Science Fiction Bucket List

A linguist learns an alien language and it rearranges her sense of time.

Eighteen years without a birth, and one famously unbroken shot through a war zone.

A couple erase each other from memory and he changes his mind halfway through.

A spy thriller in which half the action runs backwards through time.

Pre-crime police in 2054 Washington, and the cop they come for.

A princess tries to make peace with a toxic jungle and the insects that guard it.

Miyazaki's seven-volume manga of the toxic jungle and the princess who understands it; darker than the film.

A robot boy built by a grieving scientist; Tezuka, the god of manga, from 1952.

Clarke's novel written alongside Kubrick's film, and it explains the ending.

A smuggler in the only city on the Moon takes a job that turns into sabotage; Weir after The Martian.

A Cultural Revolution scientist contacts an alien civilisation; Liu Cixin's Hugo winner.

A science teacher wakes alone on a starship with amnesia and meets an alien engineer; Weir's best.

Mark Watney stranded on Mars grows potatoes in his own waste; Weir's self-published hit.

Paul Atreides on Arrakis: spice, sandworms and the most imitated world in science fiction.

A pilot dies on an alien planet and restarts; the roguelike bullet-hell that cost sixty dollars.

Manage a starship crew through a roguelike galaxy; every run ends in a story.

A single-shard galaxy where players run the economy and the wars cost real money.

Complete the critically acclaimed puzzle-platformer Portal 2.

Atmospheric shooter in an undersea dystopia (2007).

Huxley's chilling vision of an engineered utopia (1932).

Shelley's gothic birth of science fiction (1818).

The original space opera that started it all (1977).

Mind-bending physics puzzles with a dark wit (2007).

The GameCube launch game: the trench run, the Battle of Hoth and gold medals nobody could reach.

One city, two alien factions and a real-time mode; the last X-COM the original team made.

Saber combat good enough that people still duel in it twenty years later.

Three named alien hunters who remember your fights, plus three resistance factions to answer them.