Top Ten Science Fiction Books

The Book of the New Sun is my favorite science fiction book of all time. I've never read anything that works on so many concentric layers at once.

It's not Dick's wildest, trippiest, or even his best written book, but I do think it's his most complete story, and it does maintain a lot of that gooey, cerebral gray area.

Earth Abides ticks many of those post disaster boxes, including the super cinematic vision of hardly any humans surviving and living in the detritus of our former glory. But it's also a novel that defies expectations.

I fell in love with the characters, the thrilling story of one child tasked with saving the human race from certain annihilation. But most of all, the action.

You could argue that the legacy of this character has been lobbomized from Mary Shel's original masterpiece and superseded by the Hollywood version of the monster. And although I embrace and love the fact that the first science fiction novel created a cultural icon, this book remains the best, the most powerful, and the most interesting version of the modern Prometheus.

The genius of Roadside Picnic is that it succeeds at everything it attempts. The message from behind the Iron Curtain is somehow disguised but also undiluted.

Instead, Vonagget gave us this extraordinary pseudoictional novel that combines genre with horrifying reality. It's a book about war, survival, death, philosophy, mental illness, and yes, if you so choose, time travel, dimensional displacement, science fiction.

Nothing I've read does this more hauntingly effectively than Stanislav Lem's Solaris. Yes, it's about a mission to a space research station that is studying a sentient ocean planet entity, but is it really about the pain of lost love?