# The 23 Best Sci-Fi Novels of the 1970s

> Seventies science fiction swung between hard-physics starships, feminist utopias and paranoid drug-fuelled dystopias. Award sweepers share this shelf with cult paperbacks that still split readers down the middle.

*By YPB Team · Published October 26, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-23-best-sci-fi-novels-of-the-1970s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Dispossessed** — score 1000/1000
   Le Guin's 1974 'ambiguous utopia' contrasting an anarchist moon with its capitalist twin planet, winner of the Hugo and Nebula.
2. **Gateway** — score 952/1000
   Frederik Pohl's 1977 Hugo and Nebula winner about prospectors gambling their lives on abandoned alien ships.
3. **Woman on the Edge of Time** — score 952/1000
   Marge Piercy's 1976 novel about a woman in a psychiatric ward who contacts a utopian future.
4. **The Forever War** — score 734/1000
   Joe Haldeman's 1974 Hugo and Nebula winner about a soldier whose interstellar war is stretched across centuries by time dilation.
5. **The Lathe of Heaven** — score 734/1000
   Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 novel about a man whose dreams rewrite reality and the psychiatrist who exploits them.
6. **Kindred** — score 659/1000
   Octavia E. Butler's 1979 novel about a Black woman pulled back in time to an antebellum Maryland plantation.
7. **Rendezvous with Rama** — score 659/1000
   Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 award sweeper about astronauts exploring a vast, silent alien cylinder passing through the solar system.
8. **Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang** — score 659/1000
   Kate Wilhelm's 1976 Hugo winner about a clone society that emerges after civilisation collapses.
9. **Man Plus** — score 571/1000
   Frederik Pohl's 1976 Nebula winner about an astronaut surgically rebuilt to survive on Mars.
10. **Children of Dune** — score 467/1000
   Frank Herbert's 1976 third Dune novel, following Paul Atreides' twin children through Arrakis' transformation.
11. **A Scanner Darkly** — score 467/1000
   Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel about an undercover narcotics agent ordered to spy on himself.
12. **The Word for World Is Forest** — score 467/1000
   Le Guin's 1972 Hugo-winning short novel about colonists brutalising the peaceful natives of a forest planet.
13. **High-Rise** — score 467/1000
   J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel about a luxury tower block that descends into tribal savagery.
14. **Tau Zero** — score 467/1000
   Poul Anderson's 1970 hard-SF voyage of a starship that cannot stop accelerating toward the end of the universe.
15. **Dying Inside** — score 467/1000
   Robert Silverberg's 1972 portrait of a New York telepath slowly and painfully losing his gift.
16. **The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy** — score 467/1000
   Douglas Adams' 1979 comic novel about Arthur Dent's journey across the galaxy after Earth is demolished.
17. **Ringworld** — score 343/1000
   Larry Niven's 1970 Hugo and Nebula winner about explorers stranded on a colossal artificial ring circling a distant star.
18. **Roadside Picnic** — score 343/1000
   Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 1972 novel about stalkers raiding alien-visited Zones, the basis for Tarkovsky's Stalker.
19. **Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said** — score 343/1000
   Philip K. Dick's 1974 novel about a TV star who wakes up in a police state where he no longer exists.
20. **The Shockwave Rider** — score 343/1000
   John Brunner's 1975 novel that imagined computer worms and a hacker on the run in a networked society.
21. **The Gods Themselves** — score 343/1000
   Isaac Asimov's 1972 Hugo and Nebula winner about an energy exchange with a parallel universe that threatens the Sun.
22. **The Female Man** — score 0/1000
   Joanna Russ's 1975 feminist landmark following four women from parallel worlds.
23. **Dhalgren** — score 0/1000
   Samuel R. Delany's dense 1975 cult novel set in a ruined American city where time and memory refuse to behave.

Tags: books, 70s, sci-fi, classics