50 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time - Esquire
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Wars, it's a medium where anything goes and nothing is off limits. Now, with the release of Dune: Part Two, the canon of ...
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Science Fiction and cinema have gone hand in hand since the birth of moving pictures. Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon was made all the way back in 1902. And since then, <anchor>sci-fi</anchor> movies have continued to hold a mirror to our most utopian dreams and most dystopian nightmares. With big, knotty “what if” scenarios that mix speculative, brave-new-world storytelling and envelope-pushing visual imagery, no movie genre packs the same allegorical power as sci-fi. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Wars, it’s a medium where anything goes and nothing is off limits. Now, with the release of Dune: Part Two, the canon of classic sci-fi films has a new member. But where does Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster sequel rank on Esquire’s list of the 50 greatest sci-fi movies of all time? Read on to find out…
The Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 (So Far)
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# The Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 (So Far)

This year’s best sci-fi outings are full of questions about how we might live differently with one another, on our troubled planet or in the furthest reaches of space.

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The opening page of Malka Older’s new book says simply, “There are other ways to live.” That idea carries through so many of this year’s best science-fiction books, which are full of questions about how we might live differently with one another, on our troubled planet or in the furthest reaches of space. Science fiction, as Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, is not predictive but descriptive, and what contemporary science-fiction authors are so often describing is a world that seems to be less and less built for humans to thrive in it. We are still close enough to 2020 that we’re reading books that have their roots in that particularly tumultuous year—roots that dig deep into surveillance, capitalism, protest, inequity, and failures to learn from the past.

But there are other worlds, other ways to thrive—and other ways to replicate humanity’s worst failings, too. This year’s best books don’t shy away from who we’ve been and who we are, but they also brim with a fierce curiosity about who we might become. As Martin MacInnes writes in the glorious In Ascension, “The original science-fiction story—the impossible adventure full of wonder and awe—was merely the existence of the species, all the movements she and her sister and their family and every other living person had shared.”

Below, listed in publication order, are our favorite science-fiction books of the year (so far). Watch this space for updates; we’ll continue adding to our list as the year unfolds.

1

## In Universes, by Emet North

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Discontented Raffi spends their days searching for dark matter and hanging around Britt, an effortlessly cool sculptor with whom Raffi went to school. They didn’t know each other as kids, but what if they had? From that question, North’s moving, fracturing debut takes off, exploring increasingly strange versions of Raffi’s world. In one story, aliens possess wildlife, and Raffi’s sometimes-friend, sometimes-wife Kay taxidermies dead neighbors. In other versions, women transform into clusters of animals, a grieving Raffi builds a House of Discontent, and there is something very wrong with the water in a hotel shower. “There are some things in the universe you can only find by looking away from them,” Raffi thinks at the start. As the stories go on, Raffi inches closer and closer to the love and hope and grief that drive them—in any universe. In elegant, precise prose, North balances the loss and uncertainty of Raffi’s varied existences with tenderness and sheer possibility. There are so many ways to be, and to love, and to find other versions of ourselves—even here, in our own singular universe.

2

## The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

Now 38% Off

Flawlessly paced and brazenly genre mixing, Kaliane Bradley’s debut is at once a spy thriller, a time-travel tale, a romance, and a story with room to consider the climate crisis, imperialism, grief, and the weight of history. An unnamed British Cambodian government employee gets herself a new job at the Ministry of Time, where she serves as a “bridge” to an expat—a man not from a different country but from a different century. Graham Gore died during a doomed Arctic expedition, or he would have had the ministry not swooped in before his demise. The time travel is handled solidly, but Bradley is most interested in the crackling relationships among the Ministry’s employees and expats—and, naturally, in the slow-burning connection between her narrator and handsome, gentlemanly Gore, who is delightfully flustered by near-future life. Fun, funny, sharp, and ridiculously, compulsively readable, Bradley’s novel is also poignant and wise, a thriller full of questions about how we live both now and within the great span of human history.

