10 Sci‑Fi Books That Are Better Than 'Dune'
Science fiction has long been a battleground of ideas rather than merely a genre of spaceships and spectacle. Dune currently dominates pop culture, in large part because of Denis Villeneuve's acclaimed big‑screen adaptations, but Frank Herbert’s epic is not the be‑all and end‑all of the field.
The books on this list run the gamut from tragedy to satire, dystopia to intimate human study. Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy uses humor to confront cosmic absurdity, while Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness slows the pace to examine diplomacy, cultural misunderstanding, and how identity is constructed.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 turns a future without books into a meditation on censorship, conformity, and intellectual apathy, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War literalizes the generational gap that war creates.