Science Fiction Books Bucket List

Experience the dystopian classic by George Orwell

Read Solaris, a classic science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem exploring themes of human psychology and alien contact

Major Kusanagi and Section 9 in Shirow's dense cyberpunk pages, with footnotes.

Neo-Tokyo, biker gangs and a psychic child; Otomo's six volumes the film only sketched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The jihad ends with atomics over Corrin, and the Corrino empire, the Spacing Guild and the Great Convention come out of the wreckage.

The Emperor's synthetic-spice project on Ix collapses while Leto goes to war over it; the trilogy ends with the birth of Paul.

After Paul walks into the desert: Jessica and Alia hold Arrakis together while Bronso of Ix writes pamphlets against the Atreides myth.

Leto Atreides at home a year before Arrakis, facing a rebel movement called the Noble Commonwealth.

Thirty-five years before Dune: Leto is sent to Ix as a boy, Pardot Kynes reaches Arrakis, and Shaddam plots his own father's death.

Twenty-four years into the jihad: Vorian Atreides against the Titan Agamemnon, and Norma Cenva working out how to fold space.

A city whose happiness depends on one child kept in a cellar, and the few citizens who leave rather than accept the terms.

The last weeks before Dune opens: the Emperor hands Arrakis to House Atreides and Paul turns fifteen.

Gurney Halleck in the Harkonnen slave pits, Duncan Idaho training on Ginaz, and Jessica sent from the Sisterhood to Caladan.

Jessica is recalled to the Sisterhood on Wallach IX, and Leto and Paul are left with the rebellion and a narcotic grown on Caladan.

Ten thousand years earlier: humanity revolts against the thinking machines, and Serena Butler gives the war its name.

Alternates between Paul's twelve-year jihad after Dune, fought across the galaxy in his name, and his boyhood on Caladan.

The pursuers are finally named and the cycle is closed, on the outline Brian Herbert found in his father's safe deposit boxes.

Picks up the cliffhanger Frank Herbert left in 1985: the no-ship runs from an enemy the Bene Gesserit cannot name, with a hold full of gholas.

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