3

## Archangels of Funk, by Andrea Hairston

Hairston’s latest is an absolute joy of a novel—a reminder that even if the world as we know it ends, people will find each other, make art, remember, and move forward. In her future, there are nostalgia militias and darknet lords and smarmy guys with way too much money, but there is also brilliant former coder Cinnamon Jones, who has a festival to run. The sprawling Next World Festival is her responsibility, but she doesn’t do it alone. She has the help of her Circus-Bots, AI creations trained on the memories of her ancestors; two extraordinary border collies; Baron Taiwo, a veteran with unusual abilities; and a whole Ghost Mall full of community leaders and formerly ne’er-do-well teens. Science fiction, as Hairston demonstrates, isn’t just aliens and space; it’s also the technology of living, the tools we use to shape the world, and it exists alongside nature and community and spirits and all the messy lost and found bits that make up a life.

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4

## The Stardust Grail, by Yume Kitasei

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Grad student Maya Hoshimoto is a former thief, and a very good one, apart from that one job that went really, disastrously awry. But she doesn’t do that anymore—until, of course, she does. When her dear alien friend Auncle appears and asks her to come back for one (last) job, Maya can’t say no. The future of Auncle’s species is at stake, and so is humanity’s future among the stars. Throw in space cops, a virus that gives Maya visions (and migraines), collapsing fast-travel nodes, a robot in search of his own personality, deadly planets, and an appreciation for good noodles, and you have the stuff of a first-rate space-adventure heist. But Kitasei also has a lot to say about culture clashes, colonization, artifact theft, the nature of personhood, injustice, greed, morality, and so much more—all of it beautifully imagined, from the details of Auncle’s ship to the surprisingly scary final sequence. The Stardust Grail is a marvelous found-family quest that’s deeply interested in the complexities of understanding other people, whether they’re the same species or unfathomably alien.

5

## Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

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Less than a year after his phenomenal debut, The Saint of Bright Doors, Chandrasekera follows that epic and astonishing novel with a book even more epic and even more astonishing. Rakesfall is mythic, sweeping, and revolutionary in both subject and telling; it works, as Saint did, on multiple levels. (More levels than a reader is likely to grasp in one reading.) To try to briefly summarize it is to inevitably fail, but here I go. It follows two (-ish) beings as they recur, from a jungle childhood to the distant future of the earth, colliding and cursed and connected, cycling through time. “In every world, I’ll look for the revolution,” says one of them early on, and they proceed to do just that, moving through eras as “the red wheel” turns. Chandrasekera wraps vivid stories within stories (at one point there’s a play), tangles with ghosts and monsters, and writes with fluid, breathtaking beauty about the ugliest cruelties and most glorious moments of grace that this or any future world has to offer.

6

## Pink Slime, by Fernanda Trías (translated by Heather Cleary)

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Trías conjures a quietly relentless climate disaster in Pink Slime, which takes its name from a grotesque extruded meat product. An unnamed narrator is one of the last people living in her city, which is wrapped in fog when it’s not being scoured by a deadly red wind. Her ex walked out in it but didn’t die; he is in Clinics, recuperating. When she isn’t checking in on him, she’s visiting her mother, who moved inland to escape the wind, or taking care of a little boy named Mauro, who suffers from a syndrome that leaves him endlessly hungry and unable to discern what’s food and what isn’t. No one is doing well, and maybe no one has been doing well for a while. “The beginning is never the beginning,” Trías writes. “What we often mistake for the beginning is just the moment we realize something has changed.” Evocative, dreamlike, and immersive, Pink Slime is unnervingly effective at depicting the class-divided reaction to disaster, the claustrophobia of a stilled city, and the way things might change, and change some more, and slowly become unlivable. The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.

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7

## The Mercy of Gods, by James S.A. Corey

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This series-starting novel from the author of The Expanse is pointed, powerful, and simply fantastic. On a distant planet called Anjiin, a human population faces an impossibly strong colonizing force: the Carryx, who subjugate alien species if they are useful—and destroy those that are not. A group of brilliant scientists find themselves, along with the rest of Anjiin’s elite, taken to a Carryx world and given a task. Succeed and they earn a role in the empire. Fail and humanity dies. The humans divide by their reaction to servitude: Some want to live, some want to fight, and some want more time to choose, more information, more of a chance. Only a few begin to understand the levels to the game they’re unwillingly playing. The Mercy of Gods slowly spins a rich and brutal tale that begins to look an awful lot like a mirror. What are the Carryx doing that humanity under capitalism has not done to other species? Doesn’t our world require that people be useful in order to earn a living? What terrible compromises might a person make in order to try to break out of—or break—such a system?

