16 Sci Fi Books for Beginners, Ordered by Difficulty

Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after his crew evacuates in a storm and writes him off as dead. What follows is a survival diary kept by a man who stays funny because panic is not a usable option. He needs water, food and a radio, and he solves each one with chemistry, duct tape and a running commentary on his crewmates' taste in music. The science is solid enough that engineers still argue about it online, but you never have to follow the maths to enjoy the book. Skip a formula, keep reading, nothing is lost. Weir put it out himself in 2011 before a publisher came for it.

Ryland Grace comes round on a ship millions of kilometres from home, with two dead crewmates and a brain that has misplaced his own name. His memory returns in flashbacks while the present-day problem gets worse: something is eating the sun and Earth has a few decades left. Then, about a third of the way in, the book does something I refuse to spoil, except to say it turns a survival puzzle into the warmest friendship story I have read in years. Same engineering pleasure as The Martian, higher stakes, more heart.

Jason Dessen teaches physics at a small college, has a wife he loves and a son he likes, and quietly wonders about the career he traded away. One night a masked man who knows his name abducts him, and he wakes in a laboratory where strangers congratulate him on an experiment he never ran. The chase that follows moves at thriller speed, but the engine underneath it is the question you have probably asked yourself at two in the morning about the road you did not take.

Earth has survived two attacks by an alien species and is now breeding commanders for the third. Ender Wiggin is small, brilliant and deliberately kept isolated by adults who believe loneliness produces better strategists. Most of the novel is him playing war games in a zero-gravity room against older boys, and Card writes those games so clearly that you start thinking in three dimensions yourself. The tone is cold, the cruelty done to children is real and constant, and the last thirty pages rearrange everything you thought you were reading.

Arthur Dent's house is being knocked down on the same morning the planet is, which tells you the scale of joke Adams is working at. His friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien researcher, and the two of them hitch a ride off Earth minutes before it goes. What follows is less a plot than a sequence of superb digressions about bureaucracy, depression, mice, whales and the number forty-two. The comedy is dry, thoroughly English, and funnier than almost anything published this year.

Charlie Gordon is thirty-two, works in a bakery, and wants to be smart more than he wants anything else in the world. Scientists who have already run their procedure on a mouse called Algernon choose him for the first human trial. The entire novel is Charlie's own progress reports, so the spelling, the punctuation and the sentence length all change as his mind changes, which means the shape of the book tells the story alongside the plot. It is short, it looks simple, and it will take something out of you.

Guy Montag burns books for a living in an America that decided reading made people unhappy. His wife spends her days with wall-sized screens and little shells in her ears, a detail Bradbury wrote in 1953 that now reads like a description of most of our evenings. Then a girl on his street asks whether he is actually happy, and the question refuses to leave him alone. The prose runs hot and strange, closer to poetry than to plot, and the whole thing is short enough for two sittings.

Kathy narrates her childhood at Hailsham, a school in the English countryside with peculiar rules about art, health and the future. She tells it the way people actually tell you about school: small jealousies, a lost cassette tape, a friendship triangle that keeps rearranging itself. The science fiction sits underneath all of it, and Ishiguro lets you work out the truth early instead of saving it for a reveal. The horror comes from how calmly everyone involved accepts the arrangement.

It opens with an actor dying on stage during King Lear on the night a pandemic reaches Toronto. Then the book splits in two: one thread follows the last normal week on Earth, the other follows a caravan of musicians and actors walking between settlements two decades later. Mandel cares about what people keep rather than how they die, so there are more conversations about comic books and orchestras than there are gunfights. Reading it after 2020 is a strange experience, and mostly a gentle one.

Shalini's city has arranged itself into communities behind walls, each one policed for purity, with the poor living in the gaps between. She married outside her group, and on her daughter Leila's third birthday everything is taken from her. The novel follows her search through camps and colonies while she remembers the years that led there. Akbar builds his future entirely out of things already visible in Indian cities: gated societies, water queues, mountains of garbage, and the everyday snobbery of people who consider themselves liberal.

Binti is the first of her people offered a place at Oomza University, and accepting it means leaving a family who will treat the decision as betrayal. She carries her culture with her, from the otjize clay on her skin to the mathematics she does to steady her nerves. Partway through the journey her ship is boarded by the Meduse, and the story becomes a negotiation conducted by a teenager armed with nothing but her hands and her manners. It runs about ninety pages, so it fits inside one evening.

Dana is unpacking boxes in her new apartment when she is yanked across time to a river in antebellum Maryland where a child is drowning. She saves him, snaps home, and learns the rules the hard way: she returns whenever he is in danger, she stays until her own life is threatened, and the boy turns out to be her ancestor. Butler wastes no energy explaining the mechanism, because the mechanism is not the subject. The plantation is, and a modern woman with a modern education has to survive there as property.

A scientist's experiment goes wrong and a virus designed to raise monkeys into intelligence lands on spiders instead. The novel then runs two clocks. On the planet, generation after generation of spiders build language, religion and technology. In space, the last humans wake from cold sleep every few centuries to make progressively worse decisions. Tchaikovsky writes the spiders as engineers rather than monsters, and somewhere in the middle you will notice you are rooting for them over your own species.

Genly Ai is sent to Gethen, a world locked in winter, to invite it into a federation of planets. Gethenians take on sex only for a few days each month, so their society has no wars fought over manhood and none of the assumptions Genly knows how to read. He misreads the politics, distrusts the one person genuinely helping him, and ends up on a months-long walk across a glacier with that same man. That walk is among the finest sequences anyone has written in this genre.

It opens during the Cultural Revolution with a physicist beaten to death in front of his daughter, and that daughter grows up to work at a secret radio installation pointed at the sky. Decades later scientists are killing themselves, physics experiments are returning nonsense, and a nanomaterials researcher is drawn into an investigation that runs through a virtual reality game set on a planet with three suns. The scale keeps widening until the human characters feel small, which is precisely Liu's argument. First published in China in 2008, in English in 2014.

Paul Atreides moves with his family to Arrakis, a planet of sand, enormous worms and a drug called spice that makes interstellar travel possible. The politics are Byzantine, the ecology is worked out down to the last drop of recycled water, and the religion humming underneath everything was planted deliberately, generations earlier. Herbert writes half the book inside people's heads, so you read their calculations alongside their words. There is a glossary at the back and you will be using it.