A heist crew of allomancers against the immortal Lord Ruler; Sanderson's magic system.
Kvothe tells his own legend from behind an inn counter; the third book is still not out.
A world of periodic apocalypses and the people who can quell earthquakes; three consecutive Hugos.
A travelling Shakespeare troupe twenty years after a flu killed the world.
Charlie Gordon's IQ goes from 68 to 185 and back, in his own progress reports.
Soldiers return from each battle to an Earth centuries older; Haldeman's Vietnam in space.
Mobile infantry against the Bugs and a lecture on citizenship; Verhoeven turned it inside out.
A human raised by Martians comes to Earth and starts a church; grok.
Earth colonises Mars in linked stories; Bradbury's melancholy frontier.
The Axis won and America is divided; Dick's alternate history.
Deckard, the replicants and the mood organ; the book behind Blade Runner.
A boy trains for a war against the buggers in a battle room; the ending is the point.
Seven pilgrims tell their stories on the way to the Shrike; The Canterbury Tales in space.
Ged learns the true names of things and hunts his own shadow; the Earthsea cycle begins.
A physicist between an anarchist moon and its capitalist planet; Le Guin's ambiguous utopia.
An envoy on a planet where people have no fixed sex; Le Guin's thought experiment.
Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia and fights a virus in the Metaverse; the word comes from here.
Case, Molly and the matrix; Gibson invented cyberspace in 1984.
A fifty-kilometre cylinder enters the solar system and a crew goes inside; Clarke's purest wonder.
The three laws of robotics in nine stories; Susan Calvin and the machines.
Psychohistory predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire and Hari Seldon plans for it; Asimov's trilogy begins.
Street children in 1930s Salvador; Jorge Amado's most loved.
A dead man narrates his pointless life with digressions; Machado's 1881 modernism.
Did Capitu betray Bentinho? Machado de Assis leaves the reader to decide; Brazil's classic.
The last day of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and a woman who returns; Vargas Llosa.
A point that contains every other point, in a Buenos Aires cellar; Borges' second collection.
The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.
A novel you can read in two orders; Cortazar's Paris and Buenos Aires.
Two visceral realist poets hunted through Mexico City and beyond by fifty narrators.
Five parts, a missing German novelist and the murdered women of Santa Teresa; Bolano's unfinished monument.
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