by Ursula K. Le Guin, pub. 1967

“Imagine darkness.
In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.
As unremembered light brightened around him he moved… he had no way through the world in which he was, for a way implies a beginning and an end.”

An earlier Le Guin novel, this book is a concise but wonderful introduction to her Hainish Cycle – the universe in which many of her stories are set. This opening excerpt above draws from the Tao Te Ching, perhaps the single-most influence on her writing, and of which she was a student for decades.

by William Gibson, pub. 1984

Neuromancer is one of my favorite novels, period. It’s seductive, gritty, and poetic. Considered one of the earliest and most essential cyberpunk novels, Gibson’s visionary book inspired The Matrix, coined the term cyberspace, and is the origin of the now-ubiquitous phrase, “black mirror.”

From the “low life, high tech” bounty hunters of Cowboy Bebop (indeed, the protagonist of Neuromancer is a “console cowboy”), to the infinite network of human information in Ghost in the Shell, Neuromancer’s legacy is inseparable from the conventions and aesthetics that now define cyberpunk.

Aside from its cultural impact, Gibson’s prose is beautiful, though challenging at times. His vision of the Sprawl, in which Neuromancer is set, is riddled with addiction, lust, greed. It’s not glitzy or sleek like a lot of futuristic sci-fi, but it’s definitely sexy.

by Ursula K. Le Guin, pub. 1974

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. This book is definitive of Le Guin’s style, exploring themes such as Taoism, capitalism, anarchism, Marxism, and utopianism (the original title was The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia). It takes place in the universe of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin’s galactic federation in which many of her stories are set. It’s a philosophical exploration of two worlds: a wealthy planet of elites, its satellite on which private property does not exist, and a physicist whose dream is to bridge these two planets with a device that enables faster-than-light communication.

by William Gibson, pub. 1993

This novel gets a lot of things right about the future: televangelists leading people to their deaths; pandemics and vaccines; the oatmeal-colored palette that rich people love, which William Gibson aptly terms “Aggressive Retro Seventies”; augmented reality face filters; and the subject of the novel, glasses that give the viewer access to an information landscape (which basically exist now).

But my favorite thing about Virtual Light is how funny and how dry it is. I think there’s a lot of demand for science fiction to be sleek and cool, and Gibson outright rejects this trope. His novels, including Neuromancer, get at the heart of cyberpunk – where class warfare intersects the information age.

by Ursula K. Le Guin, pub. 1969

Published in 1969, this novel is one of the most celebrated epics in all of sci-fi, exploring themes such as space exploration and future history in one of the most ambitious projects of world-building ever written.

But what makes The Left Hand of Darkness visionary is its destruction of the gender binary. Gethen, also known as Winter, is a planet home to people who shift between mother and father, woman and man. Fundamentally, this is a book about balance between lightness and darkness, between mythology and truth.

by Gene Wolfe, pub. 1980

This gothic and seedy epic, set on a dying earth, spans three volumes of very difficult prose. Unreliable narrators and word play are Gene Wolfe’s signatures, earning him a following that has created dictionaries and podcasts to shaman the reader through the experience.

by CLAMP, pub. 2000

Chobits is an eight-volume manga about androids called “Persocoms.” Although often remembered as the first dirty manga millennial anime fans read, Chobits is a true science fiction story: interweaving elements of artificial intelligence, digital loneliness, and the ubiquity of computers. It’s also incredibly beautiful.

by Nnedi Okorafor, pub. 2015

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Binti is so moving and so exciting that it’s impossible to put down. In fact, I was downright sad to finish this trilogy – I would follow Binti’s story through all of spacetime. Ursula K. Le Guin says it best: “There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.”

by Ted Chiang, pub. 2002

Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories embodies the essence of speculative fiction, breaking out of the typical parameters of sci-fi. This book explores time travel, free will, social media, and more. Stories of your Life eventually became the movie Arrival.

by Neal Stephenson, pub. 1992

Required reading for a lot of Silicon Valley companies, Snow Crash pioneered the use of the word “avatar” as a digital representation of self on the web, as well as the name of the “Metaverse” for the digital plane. This book is a highly stylized, hyperactive cyberpunk book that Neuromancer fans will enjoy. Trigger warning for sexual assault.

by Gene Wolfe, pub. 1992

A collection of short speculative fiction stories. In one tale published in 1970, a social media mogul faces a congressional trial for the economic and moral implications of online matchmaking – a story that eerily foreshadows Mark Zuckerberg’s (Facebook/Meta) congressional hearings nearly fifty years later. Other stories feel much more limited by gender stereotypes.