It’s also an elegy for Smith’s father, who worked on the Hubble telescope, and a dizzying exploration of the pains, joys, anxieties, and heroes of our own earthbound lives.ĭune, Frank Herbert, 1965. Poet Laureate deftly weaves together sci-fi references from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection from a former U.S. From the streets of a very different Oxford, England, to a grassland planet inhabited by lyrical sort-of-elephants, the worlds Pullman creates are both stunningly inventive and nearly real enough to touch.
In this sweeping trilogy, a young girl and her animal-shaped soul-companion set off to rescue a friend-unwittingly igniting a chain of events that carry them across multiple parallel universes.
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman, 1995–2000. On another, it pierces to the heart of why we read-and travel-in the first place: to recognize ourselves in the unfamiliar, to recognize the unfamiliar in ourselves. On one level, the novel follows the travels of an envoy sent to invite the planet of Winter to join an intergalactic confederation of worlds. No less groundbreaking now than it was a half-century ago, this slim volume-widely regarded as one of the best works by an undisputed master of the craft-explores the dualities of loneliness and intimacy, gender and self, past and present. Here are some of our picks-the latest installment in our ongoing Around the World in Books series-that transport you to enchanted realms, other planets, or completely recast corners of Earth. As the late, great sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury said: “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself.” Whatever the label, these stories allow us to imagine other places, other times, and take trips that go beyond our wildest dreams. But the line can be hard to draw, and both genres are often grouped under the umbrella of speculative fiction. Purists say sci-fi must rely on, well, science, and extrapolate from elements of real life fantasy veers toward supernatural beings and surreal settings. Superfans love to argue about the difference between sci-fi and fantasy.
But they all venture into worlds, towns, or even cyberspaces that are either subtly or radically different from our own. Their heroes might be interstellar princes or a Mexican girl who hangs out with Maya gods. Science fiction and fantasy books rocket us to places that range from vaguely familiar to fantastically foreign.
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