SF Novels That Should be Considered Literary Classics

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Bleak and dense, The Road (like much of McCarthy’s writing) resembles a long form poem more than a genre novel. And yet it’s undeniably science fiction, set in an apocalyptic world where most of mankind has died out—along with almost everything else—and the survivors scrabble for food and bare survival in the hollowed out shell of civilization. Some have abandoned all vestiges of their humanity. Others keep carrying the fire. In other words, it’s a post-apocalyptic story that won the Pulitzer Prize. Science fiction can’t get much more literary than that.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry
One of the hallmarks of of great literature is that they are substantive enough to  spur arguments, and The Giver is no exception. It’s story is of a dystopian future where emotions have been eliminated in favor of “sameness,” with one member of the community—the titular Giver—designated to host all the memories of what came before, in case that wisdom is needed. Though aimed at children, Lowry’s clever concept has the chameleon-like power to be mapped to real-world lessons. Like the literary badass she is, Lowry matches the straight-forward, colorless life of her characters with a straightforward writing style that deepens the sense of order until the protagonist begins to to question everything.

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
When it comes to film adaptations, Solaris seems like it should be an easy jump: spaceships, a crew of scientists exploring an alien planet, hauntings by phantom memories of the dead. But it is a science fiction novel that is, like the titular ocean planet, far deeper than it initially appears. The philosophical questions it raises about existence, intelligence, and communication are as complex as anything you’ll find in the genre, and the plot, unfolding with a stillness and precision usually reserved for supposedly “serious” works, lingers with the reader like the memories that haunt its protagonists. It is a novel that is not easily explained, fully understood, or dismissed, which explains why, 50 years after its first publication, people are still diving into it, searching out all of its secrets.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor
Many who read Okorafor’s 2010 novel fixate on the African setting, racial politics, and depiction of violence against women. While it’s an often unsettlingly brutal book, it is also a powerful story that expertly accomplishes one of the primary goals of science fiction—to extrapolate a fantastical future from the real world as it actually exists—with an exploration of power in its many forms: as violence, as knowledge, as courage. This is not escapism, because its subject matter should not be easy, and everything from the imagery, to the writing style, to the dialog is purposefully designed to slow you down—as if Okorafor wants to force you to truly see what she is revealing. Like all great literary novels, we will be unraveling this one for years to come.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller
Where some writers would imagine a Catholic monastery in the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse and stop there, satisfied, Miller uses the image as the launching point for a novel whose circular structure is echos the cyclical theory of history it is designed to represent. More than just a story of Earth recovering from an apocalypse, this is an examination of faith, religion, human nature, and the patterns of history itself. A Canticle for Leibowitz examines all of human civilization through this prism, and your perceptions of the story will change as you turn it this way and that. The oldest novel on this list, it is also the one that has come closest to being considered literature; a little over a decade after its publication, Time somewhat snootily called it, “an extraordinary novel even by literary standards.”
As genre lines continue to blur, we may be moving into a Golden Age of literary science fiction—but these books have been enjoying their own Golden Age for years. What others would you add?