Reading list
Classic science fiction books that started it all
Almost every big idea in science fiction has a first book, and most of those first books are now free. Time travel, alien invasion, the robot uprising, the surveillance state and the internet all appeared between 1818 and 1930, written by people who had seen the telephone arrive and wondered what came next.
18 books, all free to read
This list ranks them by how well they still read, with a note on which idea each one gave the genre.
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1. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
A scientist builds a man and then abandons him. The first science fiction novel, and still the best on what we owe what we make.
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2. The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 and finds humanity split in two. Time travel, in a hundred pages.
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3. The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells
Martians land in Surrey and nothing we have can stop them. The alien invasion, invented.
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4. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
A citizen of a glass city with numbers for names starts to dream. The dystopia Orwell and Huxley both read first.
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5. R.U.R.
by Karel Čapek
The play that gave us the word robot, about manufactured workers who decide they no longer need us.
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6. Short Fiction with The Machine Stops
by E. M. Forster
Written in 1909: people live alone in cells, talk through screens and worship the system that serves them. Uncomfortably close.
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7. The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H. G. Wells
A shipwrecked man on an island where a scientist makes people out of animals. Wells at his darkest.
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8. The Invisible Man
by H. G. Wells
A scientist makes himself invisible and finds it is mostly cold and lonely. Then he gets angry.
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9. Flatland
by Edwin A. Abbott
A square in a two-dimensional world is visited by a sphere. A math lesson and a satire, and short.
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10. Herland
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Three men find a country of women that has done perfectly well without them for two thousand years. Funny and sharp.
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11. From the Earth to the Moon
by Jules Verne
A gun club in Baltimore decides to fire a shell at the Moon, with people in it. Verne a century early.
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12. A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Civil War veteran wakes up on Mars. The planetary romance that inspired a century of space opera.
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13. The Last Man
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley's other great book: a plague in the 2090s and the last survivor of humanity.
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14. At the Mountains of Madness
by H. P. Lovecraft
An Antarctic expedition finds a dead city older than humanity. Cosmic horror meets science fiction.
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15. The First Men in the Moon
by H. G. Wells
A scientist invents a gravity-blocking material and two men ride it to the Moon, where something lives.
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16. The Iron Heel
by Jack London
Written in 1908, a future America run by an oligarchy. Jack London's angry, prophetic dystopia.
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17. Metropolis
by Thea von Harbou
The novel behind the film: a city of towers above and workers below, and a robot made in a woman's image.
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18. Erewhon
by Samuel Butler
A traveller finds a land where machines are banned in case they evolve. The first warning about machine intelligence.
Read it as a path: Science fiction beginnings
Robots, time travel, Martians and dystopia: every big idea, in its first book.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.