Science Fiction Books

Long before science fiction had a name, a handful of 19th-century writers were already asking its defining question: what happens when technology outruns the people using it. This shelf covers the genre's founding decades — H.G. Wells imagining alien invasion and time travel before either concept existed in popular culture, Jules Verne predicting submarines with startling technical accuracy, and Mary Shelley writing what's widely credited as the first science fiction novel over a century before the genre had a label. None of these books have the vocabulary of modern sci-fi — no robots, no computers — but the core move is identical: take one scientific idea seriously and follow it to its most unsettling conclusion. If you've only encountered these stories through movie adaptations, the source material is usually stranger and more skeptical of progress than the films let on.

Where to start

The war of the worlds

The alien invasion story that invented almost every trope the genre still uses.

Where to start

The Time Machine

Short, fast-moving, and the reason 'time machine' is a phrase everyone understands.

Where to start

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

Captain Nemo and an electric submarine, imagined decades before either existed.

13 books total in this collection, free to read with synchronized LibriVox audio.