8

## Glass Houses, by Madeline Ashby

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Ashby effortlessly melds a near-future tech thriller with sharp-toothed commentary about power, misogyny, surveillance technology, and what it takes to move through a world that embraces these things. Kristen is the chief emotional manager (no, really) for a tech start-up called—brace yourself—Wuv. Its founder, billionaire orphan tech bro Sumter Williams, intends to create an app that can quantify emotion. Surely nothing could possibly go wrong! But things have already gone deeply wrong as the book opens: Kristen, Sumter, and the surviving members of their team have endured a terrible plane crash onto an island that is deserted, apart from a very high-tech glass box of a house that behaves differently for different members of their party. Early on, Ashby begins dropping hints that not everything on the island, or in Kristen’s story, is quite what it seems. (For one thing, a Wuv employee’s suicide is really quite fishy.) Perfectly paced revelations and a constant undercurrent of justified rage propel Glass Houses to a finale that’s almost as disturbing as it is satisfying.

9

## Time’s Agent, by Brenda Peynado

If humans were offered the possibility of another livable universe—one with a planet we hadn’t yet screwed up—what would we do to take it? What powers would claim dominance in another world; what people, cultures, and species would be crushed in the process? In Peynado’s debut novella, pocket worlds exist. Most are small, but Universe Two might be out there. In the process of exploring the pocket worlds, archaeologist Raquel falls into one that steals 40 years from her in a blink (time does its own thing in these little worlds). The world she steps back into has no place for her: Her daughter is gone, her wife is grieving in her own world (literally), and pocket worlds are now the domain of corporations that aim to suck them dry. Raquel’s knowledge of Dominican history informs both her approach to the pocket worlds and her horror at the future’s misuse of them, and Peynado makes her grief and fury heart-wrenchingly clear. This layered and beautiful story bracingly addresses climate change, consumerism, colonialism, and time—and yet retains a glimmering, vital sense of hope that the future can still be better.

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10

## New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Award-winning editor Strahan’s third space-opera anthology pulls together 15 stories published since 2012. As Strahan notes in his introduction, space opera is forever changing, retaining its basics (space adventure on a grand scale) while adjusting its focus. The current shift is toward storytelling that, he writes, “is more open, more diverse, has different points of view to present, and powerfully and critically examines the political underpinnings of the stories.” You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of what that looks like than these evocative, inventive tales. Standouts include Tobias S. Buckell’s clever (and cleverly titled) robot story “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”; T. Kingfisher’s darkly gorgeous, Hugo-winning “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”; Becky Chambers’s “A Good Heretic,” set in the Wayfinders universe; and Karin Tidbeck’s “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir,” which feels like an elegy for lost species. But it’s Seth Dickinson’s “Morrigan in the Sunglare” that immediately sent me in search of more stories about the title character. Kinetic and taut, it’s a character-driven piece about diving into or avoiding conflict, and like the rest of these stories, it may make you want to seek out everything else the author has ever written.

11

## Your Utopia, by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur)

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Bora Chung’s impressive second collection sets its tone with its title: If a utopia is yours, can it be shared? Can it be anyone else’s? There’s a melancholy and a wryness to these stories, in which lonely people (or other beings) try to connect, or protect, or simply survive. In “The End of the Voyage,” the urge to consume dooms humanity. In “A Song for Sleep,” an AI elevator does its best to care for a resident of its building. The elevator seems kind, but its knowledge of the building’s inhabitants is due to an alarming level of surveillance. Through the prism of her singular imagination, Chung looks sharply at the ways the world we’ve made doesn’t suit us: Corporate greed is a frequent enemy, whether it’s focused on controlling the natural world (“Seed”) or extending its own existence (“The Center for Immortality Research”). These are stories to sit with, to read one at a time and savor.

