Plenty of people who read prize-winning literary fiction every month still skip the science fiction and fantasy shelves. Usually it's the covers, or one bad experience with a 900-page series that opened with a map and a family tree. This list is for them. Every book here stands on its own, nobody needs a glossary, and each one is as interested in people as it is in spaceships or magic. We've ordered it roughly from "this is obviously science fiction" to "is this even fantasy?", so start wherever you feel comfortable.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
Genly Ai, an envoy from a loose union of worlds called the Ekumen, arrives alone on Gethen, a frozen planet that visitors call Winter. The people there have no fixed sex: for most of each month they are neither male nor female, and Genly's assumptions about gender keep tripping him up. The second half turns into one of the great survival journeys in fiction, across a glacier, with the one Gethenian who has quietly stood by him all along. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and it reads less like a thought experiment than like a careful anthropologist's notebook that slowly becomes a love story.
Start here if: you like slow, thoughtful novels about people misunderstanding each other.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
Dana, a Black writer living in Los Angeles in 1976, is pulled without warning to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, again and again, each time to save the life of a white boy who will grow up to be a slaveholder. Butler never explains the time travel, and she doesn't need to. The book is short, fast and brutal, and it makes slavery feel immediate in a way that history lessons rarely do. Butler herself called it fantasy rather than science fiction, which tells you how little the machinery matters.
Start here if: you read The Nickel Boys and want another novel that looks straight at American history.
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
Yes, it's long, and yes, it has an appendix. But the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family takes over the desert planet Arrakis and the spice that the whole empire depends on, is a political novel first: about ecology, religion, colonial power and what happens when people decide someone is their messiah. It won the first Nebula Award for best novel and shared the Hugo. Read it before or after the films; the book is stranger and colder than either.
Start here if: you enjoy big family sagas and court intrigue.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
On a continent called the Stillness, the earth regularly turns on its people, and the few who can control seismic energy are feared, trained and used. The book opens with the end of the world and with a mother, Essun, whose son has been killed by her husband and whose daughter is missing. Jemisin tells part of it in the second person, which sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be the point. It won the Hugo, and so did the two books that follow it, a first for any trilogy.
Start here if: you want a story about grief and power that happens to involve volcanoes.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
A terraforming experiment goes wrong, and the virus meant to speed up the evolution of monkeys lands on a planet full of spiders instead. Meanwhile the last humans, fleeing a dead Earth on an overcrowded ark ship, are heading straight for that planet. Chapters alternate between the two, and the spider civilization, built over thousands of years, is so convincing that you start to root for it. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Start here if: you like ideas, and you're fine with spiders (you'll come round).
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
A flu pandemic wipes out most of the world's population, and twenty years later a small troupe of actors and musicians travels between settlements around the Great Lakes, performing Shakespeare. The book moves back and forth between that future and the life of a famous actor who dies on stage the night the pandemic begins. It's a novel about art and memory more than collapse, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It's often shelved with literary fiction, which is a decent hint about how it reads.
Start here if: you think you don't read science fiction. You probably already would read this.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)
The narrator lives in the House: endless halls full of marble statues, with an ocean whose tides flood the lower floors. As far as he knows, only one other living person exists. He keeps careful journals, and reading them, you slowly realize what he can't. It's a short book, and it won the Women's Prize for Fiction. If you liked how much Ishiguro hides in Klara and the Sun, you'll like this.
Start here if: you want a puzzle that is also a very gentle book.
Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
The witch from the Odyssey tells her own story, from a lonely childhood among the Titans to exile on the island of Aiaia, where she learns witchcraft, meets Odysseus and others from Greek myth, and decides what kind of life she wants. Miller writes in clean, modern prose, and you don't need to remember any Homer. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and is a reliable book club pick.
Start here if: you'd rather your fantasy came from an old myth than an invented world.
How to keep going
If one of these clicks, follow the author before you follow the genre. Le Guin's Earthsea books are a good next step after The Left Hand of Darkness, and Butler's Parable of the Sower is the obvious follow-up to Kindred. For something short, several of our novels under 200 pages sit near the edge of the genre, including Samantha Harvey's Orbital, which is set on a space station and contains no science fiction at all. Book Twitter is also a good place to ask for the next one: post the book you liked and why, and the replies will fill a year of reading.