The Ten Best SF(F) Books I Read in 2024

I was recently struck by a post online saying, “if I spent all of my time reading and never did anything else I would still never run out of amazing books to read and I think that is a really wonderful thing about humanity.” In 2024, I have read more classic SF books than ever, at a faster rate than ever before. I know I am only scratching the surface, and that is the wonderful thing about this genre.

It has been a little tricky to choose ten best books this year, and I’ve stretched my definition by including two fantasy novels. These books were published between 1959 and 1986. Between them they contain faster than light travel, superpowered clothes, matter transmission, androids, and a ghostly Mayan priestess. They are challenging, rewarding, entertaining reads - the best subset from the 90 or so books I will finish in 2024. 

Over the course of the year I have written at length about all ten of my picks, so you can find out more about them either in text or podcast form. If you have read these, or have recommendations of your own, I’d love to know. Later, there's brief roundup of my biggest disappointment of the year, some honourable mentions, and my plans for 2025. But now, in no particular order, is the list...

---

The Garments of Caean (1976) by Barrington J. Bayley

A tailor signs up with a rogue conman to plunder a crashed starship on a hostile world. Their goal: to recover unique and priceless cargo of an unusual kind - clothes. 

Encountering the work of Barrington J. Bayley has been a pleasure in 2024. A longtime friend and collaborator of Michael Moorcock, he wrote a string of wild and entertaining SF novels in the 1970s, and The Garments of Caean is a great example. At the core of the story is a beautiful suit which confers subtle but powerful abilities on the wearer. Bayley’s protagonist pursues a strange quest to discover the origin of this sartorial wonder, while a B-plot follows an odd war between the surviving factions from an earlier age of space exploration. Playful, irreverent, but also thought-provoking, this is a little-known ‘70s gem.

Tau Zero (1970) by Poul Anderson

A starship en route to settle the Beta Virginis system, 35 lightyears from Earth, encounters a malfunction: it can no longer stop accelerating. 

Poul Anderson wrote prolifically across various styles, including the influential fantasy The Broken Sword (1954) and the comic SF of The High Crusade (1960). Tau Zero has long been a cornerstone of hard SF, and rightly so. Here, Anderson uses his physics training to plausibly depict a starship which is accelerating in a frighteningly uncontrollable way. He captures well the “absolute night” of deep space, as well as the unsettling loneliness as eons pass the crew in a blink of an eye. The crew are surprisingly well-realised for a hard SF novel of this vintage.  A true “sense of wonder” classic.

Wolfbane (1959) by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

Earth has been stolen, and cast out into the stars by alien invaders. Some humans undergo a harrowing transformation, which they may be able to use to their advantage.

In 2024 I read most of the landmark collaborations between Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth - arguably one of the most important partnerships in the history of SF. While The Space Merchants (1952) is the best known, the one that most caught my imagination was Wolfbane. Here, the co-authors broke from the satirical, social SF template they had established, launching headlong into a bizarre dystopian future. The depiction of a chilling kind of cyborg hive-mind is startlingly ahead of its time for a novel published in 1959, and the implacable, pyramid-shaped alien machines are equally memorable. 

The Forge of God (1987) by Greg Bear

Multiple alien landings on Earth bring mixed messages. In time, people begin to prepare as best they can for the destruction of the planet.

In 2023, I had no hesitation at all in including Greg Bear’s brilliant Blood Music (1985) on my top ten list. In 2024, I feel quite similarly about The Forge of God. This is another equally inspiring and unsettling novel from Bear, who died in 2022 - and incidentally, was Poul Anderson’s son-in-law. The mystery of the alien incursions and the slow dawning of the knowledge that the world is doomed are handled equally well. For a story on such a large scale, The Forge of God has a number of beautifully humane moments, as people cling to the ones they love against a backdrop of terrible finality. At its best, this is hard SF which manages to be genuinely moving.

Breakfast in the Ruins (1972) by Michael Moorcock

Karl Glogauer experiences glimpses of lives he could have had, all of them connected with one of the many horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This is the first of two books I loved this year that would be difficult to claim for SF - although as it happens, Breakfast in the Ruins is a kind of sequel to an SF novel. In 1969, Moorcock published Behold the Man, in which Karl Glogauer travels back two thousand years and takes up the role attributed to Jesus Christ. In this loose follow-up, Glogauer endures a kaleidoscopic journey across many possible versions of his life, splintered across history. This is an experimental, trippy odyssey across history’s horrors, from the smashing of the Paris Commune to the Vietnam War. All along, Moorcock argues that there are no easy answers, and the same person can be victim, bystander, and killer.

The Falling Woman (1986) by Pat Murphy

In 1980s Mexico, an archaeologist and her daughter confront their troubling connections with the dead - in particular, a Mayan priestess who died hundreds of years earlier.

While this is not SF - instead it is a literary fantasy - The Falling Woman is connected with the science of archaeology. It takes place at a dig site in contemporary Mexico, and focuses on the archaeologist Elizabeth Butler. She has an ability that is both blessing and curse: she can see and commune with the dead. This has helped her make professional breakthroughs, but also seen her confined to a mental institution. Murphy elegantly spins a tale with a strong fantastical element, but which is also strongly rooted in the real world and in real, difficult human relationships.

Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budrys

A bizarre structure, apparently of alien origin, is discovered on Earth’s moon. A team of damaged individuals use a matter transmission machine to explore it, at terrible cost.

Algis Budrys is possibly better known as a well-respected SF critic, but he wrote a small number of quite acclaimed novels of which Rogue Moon is the most famous. On its face, the book is about an alien labyrinth on the moon which kills everyone who enters it if they make a single wrong move. In fact, barely any of the book is set on the moon and the novel is really an extended meditation on identity, risk, and especially death. This is a gloomy novel shot through with hardboiled prose, which asks some disturbing questions about human psychology and the pursuit of knowledge. 

The Embedding (1973) by Ian Watson

A linguist is conscripted to help make first contact with aliens obsessed by languages. For better or worse, the world stands on the brink of a major change.

The British author Ian Watson made a major impact when he arrived on the SF scene in the 1970s - not least with this complex, bracing first novel. The braided plot features unethical experiments in linguistics, an engineering mega-project in the Amazon threatened by revolutionaries, and a remote tribal people awaiting the birth of a new messiah - all before the aliens make an appearance. The Embedding is heady, challenging stuff which goes to some very dark places, not only in space but also within the human psyche, filled up with hubris, competition, and greed. At times genuinely shocking, this is a debut novel which makes a real impact.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick

In San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts down several androids which have escaped offworld colonies. He soon finds himself in a maze of confusion and paranoia.

This mid-career highlight for PKD deserves so much more than to be remembered merely as the inspiration for Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s film captures only a small portion of what goes on in the novel - not so much in terms of events, but in terms of ideas. Dick ruthlessly complicates the notions of identity, duty, and reality. Do Androids Dream is also an extended commentary on the notion of empathy - on who or what we deem worthy of it, and who we refuse to extend it to.  Even if Dick had only written this one, excellent novel, his place in SF history would be assured. It is every bit as good as you may have heard.

Ice (1967) by Anna Kavan

A man pursues a sylph-like woman from place to place, without knowing why. His efforts are complicated by the mysterious “Warden”, and a wall of ice encroaching on the world.

Anna Kavan was a fascinating figure. Born Helen Emily Woods, she began writing in the late 1920s, by which time she had already become a heroin addict. She later renamed herself Anna Kavan after one of her own characters, and published Ice only a year before she died. A genuinely strange, genre-mixing novel, Ice exists in the tradition of British catastrophe novels by writers like John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard, but is significantly more surreal. There are no named characters, nor specific identified locations. Influenced by Kavan’s own inner struggle with heroin and mental health crises, this is an unsettling tale of a mind, and a world, falling apart.

---

Disappointment of the year

Strangely, my biggest letdown of 2024 has been with the author I’ve read the most: Roger Zelazny. I’ve read seven of his novels this year, constantly chasing the high I got from reading Damnation Alley (1969) over two years ago. I finished off the Chronicles of Amber series, the Nebula Award-winning The Dream Master (1966), his late multiverse novel Roadmarks (1979), and his final book, the cult classic A Night in the Lonesome October (1993). None of these have done much at all for me, and the first Amber cycle was genuinely annoying by the time it finally ended. Zelazny’s haphazard, unplanned style just doesn’t seem to chime with me - but yes, I will get around to Lord of Light (1967).

---

Honourable mentions

Alastair Reynolds has been a leading figure in British SF for nearly 25 years now, and a favourite author of mine. At its best, his early novel Chasm City (2001) is superb. The Medusa Chronicles (2016) is a collaboration with Stephen Baxter and a well-executed continuation of an Arthur C. Clarke tale. Eversion (2022) is a structurally ambitious recent novel which explores playfully the history of SF.

In late April I had a brilliant time reading The Atlantic Abomination (1960) by John Brunner. One of the many breathlessly fast-paced novels he wrote for Ace Books, this one deals with an effort to prevent an ancient creature from taking over the world with its immense psychic powers. It is hugely entertaining stuff, like a classic 1950s monster movie that never was. 

Bob Shaw has rapidly become a new favourite of mine this year. I read his debut novel Night Walk (1967), The Palace of Eternity (1969) and A Wreath of Stars (1976). I thoroughly enjoyed them all, even if none of them quite made it into the top ten. Shaw was a true SF entertainer and happily, his reputation seems to have been on the rise lately.

---

Plans for 2025

2024 was in some ways a year of change for my writing about classic SF - I rebranded my site and podcast to reflect my near-complete focus on that topic, and in fact that process isn't yet complete. While this is still a small enterprise, I've reached more people than before this year and I'm grateful for your interest.

What do I have in mind for the coming year? Well, I will certainly continue (and perhaps complete) my reading of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. I will further explore the work of new favourites Barrington J. Bayley and Bob Shaw. I also have books in mind by Philip K. Dick, Vonda N. McIntyre, John Sladek, Cordwainer Smith, Robert Silverberg, and Ken MacLeod - some of whom are wholly new to me. 

More generally, I’d also like to reach out and connect more with others who are exploring classic SF. There are many worlds out there, and they are better explored together. That means you, too - I’d love to hear from you in the comments what your reading plans are for 2025.