# The 22 Greatest Science Fiction Novels of All Time

> Sixty years of the genre in one list: the ones assigned in school sit next to the ones that were dismissed as pulp on release. Argue it out.

*By YPB Team · Published August 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-22-greatest-science-fiction-novels-of-all-time*

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## Current results (4 votes)

1. **Nineteen Eighty-Four** — 25% (1 votes · score 1000/1000)
   George Orwell's 1949 vision of total surveillance that gave the language Big Brother, doublethink and Room 101.
2. **Ender's Game** — 25% (1 votes · score 881/1000)
   Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel about a child trained through war games to command a fleet.
3. **Solaris** — 0% (0 votes · score 852/1000)
   Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel about an ocean-planet that answers human contact with the contents of their memories.
4. **Stranger in a Strange Land** — 0% (0 votes · score 852/1000)
   Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel about a human raised on Mars returning to an Earth he does not understand.
5. **The Dispossessed** — 25% (1 votes · score 809/1000)
   Le Guin's 1974 study of an anarchist moon and the capitalist world it orbits.
6. **A Canticle for Leibowitz** — 25% (1 votes · score 809/1000)
   Walter M. Miller Jr.'s 1959 chronicle of monks preserving knowledge across a post-nuclear dark age.
7. **Snow Crash** — 0% (0 votes · score 787/1000)
   Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel that popularised the term metaverse and its pizza-delivering hacker hero.
8. **Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?** — 0% (0 votes · score 787/1000)
   Philip K. Dick's 1968 bounty-hunter novel about telling humans from replicants, later filmed as Blade Runner.
9. **The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy** — 0% (0 votes · score 713/1000)
   Douglas Adams's 1979 comedy of an Earthman hitching across a galaxy where the answer is 42.
10. **Fahrenheit 451** — 0% (0 votes · score 713/1000)
   Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel about a fireman whose job is to burn books.
11. **Neuromancer** — 0% (0 votes · score 629/1000)
   William Gibson's 1984 debut that named cyberspace and launched cyberpunk.
12. **Frankenstein** — 0% (0 votes · score 629/1000)
   Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, widely treated as the first work of science fiction.
13. **Foundation** — 0% (0 votes · score 533/1000)
   Isaac Asimov's 1951 saga of psychohistory, in which mathematics predicts the fall of a galactic empire.
14. **The Martian** — 0% (0 votes · score 532/1000)
   Andy Weir's 2011 survival novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars with potatoes and duct tape.
15. **The Forever War** — 0% (0 votes · score 532/1000)
   Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel in which relativity turns an interstellar war into centuries of homecoming.
16. **The Left Hand of Darkness** — 0% (0 votes · score 420/1000)
   Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel set on a frozen world whose inhabitants have no fixed gender.
17. **Slaughterhouse-Five** — 0% (0 votes · score 420/1000)
   Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel about a man unstuck in time and the firebombing of Dresden.
18. **The Three-Body Problem** — 0% (0 votes · score 286/1000)
   Liu Cixin's 2008 first contact novel, the first translated work to win the Hugo for Best Novel.
19. **The War of the Worlds** — 0% (0 votes · score 286/1000)
   H. G. Wells's 1898 invasion novel that set the template for alien attack stories.
20. **Dune** — 0% (0 votes · score 286/1000)
   Frank Herbert's 1965 desert epic, winner of the first Nebula Award and co-winner of the Hugo, and the best-selling science fiction novel ever written.
21. **Rendezvous with Rama** — 0% (0 votes · score 126/1000)
   Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel about an alien cylinder passing through the solar system and leaving without explanation.
22. **Hyperion** — 0% (0 votes · score 126/1000)
   Dan Simmons's 1989 Canterbury Tales in space, seven pilgrims travelling toward a creature called the Shrike.

Tags: books, sci-fi, classics