The Five Greatest Science Fiction Novels of All Time

Before Science Fiction entered the cinemas or the comic books or the radio plays, Science Fiction began as literature, as stories and books of adventures on other planets, in other times and even other galaxies.

Science Fiction lacked the pedigree of great literature. It was more likely to be read by boys on street corners than men in smoking jackets in drawing rooms. The quality might be uneven but unlike conventional literature, Science Fiction was rarely stuffy, self-involved or indecipherable. So for the most part it was rarely recognized as literature, a stigma that continues to the present day.

Science Fiction writers who wish to be critically recognized redefine themselves as something other than Science Fiction writers, at a time when major literary writers like John Irving and Cormack McCarthy have taken their dips in the pool of SciFi, Science Fiction continues to be denied the literary recognition it deserves. So here to help change that are five of the greatest Science Fiction novels ever written. And if there are any on this list that you have yet to read, there is no time like the present.

5. Gateway by Fredrick Pohl

Before Cyberpunk came on the scene, Fredrick Pohl envisioned a world where corporations mattered more than governments, where the universe's secrets were buried in a mystery embedded in a technology humanity had yet to master and the right amount of money could let you live forever.

In Gateway, humanity lives in a world of a handful of Haves and a planet of Have Nots, torn apart by terrorism and perpetual civil unrest, most people work just to be able to survive and buy as much medical care as they can. With enough money you can just about buy immortality. Without it, you're lucky to buy another day to live. For most people life is hard and grinding.

But out beyond Earth's atmosphere and in the darkness of night, is Gateway, an alien space station built by a race humanity calls the Heechee, a race that no trace has been found of. Gateway contains incomprehensible alien technology and ships. Thousands and thousands of ships with unknown controls. Press the right button and you might find treasure and fortune beyond your wildest dreams. Press the wrong button and you might vanish inside a black hole. For those few who can scrape up enough money to take a shot at seeking their fortune, Gateway promises to either change their lives forever or take them.

Gateway in many ways is one of hard Science Fiction's most literary novels combining the self-indulgence of some of the seventies New Wave literature with the rigid self-control of a master storyteller. Frederick Pohl was one of SF's most eccentric talents coming up with strange and unusual storylines time and time again from a world where wealth was poverty and poverty was wealth to intelligent stars. In Gateway, Fred Pohl achieved his greatest literary accomplishment.

4. Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Once voted as the fan favorite trilogy, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy had expanded with a series of increasingly poorly chosen novels beginning with Foundation's Edge that increasingly diluted the series finally rolling the whole thing up into a planetary intelligence that would consume all human life in the universe. And then after Isaac Asimov's death came Forward the Foundation. Forward the Foundation did rely on some of the same elements of those novels but it possessed a purity of narrative emerging as not only Isaac Asimov's greatest novel but also as a parallel story to his own life.

Told in a series of sections encapsulating the life and death of Hari Seldon, founder of the Foundation and the man whose vision of Psychohistory was to chart and predict the course of humanity, Forward the Foundation gives us Hari Seldon coping with Emperors and tyrants, intelligent robots hiding among mankind, telepaths and the unsolvable problem of predicting human history all the while growing old, losing his wife and watching the Empire he had grown up in decaying and collapsing all around him. It was likely too how Isaac Asimov had felt in the closing stages of his life living in a city that had become increasingly violent and dangerous, his illness and his disconnection growing and it is ultimately the story of one man's death and his intellectual triumph over it. At the end of Forward the Foundation Hari Seldon dies with the vision of humanity's future unfolding all around him in the equations he had produced and it is also the vision of Isaac Asimov dying with the visions of the future he produced living on in his published and printed works.

3. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

Though embraced as a literary writer later in life, Philip K. Dick worked with the standard tools of the trade of pulp SciFi, coining tales of morality and damnation, salvation and human identity using rocket ships, robots, telepaths and aliens. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is less known than many of Philip K. Dick's other novels such as The Man in the High Castle but it is far superior melding Philip K. Dick's religious obsessions and his own growing paranoia of evil infesting the world.

The result is a perfect blend of surrealism and Science Fiction as humanity lives in a solar system ruled over by the U.N. which deports people to a grim and empty life in the Martian Colony devoid of the comforts of earth, a life which is only made bearable by doses of Can-D, a hallucinogenic drug that allows users to transport themselves into an artificially perfect world back on Earth. Can-D is produced by P.P. Layouts headed by Leo Bulero, a harsh and brutish man who has just allowed his top layout precognitive who predicts the success or failure of P.P. Layouts products, Barney Mayerson to be drafted by the UN and sent to Mars.

But meanwhile Palmer Eldritch has returned from the first insterstellar expedition to another star bringing with him a brand new drug with seemingly incredible capabilities. Chew-Z needs no layouts and Chew-Z genuinely seems to be a miracle drug. But where was Palmer Eldritch really and is it Palmer Eldritch that came back or something else entirely?

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch has P.K. Dick playing with his usual philosophical agility with the questions of identity, precognition, faith and evil and the results raise as many questions as answers.

2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

Ursula LeGuin is in many ways one of Science Fiction's most overrated writers, celebrated for all the wrong reasons often having more to do with her politics and the politics of identity and indeed for quite a while LeGuin's novels have been thoroughly mediocre. Yet The Left Hand of Darkness is a genuine literary accomplishment, a tightly delineated work of art set on a colonized world of androgynous people who move between masculine and feminine depending on cycles and presence into which a single gendered emissary from the Ekumen, the union of worlds, has intruded. Genly Ai comes bearing the promise of contact with the rest of the universe, yet the environment he finds it as once alien and familiar and the journey he will undertake is one of survival across a frozen and desolate land and in the process forge an unusual allegiance.

1. The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have collaborated on a number of novels, yet neither of them would be accused of being a particularly literary writer and while they both have large fanbases, the simple reality is that their collaborations have produced more mediocre thrillers than anything else. It is hard to tell why exactly The Mote in God's Eye emerges so startlingly from such a mediocre bibliography. The hidden variable may well be Science Fiction Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein who had an enormous amount of editorial control over the book, reshaping and recreating it and becoming an unspoken author as he prodded Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle into creating a genuinely great novel.

The result captures the poetry of Poul Anderson's novels while playing on a massive scale. The characters step beyond the usual Niven and Pournelle cliches and loom as icons, dramatic personae delivering lines as resonant as that of a Shakespearean play.

There are many novels of humanity's first contact with aliens but The Mote in God's Eye is one of the few where aliens have their own inhuman personality and identity without the need for convoluted language and where the potential and the threat of first contact are so evenly matched and the future of two races hangs on a knife's edge.