the 60s and the cyberpunk of the 80s, this is a fast-moving pyrotechnic extravaganza with enough bloodshed for Tarantino and enough social analysis for Marx. Gully Foyle is not exactly one of the good guys, but he’s your hero for this trip. The solar system is torn by warfare – the discovery of a human capacity to move short distances by the power of mind has blown open the balance of economic power. Foyle’s life has never been easy, but as the novel opens he is in about the worst predicament of his life – stranded in space, alone, with little or no chance of rescue. The only thing on his mind is revenge on the ship and crew that left him to rot... Marked by hideous facial tattoos, and haunted by his own flaming double, there is nothing that Foyle will not do – pursuing them among hereditary industrialists, sensory-deprived monks, circus freaks and the convicts of the deepest Hell on Earth, as he too is pursued by a selection of Furies as highly coloured as himself. Streetwise and high-gloss, this is one of the finest of SF classics, full of evocative scenery and much-imitated stylistic gimmicks that for once work perfectly.

Kurt Vonnegut – THE SIRENS OF TITAN
This Vonnegut’s novel was published way back in 1959 but remains horribly timeless. For all the book’s wild inventiveness, it’s one of the most blackly nihilistic comedies ever published in the genre. This is a masterpiece of ingenuity, black humor, and fine writing that is centrally concerned with the meaning of life. Or rather, the meaninglessness of life. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a wealthy playboy who takes his privately funded spaceship and drives it straight into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, just to see what will happen. The pay-off has to be the darkest comment on human pride and ambition, and on the meaning of the universe that anyone has ever written. It proposes a question: if there were a God in the universe, why the hell would he care about you?

Samuel R. Delany – BABEL-17
Delany wrote more perfect books than Babel-17, but it is perhaps the most delightful, clever and sensual of his works, a story that explores the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (that language strongly influences thought and perceived reality) in funny and original way. The novel deals with several issues related to the peculiarities of language, including how conditions of life shape the formation of words and meaning, and how the words themselves can shape the actions of people. During an interstellar war, one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. This is discovered by the beautiful starship captain, linguist, poet, and telepath Rydra Wong. She is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. Initially Babel-17 is thought to be a code used by enemy agents, but Rydra realizes it is a language, and soon finds herself becoming a traitor as she learns it...

Joe Haldeman – THE FOREVER WAR
War seems to last forever in the hearts and minds of men who fight it, and Joe Haldeman takes this to extremes in The Forever War, a book that transposes most of the problems of the Vietnam War (drug abuse, permanent physical scars, detachment from reality, isolation, maladjustment to normal society, etc.) to an intergalactic war that spans several thousand years due to the relativistic duration of space travels. That can be traumatic enough, but it is the changes in society, mores, and norms that will be the most difficult barriers facing those who return home. In addition to all the sociological and philosophical concerns, this book describes believable foes and future technology as well as interesting action sequences. While the 70s homophobia grates somewhat, in other respects the book hasn’t dated at all, and it has one of the most conclusive and satisfying endings I have come across.

Theodore Sturgeon – MORE THAN HUMAN
One of the key figures of science fiction’s so-called Golden Age, Theodore Sturgeon stands out from his contemporaries both in the literary quality of his writing and his focus on creating strong, complex characters as well as fast-paced plots. This book is powerfully written, in a style both sinewy and poetic, and Sturgeon’s humanism, compassion and his belief in the transformative power of love are also evident throughout the story. The novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to “blesh” (a portmanteau of blend and mesh) their abilities together. In this way, they are able to act as a single organism. They progress toward a mature gestalt consciousness, called the homo gestalt, the next step in the human evolution. Originally published over 50 years ago, the book does not seem dated: the universality of its themes and the depth of its meditations on the nature and future of humanity (what does being human truly means?), are appropriate for any time. It’s a must-read from one of the great masters of the genre.

Stanislaw Lem – SOLARIS
Polish author of worldly fame Stanislaw Lem was surely one of the greatest minds of our time, and intellectual depth of his books may often prove too much for the average reader. This is probably his most accessible novel of all, and a great introduction to the work of this brilliant genius. A psychologist arrives at a research space station called Prometheus, his mission to ascertain whether research of the mysterious planet Solaris, entirely covered with ocean, should be terminated. He finds Prometheus all but deserted, its straggling crew seemingly haunted by hallucinations of figures from their pasts. But when similar things start happening to him, he will realize that what covers the surface of Solaris is not an ocean at all... The novel is pervaded by a powerful and moving poetic sense of remoteness and loneliness, and uses remote space exploration as a metaphor for whether the human mind will ever understand a truly alien life form.

Philip K. Dick – UBIK
Nobody but Philip K. Dick could so successfully combine comedy with the unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like quicksand. This searing phantasmagorical story of death and salvation (the latter available in a convenient aerosol spray) is tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the deceased give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again. An accident has occurred. Joe Chip and his colleagues – all but their boss – have narrowly escaped an explosion orchestrated by his business rivals. Or is it the other way around? Did Joe and the others die, and did the one fatality, Glen Runciter, actually survive? If Glen is dead and Joe alive, why does Joe keep getting weird messages from Glen? He must discover the answers fast, because something tells him he may be running out of time... if he hasn’t already. For, this is Dick-country, where final truths are never quite final, and – with the help of Ubik – the reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way around... From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.

Cordwainer Smith – THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN
Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An interstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon from the planet Norstrilia confers on them virtual immortality. A world in which wealthy and leisured humanity is served by the underpeople, genetically engineered animals turned into the semblance of men. A world of wonder and myth, and extraordinary imagination...