For us, a good story is a must in science fiction. Give us a bold, exciting, well-plotted tale; give us characters we can love and those we'll loathe; give us something that feels fantastic and also possible. If you can give us all this, we'll forgive you much else. That said...

The following literary sci-fi picks have nothing to forgive. They deliver compelling stories and characters and also feature truly excellent writing. This list is the result of a poll we conducted recently in the Discover Sci-Fi Readers & Fans Facebook Group, and naturally, there are many more that could have been added to this list, but if you're looking for a memorable literary sci-fi read, it's a great place to start.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Read Fahrenheit 451 here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.”

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Read Slaughterhouse-Five here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook

The World of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer

His past a mystery and his present unbearably mundane, Robert Wolff is simply trying to buy a new house in Arizona when he stumbles upon a secret doorway through space and time and enters the World of Tiers. Made up of ascending levels of jungles, plains, medieval cities, and, at the top, a Garden of Eden, and populated by fantastical creatures, from nymphs and centaurs to merpeople and strange amalgams nonexistent on Earth, it’s beyond anything Wolff could have imagined in his previous humdrum existence. And when his youth is restored in the bargain, it seems he’s truly found paradise.

But there are dark forces in this new world, and Wolff is plunged into an epic quest up through the tiers, accompanied by Paul Janus Finnegan, another earthling, now known as Kickaha. Wolff’s journey to find Jadawin, the Lord of this world, will lead to answers about his own identity—and determine his fate.

Wolff and Kickaha will face off against feuding Lords—who hold the power to control private worlds of their own design—and the depraved Bellers. Devices originally created in the biolabs of the Lords, the Bellers are now conscious entities waging war on the Lords and their “pocket universes.” As they infiltrate the bodies of creatures throughout the World of Tiers and hunt down the Earth-born, the survival of all the worlds hinges upon the battle between the strangers from Earth and enemies disguised as their allies.

This omnibus contains the author’s preferred text, reprinted from the limited edition volumes published by Phantasia Press.

Get your copy of The World of Tiers here on Amazon.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 

Read Doomsday Book  here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Roadis the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

 Grab The Road here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

A World Out of Time by Larry Niven

After 200 years in cryosleep, Jaybee Corbell awakens to find that his mind has been downloaded to another body and he's in servitude to a harsh future State. After his escape via a spaceship, he traverses such vast distances--with accompanying time dilations--that he returns to Earth 3 million years later to discover a world wholly alien to the one he'd left. A.E. van Vogt wrote, "This fantastic novel is a mix of Niven hard science and a time-travel concept to boggle the mind."

Get your copy of A World Out of Time here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Dive into The Left Hand of Darkness here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.”

Dive into A Clockwork Orange here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

What if humans discovered the secret to prolonged life?

Francis Saxover and Diana Brackley, two biochemists investigating a rare lichen, separately discover that it has a remarkable property: It slows the aging process almost to a halt. Francis, realizing the horrifying implications of an ever-youthful wealthy elite, decides to keep his findings a secret. But the younger and more daring Diana sees an opportunity to overturn the male status quo and free women from the career-versus-children binary—in short, a chance to remake the world.

Get your copy of Trouble with Lichen here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling.

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.

These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

Start reading Stand on Zanzibar here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.

Grab Cat's Cradle  here on Amazon. Also available on audiobook.

Have you read any of these exceptional literary sci-fi reads? Which ones will make their way into your (e)bookshelf or into your ears? Have a personal favorite that didn't appear on our list? Give it a shout out in the comments here, or over in the Discover Sci-Fi Facebook group! 

*All book-related copy in this post was pulled from Amazon, Goodreads & Wikipedia, unless otherwise credited.