The Science Fiction Observatory
Explore the best science fiction books at The Science Fiction Observatory. Discover curated lists of top sci-fi reads, from classics to new releases, for all fans of futuristic and speculative fiction.
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The First Men in the Moon
by H.G. Wells
This is the only one of Wells' scientific romances to embrace space travel. Thanks to the discovery of the anti-gravity metal cavorite, two Victorian Englishmen travel to the Moon.
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A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Civil War veteran John Carter is transported to a dying planet where he must rescue a Martian princess while evading giant green barbarian Mars-men!
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Rainbow Fantasia of Sci-fi
by Anne Hardin
"Rainbow Fantasia" presents 35 classic stories from the golden age of sci-fi and fantasy pulp fiction, many heretofore unavailable for decades.
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Planet of Peril
by Otis Adelbert Kline
Derring-do on a world of primitive monsters! When Robert Grandon swapped bodies with a prince of the planet Venus, he was concerned only with the thrill and interest of living on a different world. But the situation he found himself in was hardly that of a leisurely sightseer. Instead, he found himself smack in the center of a whirlwind of intrigue, danger, and desperation. Planet of Peril is a science-fiction adventure on a world of semi-barbaric nations, ferocious beasts, gigantic reptiles, and maidens in distress!
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Last and First Men
by Olaf Stapledon
"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke of this masterpiece of science fiction. An imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years, this 1930 epic abounds in prescient speculations. A must-read for scholars of the genre.
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Star Maker
by Olaf Stapledon
This 1937 successor to Last and First Men offers another entrancing speculative history of the future. Cited as a key influence by science-fiction masters such as Doris Lessing, its bold exploration of the cosmos ventures into intelligent star clusters and mingles among alien races for a memorable vision of infinity.
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The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury
Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun. Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.
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The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut
“[Kurt Vonnegut’s] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.”—Esquire Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’ s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell. “Reading Vonnegut is addictive!”—Commonweal
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Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
The complete, uncut version of Robert A. Heinlein’s all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a science fiction classic. Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...
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Dune
by Frank Herbert
• DUNE: PART TWO • THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert • Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, with Stellan Skarsgård, with Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.
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The Dream Millennium
by James White
With corruption and pollution destroying Earth, John Devlin is sent on a one-thousand-year mission to find a new planet for mankind