My love of science fiction didn’t begin with a book.
Like a lot of people, I came to it through Star Wars and Star Trek. I loved the ships, the planets, the strange civilizations and the sheer scale of it all. Those stories made the future feel like a place I wanted to visit.
But eventually, television and movies weren’t enough.
I wanted more depth. I wanted to know how these imagined societies actually worked. I wanted the politics, the science, the history and the ideas behind the spectacle. I didn’t only want to see the future. I wanted to live inside it long enough to understand it.
That search led me to Isaac Asimov.
The purchase links below are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Foundation was the gateway drug
When Hari Seldon first explained psychohistory in Foundation, I was blown away.
The concept seemed both impossible and strangely believable. An individual human being is unpredictable. A civilization made up of trillions of people can become statistically understandable. You may not know what one person will do, but perhaps you can anticipate what an empire will do.
And if you can anticipate it, perhaps you can guide it.
That idea changed what I believed fiction could do. This wasn’t simply a story about spaceships or distant planets. It was history, politics, mathematics, psychology and philosophy compressed into one enormous thought experiment.
The moment that sealed it for me came when the Time Vault opened and Seldon revealed the larger purpose behind what was happening. The characters thought they were solving the crisis in front of them. Seldon had been working on the scale of centuries.
I loved the audacity of that.
It suggested that history might have structure. That populations could be influenced without every individual being controlled. That an empire could appear permanent while the forces destroying it were already in motion.
What other genre could express an idea like that?
Foundation became the foundation of my love of science fiction. It showed me that the genre could contain almost anything: science, story, vision, destiny, power and the future of humanity itself.
Then came Neuromancer
If Foundation made science fiction feel intellectually limitless, Neuromancer made it cool.
William Gibson's world felt dangerous, stylish and completely unlike anything else I had read. Cyberspace wasn’t just a technical network. It was a place. People entered it, moved through it and risked themselves inside it.
Today, the idea of living through screens and networks is ordinary. When Gibson wrote the novel, most people had no personal relationship with computers at all. Somehow he imagined not only connected technology, but the culture, mood and identity that might grow around it.
Neuromancer made the idea of sitting in front of a computer feel rebellious. The machine wasn’t office equipment. It was a gateway into another reality.
The novel was also proof that science fiction didn’t need to be clean, optimistic or full of noble explorers. It could be noir. It could be disorienting. It could be populated by criminals, artificial intelligences, corporations and damaged people trying to survive.
Foundation showed me the rise and fall of civilizations. Neuromancer showed me the future from the street.
And of course, there was Dune
Then came a desert planet, giant sandworms and a substance valuable enough to shape the politics of the entire universe.
Dune takes place tens of thousands of years in the future. That distance made it feel enormous, but also oddly plausible. This wasn’t tomorrow with slightly better technology. Humanity had changed, expanded, outlawed certain machines and built new systems of religion, politics and power.
Arrakis was unlike any world I had encountered. Water was wealth. Ecology shaped culture. The sandworms weren’t simply monsters. They were part of a vast biological and economic system tied to spice, travel and imperial control.
Everything connected.
That was the revelation of Dune for me. A science-fiction world could feel invented and still obey its own logic. Climate, religion, economics, technology and politics could all push against one another. Change one part of the system and everything else moved.
It also offered ideas that escaped the boundaries of the story. I still sometimes repeat the beginning of the Litany Against Fear when I’m stressed: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”
It’s science fiction, but it’s also practical philosophy. The point isn’t that fear disappears. The point is that you allow it to pass through you without letting it control what comes next.
Again, what other genre gives you sandworms, political economy, ecology, religion and something close to Stoic philosophy in the same novel?
The deepest genre
I know this is subjective, but I don’t think any other genre offers the same range of human experience.
Science fiction can be intimate or cosmic. It can examine one person's memory or the fate of an entire galaxy. It can be a detective story, a political drama, a war novel, a philosophical argument or a warning about technology.
It can ask what happens when machines become conscious, when humanity leaves Earth, when time stops behaving normally or when a society solves one problem and accidentally creates something worse.
More importantly, it can ask what remains human after everything else changes.
That’s why the genre has always felt hopeful to me, even when the future it describes is dark.
For any of these stories to come remotely true, humanity must survive. We have to make it through our current crises, avoid destroying ourselves and continue long enough to encounter problems we can’t yet imagine.
A dystopia set five hundred years from now still contains one encouraging fact: there are human beings around five hundred years from now.
I needed more than the screen could give me
I still love Star Wars and Star Trek. In fact, I have argued that everything is Star Trek because science fiction often inspires the future rather than merely predicting it.
Those stories opened the door. Books took me through it.
Foundation gave me psychohistory and the sweep of civilization. Neuromancer gave me cyberspace and a future that felt dangerous enough to touch. Dune gave me a world where ecology, religion, politics and human psychology formed one immense system.
Together, they made science fiction my favourite genre.
They also left me permanently addicted to a particular feeling: the moment when a story introduces an idea so large that I have to stop reading and think about it.
That’s what I still look for every time I open a science-fiction novel.
Not simply another future.
A new way of understanding this one.
For more fictional universes to explore, I’ve put together ten epic science-fiction series, including old favourites and three still waiting on my shelf.
Books mentioned
This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Want to pick better books?
Tell us which stories and ideas made you love reading. We will find books matched to your taste and explain why they fit.
Find my next book