12

## The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, by Malka Older

The second volume in Malka Older’s utterly delightful Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series finds Mossa searching for a missing student—a case that expands to include over a dozen missing people. The mystery is satisfying, but the heart of this story is the tentative and endearing relationship between Mossa and the academic Pleiti, the Watson to Mossa’s Holmes, who narrates the bulk of their tale. Older packs a ton into barely 200 pages: academic wrangling, space libertarians, the state of the distant and troubled earth, a visit to the moon Io, a trip on Giant’s fascinating railcars, and so much more. This is distinctly a cozy mystery but also a space opera in miniature. Part of what Older so beautifully illustrates is the way humanity might bring its history and culture—food, tea, language, rituals, fears—into the alien landscapes of space. You can read this one without reading the first book, The Mimicking of Known Successes, but why deprive yourself?

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13

## In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

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MacInnes’s third novel—long-listed for last year’s Booker Prize—is simply like nothing else I’ve ever read. In Ascension centers on Leigh, a marine biologist who spent a troubled childhood in Rotterdam before venturing far from home: to a distant island, to the depths of the ocean, to the Mojave Desert, and eventually to the stars. But that sounds so simple, and this book is expansively, engrossingly complex, meticulously observed and quietly moving. As Leigh’s work turns confidential and mysterious, involving strange phenomena that connect to her deep-sea adventure, MacInnes details her focus on algae with the same care and consideration that he uses to depict her relationship with her mother, her sister, her colleagues, and her world. This isn’t a book that offers anything approaching a tidy resolution. What it offers instead is the texture of an entire life, reflected and refracted by the lives around it. It’s as immersive and astonishing as the deep-sea dive Leigh takes, a journey through a familiar world made freshly, improbably new.

14

## Those Beyond the Wall, by Micaiah Johnson

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If this were a ranking of the most memorable characters of the year, Scales would be at the top. A mechanic by assignment but a killer by skill, she’s one of many lieutenants to the Emperor of Ashtown, a desert community that exists outside the walls of privileged Wiley City. Ashtown is not an easy place to live, even when you’re the emperor’s favorite. But when mangled bodies start appearing, no one is safe, and it will take the combined efforts of Scales, her least favorite colleague, a disgraced scientist, the emperor, and a worldwalker to save them—all of them. Johnson’s second book, a stand-alone set in the same world as her The Space Between Worlds, is fueled by the rage that comes from love. When you love a people, love a place, and that people and place are treated as lesser and disposable, rage is inevitable. (As Johnson writes in the author’s note, “Rage is a beacon calling out to others.”) Complicated, deadly, and absolutely full of secrets, Scales is one hell of a narrator, and her sharp, distinctive voice propels this story though desert, city, multiverse, and her own hidden history. Those Beyond the Wall is a novel about holding tight to community in the face of devastation, and it is a triumph.

15

## The Siege of Burning Grass, by Premee Mohamed

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The latest work from the astonishingly prolific Mohamed (who has three books out this year alone) is a visceral yet intimate story about violence, nationalism, and war. Injured, captured, and tortured by his own side in an endless conflict, the famous pacifist Alefret is sent on a mission to infiltrate an enemy city. With him is Qhudur, a fanatic who will do anything for victory. Mohamed’s bio-technical setting is vivid and unusual—trained medical wasps, floating cities, and lightspiders dot these pages—but the heart of her story is Alefret’s moral struggle. Would killing Qhudur, an act of violence, lead to peace? When does violence become a habit that a country cannot break? How can a person hold tight to their ideals even amid suffering? How can stories and myths help sustain us? But The Siege of Burning Grass isn’t just a thoughtful consideration of war and pacifism; it’s also a feat of world-building, moral complexity, and taut, precisely paced storytelling. After this, I’m ready to hunt down everything else Mohamed has ever written.

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16

## These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, by Izzy Wasserstein

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In post-climate-disaster America, in what’s left of Kansas City, a woman named Dora investigates a death in the anarchist commune to which she once belonged. She’s certain her ex didn’t overdose, but finding out what really happened isn’t going to be easy. Wasserstein excels at the near-future details of her SF-techno-mystery, but she shines even more when it comes to the unexpected connection between Dora and the person sent to kill her—a person who is wearing her pre-transition face. These Fragile Graces is at once a stylish noir and an exploration of identity, gender, selfhood, control, consent, and intimacy. Wasserstein more than pulls it off—everything here feels lived-in and real, from the details of the commune’s processes to the corporate powers that treat people as disposable or replaceable. Dora’s distinctive, terse voice is one I keep hearing in my head, long after the last page. Maybe, if we’re lucky, she’ll find more mysteries to solve.

