A Reader's Map of Science Fiction: Eight Places to Start

Science fiction is less a single genre than a country with many regions. A reader who loved one book may hate another shelved right next to it, because a story about the physics of a stranded astronaut and a story about galactic empires have very little in common beyond the spaceships.

This map covers eight of the main regions, with a short history of each and one book to start with. It is not a ranking, just a way to find the kind of science fiction you will actually enjoy.

Where it all began

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, is often credited as the first true science fiction novel, because its marvel comes from science rather than magic; some go back much further, to Lucian's A True Story in the second century. Our piece on how Shelley wrote Frankenstein tells that story.

The genre got its name in the twentieth century. Hugo Gernsback coined the word scientifiction in 1916, and in 1926 he launched Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, whose first cover is the picture at the top of this page. The pulp magazines that followed shaped the genre for decades.

1. Hard science fiction

Hard SF is science fiction with a high concern for scientific accuracy and logic: stories that follow known physical laws and avoid anything that looks like magic. The term was first used in print in 1957 by the critic P. Schuyler Miller, in a review in Astounding Science Fiction.

Classic examples include Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Start with Andy Weir's The Martian, about an astronaut stranded on Mars who has to science his way home. It is funny, fast and rigorous.

2. Space opera

Space opera is the big canvas: epic adventures across space, where faster-than-light travel is normal and the stakes involve empires, wars and alien civilisations. The fan writer Wilson Tucker coined the term in 1941 as an insult, for tired, formulaic spaceship stories. E. E. Smith's The Skylark of Space, from 1928, is often called the first great example.

Star Wars made the form a popular phenomenon, and from the 1970s and 1980s a new space opera, darker and more scientifically careful, grew up around writers such as Iain M. Banks and later Ann Leckie. Start with Frank Herbert's Dune, or with the first Expanse novel by James S. A. Corey. Our guide to hard SF versus space opera compares the two.

3. Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is set in dystopian futures where advanced technology sits beside poverty and crime, often summed up as high tech and low life. The word comes from a short story by Bruce Bethke, written in 1980 and published in Amazing Stories in 1983. Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, based on a Philip K. Dick novel, gave the genre its look.

Start with William Gibson's Neuromancer, published in 1984. Gibson's first novel won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, a rare triple, and it helped define what cyberpunk would be. Its vision of hackers, corporations and networked minds still shapes how we imagine the future of computers.

4. Dystopia

Dystopian fiction imagines societies gone wrong, usually through control, surveillance or the loss of freedom. It is one of the forms of science fiction most often read outside the genre, and many of its classics are school set texts.

Start with one of the first: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, published in 1924, about a future state where people have numbers instead of names and live in glass apartments under constant watch. It was a direct influence on later dystopias and is shorter and stranger than most of them.

5. Time travel

Time travel stories ask what would happen if the past or future could be visited, and they range from adventure to philosophy. One of the earliest time machines appears in El anacronópete, by the Spanish writer Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau, published in 1887.

Start with H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, from 1895, the short novel that gave us the phrase itself. It is less about gadgets than about where humanity is heading, and our guide to The Time Machine explains why its ending still unsettles readers.

6. Military science fiction

Military SF follows soldiers and wars in the future, from the experience of combat to the politics behind it. It often explores how technology changes fighting, and what it does to the people who fight.

Start with Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, published in 1959, which introduced the idea of the powered armour suit that has appeared in countless books, films and games since. It is also a provocative book about citizenship and service that readers still argue about.

7. The end of the world

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction imagines the collapse of civilisation and what comes after. It ranges from plagues and wars to slow environmental disaster, and it has been a constant presence in the genre since its earliest days.

An early milestone comes from Mary Shelley again: her 1826 novel The Last Man, about a plague that wipes out humanity. It is a slower read than modern examples, but it shows how old the genre's fear of an empty Earth really is.

8. The Golden Age classics

The period from 1937, when John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, to around 1946 is called the Golden Age of science fiction. Its stories celebrated science and progress, and its writers built ideas that the rest of the genre still uses. In the 1960s and 1970s, the New Wave reacted against it with experimental, more literary work.

Start with Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, about a mathematician who predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows. The series won a one-off Hugo Award for best all-time series. More classics are in our list of classic science fiction.

Finding your region

If you like puzzles and real science, try hard SF. If you want scale and adventure, try space opera. If you like dark cities and technology gone wrong, try cyberpunk; if politics and warnings, dystopia. The regions overlap constantly, and many of the best books sit on the borders.

Science fiction also keeps widening. In 2015 Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem became the first novel by an Asian writer to win the Hugo for best novel, a sign of how global the genre has become. Whichever region you start in, the map keeps growing.