The 222 Greatest Works of Science Fiction

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The great thing about Jules Verne's stories of fantastic voyages is that they don't come across as fantastic. At least while we're reading, we believe we could fly across the world in a balloon, ride a rocket to the moon.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It's an irony of sorts that Edward Bulwer-Lytton's most influential book may be his last, one of his shortest, written in a genre different from everything else he had done to that point, and not even published under his own.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Flatland is a curiosity. This novella, fable, allegory, satire or math lesson—whatever it's supposed to be—is often counted as a classic science fiction work. From a bare description of Flatland, I could see why. A hypothetical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The surprising thing about Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, if you had previously known the Jekyll and Hyde character only indirectly through popular culture, is that it's so brief. Not only is the novella short.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If your first exposure to Mark Twain's time travel tale was the Disney or other screen adaptations, you may be shocked by your reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Shocked by how rough.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

How strange that the most affecting characters Asimov ever created were robots. Perhaps it's the same phenomenon we find in film and television dramas in which synthetic creatures like Frankenstein's monster and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

You could say Isaac Asimov always was a mystery writer. His early science fiction works were often light on action as his brainy, talkative characters sought answers to practical questions. Why did that robot act contrary.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If you like straightforward story-telling with characters well fleshed out, in a book you can put down and pick up later to continue without losing the thread—then you're going to hate The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Dune's timing was perfect. Launched in the mid-sixties around the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Frank Herbert's ecology-conscious science fiction novel and its many sequels and adaptation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If The Crystal World were a typical science fiction novel about an impending global disaster, it'd have scientists and military heroes working against the clock trying to stop the apocalypse. In J.G. Ballard's world....Critique • Quotes • Buy

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If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The sequel to Ender's Game picks up three thousand years later on a distant planet where humans have run into another potentially dangerous alien species with some mysterious consequences. Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

What is this? You could waste a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union is. Some people have clearly decided. The science fiction community has claimed Michael Chabon's 2007.... Critique • Quotes • Buy