17

## Floating Hotel, by Grace Curtis

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In her second novel, Curtis makes an impeccable balancing act look easy. Floating Hotel is, on the surface, a cozy sort of tale about the staff at the titular spaceship, the Grand Abeona Hotel, which endlessly traverses the same route, catering to wealthy people among the stars. Young, miserable Carl stows away on the hotel as a kid; decades later, he’s risen to the post of manager, now a gentle charmer with a soothing word for everyone. When a peculiar academic conference converges with the search for the Lamplighter (a seditious, anti-Empire figure whose broadsides appear between chapters), the fate of the hotel—and its endearing staff—is called into question. But Curtis doesn’t let the spies, codes, and mysteries take over the story; there’s still time for illicit movie nights and anxious musical performances. Floating Hotel is rich with kindness, with big-hearted characters from every corner of the ship, but it also has teeth, a working-class sensibility, and a rebellious heart. This one is a treat.

18

## Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead

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“Generation ship novel in verse” is a series of words I had never considered until I read Oliver K. Langmead’s ambitious and immersive Calypso. While the engineers slept, the crew of the Calypso experienced a schism. When Rochelle—whose role is to question Sigmund, the expedition’s leader—wakes, nothing is as she expects, and nothing goes as planned. Four narrators tell the tale: Rochelle, a woman of faith; Catherine, a biologist; the Herald, who relates the ship’s history; and Sigmund, whose narrative is largely set in his own past. Their voices take different shapes; the Herald’s words are squared off, blocky and challenging, while Catherine’s words bend and twist, branching outward more dramatically as she gets closer to the culmination of her role. In a stunning central chapter that’s part body horror and part triumphant act of creation, Catherine transforms, filling a planet with myriad forms of life. Outside of that section, Langmead’s verse creates a sense of spareness, of space unfilled, that echoes the loneliness Rochelle feels. Like so many generation ship stories, this is an elegantly told meditation on how we can’t leave ourselves behind. Any new world will be seeded with what we know, what we’ve learned, who we are, for better or for worse.

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19

## Lake of Souls, by Ann Leckie

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This complete collection of Leckie’s short fiction contains both science-fiction and fantasy stories, but the SF stories make up a full half of the book—and are unmissable. They range from flash fiction to a creation myth from the world of the Imperial Radch to “The Justified,” a haunting story about power, mortality, and choice. The title novelette follows a sentient crustacean—called a “lobster dog” by the anthropologist who crash-lands on its planet—as it leaves home, looking for answers about its world and existence. (I would read an entire novel about the lobster dogs, or about the bird-people who transmit their histories through songs.) Every one of these stories is masterfully told, but the standout is “She Commands Me and I Obey,” which depicts a moment of political turmoil through the eyes of a young monk watching a momentous sports game. Tense, affecting, and layered, it’s a perfect example of Leckie’s gift for knowing exactly the right perspective from which to tell her stories. A child, an elder, a guard on a ship’s journey through troubled space: It is a gift to spend time with these characters.

20

## The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain, by Sofia Samatar

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Samatar’s latest is a breathtaking novella that resonates like a new myth made of familiar materials. Deep in the bowels of a spaceship, a boy is imprisoned, linked to others by the chain around his ankle. A professor who wears a lighter anklet works to free him, to elevate him to the level of a student, to give him an opportunity. Neither of them have names, nor do the guards, nor the prophet who encourages the boy’s art. They are individuals but also archetypes, strong and aching, as they move through Samatar’s critical look at labor, exploitation, community, hierarchy, revolution, and worn-out narratives about acceptance and tolerance that do not allow space for real freedom. This story has its roots in academia, but it’s about any organization built to sustain itself at the expense of those who toil within it. Samatar’s gorgeous prose rings clear as a bell. There are no easy answers here, only a sense of possibility, of— as she puts it—“an invitation to exist in the cracks.”

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