The Player of Games
Widely recommended as the ideal Culture entry point and a fixture of best-space-opera lists; its empire-as-game conceit is one of SF's perfect metaphors.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Stranger in a Strange Land about?
Valentine Michael Smith, orphan of the first Mars expedition, is raised by Martians and returned to an Earth he experiences as an alien: a human in body, Martian in mind, heir to a fortune and possessed of abilities that follow from truly grokking reality. Under the tutelage of the irascible polymath Jubal Harshaw, Smith founds a church of shared water, free love and discorporating one's enemies. Scandalous in 1961, adopted by the sixties counterculture, and the source of the word 'grok' — now permanently lodged in hacker jargon.
Why it matters
Hugo winner (1962) and the first SF novel to hit the mainstream bestseller lists, becoming a genuine countercultural artefact. Its cult afterlife (Manson associations included) is its own strange story.
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'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Animal Farm
The most effective political allegory in the language, permanently in print and on syllabuses worldwide; with Nineteen Eighty-Four it made Orwell's name an adjective.