The best books that are fantasy and science fiction and make you think

Over the years, I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved, stretched, and entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I would not get out of this one unchanged.

The author's inventiveness is astonishing, managing to create not one new world we inhabit but three, all deftly interconnected by the unlikely thread of a simple fable passed from generation to generation. Perhaps most striking to me is the sheer power of the book, its capacity to take us places and share lives we would otherwise never dreamed of.

While the mysterious document—itself a fascinating story within a story—wends its way through a narrative that spans a thousand years, its message is less important than the lives it touches.

And what lives. Each character is drawn so vividly and infused with such essential, defining human traits that we bond with them to the point that the reader/character divide disappears. You do not identify with these characters; you are these characters, feeling their every fear, hope, love, aspiration, and dread, sharing their integrity, determination, inventiveness, and courage.

It is a cautionary tale, a hopeful tale. It was a wonderful read.

Ursula LeGuin once wrote, “While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there; we hear their voices. Sanity returns in most cases when the book is closed.” This book was one of those—it transported me into worlds and lives so vivid and believable as to be transformed. This is a book you don’t read without being changed.  

Sci-fi/fantasy? Perhaps not in the traditional sense, but Kesey wrote metaphors, novels rich in magic, and fantasies rooted in the very real and concrete threats to our world and how to combat them.

I read this book many years ago, and it shook me to my core. It is a story of courage, redemption, and resistance to tyranny, regardless of the consequences. Ironically, though Randal McMurphy is a rascal and reprobate of the first order, he is almost Christlike in his unwavering compassion for and commitment to empowering the men with whom he shares the mental ward, even when it is clear that he will die trying. 

The other characters, including Chief Bromden, are men broken in spirit by a system that weakens and discards those people on the margins, convincing them of their impotence and weakness. For all of his profanity, McMurphy is full of life and vivacity, and he is determined to bring the men out of their lethargy and depression. And in the end, he does, but at a terrible cost. 

Quite simply, this book provided me with a life perspective that sustained me amid political and personal turmoil and throughout my life as I faced professional and individual challenges of all sorts. I have told numerous people that I want McMurphy’s comment (after he tried to lift an impossibly heavy sink) on my tombstone.  “But I tried, goddamn it. At least I did that much.”

Welcome to a world where the inhabitants are androgynous, able to manifest both male and female genitalia. A world where you can be both a mother and a father of your children, where gender roles and expectations make no sense. I was absolutely astounded by this book when I read it many years ago. In a beautifully told sci-fi tale of political intrigue and adventure, I found myself constantly confronted by my limitations in terms of gender equity. 

For what LeGuin called her “social science fiction” and “thought experiments,” LeGuin created worlds—canvases really—where human foibles, conflicts, values, and ideas could be played out to their logical conclusion. This is one of her best.

LeGuin writes, “All science fiction is a metaphor,” and that is certainly the case with her books. Brilliant metaphors that shine light not so much on other worlds but on our own. I taught TLHOD in high school English classes, and once students got beyond the resistance to the very concept of a world, a society without determined sexual roles, they were transfixed and, I think, as I was, in most cases, changed. 

Anyone unfamiliar with Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy has been in an extended coma or is under five. Still, when I discovered these magnificent fantasy tales, I was about 15, and it would have been around 1962. No one knew Tolkien (outside of a very small circle of friends), and when I later wanted to do a term paper on the series, my teacher told me the books were too obscure, and there would be no reviews or research to draw on. 

I find myself using the word “transformational” in these reviews, and I guess that is what defines a “great book” to me. In any event, these stories transported me into worlds so rich and fully realized that I was able to slip out of my angst-ridden teenage years and live for extended periods with hobbits in their wonderful round-doored houses in a countryside that was gentle and green—and a long way away. The mystery of Gandalf transfixed me. (I even began smoking a pipe and learned how to blow smoke rings.) The sense of evil was palpable, and the forces arrayed against it were noble but seemingly doomed. What powerful writing. 

These books, I suspect, made me both a reader and a writer. 

One of my publishers had a promotional poster that read, “Reading Takes You Places!” This is a wonderful slogan for a publisher and a lifeline for a lonely boy in a soul-crushing suburb. These were the vehicles that took me the farthest and stayed with me the longest. They were transformative.

Quite simply, Erin Morgenstern’s book is the finest example of urban fantasy I have ever read. Besides a plot rich in sorcery and romance, with a circus (think Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes) that appears mysteriously, vanishing just as suddenly and the shadowy game of two great sorcerers playing out their competitiveness through the lives of their young apprentices, this is a beautifully written book. The writing is elegant, rounded, and rich. What a writer! The imagery is transporting without clobbering the reader over the head. The characters are each fully drawn, but in slow increments as the story steams inexorably ahead like the mysterious train that carries the circus from locale to locale. 

This book showed me that you do not need blazing dragons or drooling werewolves to create menace, sinister characters, and mystery. Morgenstern places this world of circus magic just out of reach but so close that we feel it and see it. It is a beautiful book.