Best sci-fi books of the 1960s

The sixties cracked the genre open. Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) fused ecology, politics, and religion into the defining epic of the field. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) reimagined gender and anthropology as SF's proper subjects. Across the Atlantic, Michael Moorcock's New Worlds drove the New Wave — Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and a rising tide of stylistic risk. Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (1967) detonated the old taboos, while Philip K. Dick spun reality into question with Do Androids Dream and a stream of paranoid masterworks. Robert Heinlein went countercultural with Stranger in a Strange Land.

For today's reader, the sixties shelf is ambitious and formally restless. Content pushed harder than before — sexuality, drugs, and moral ambiguity entered the bloodstream, though rarely explicitly. The prose ranges from mythic to fractured-experimental. This is the shelf for readers who want SF at its most intellectually daring, who appreciate writers consciously breaking the genre's rules, and who want to read the books that turned science fiction into literature's restless frontier.

• New Wave stylistic experimentation
• Gender, ecology, and inner space
• Moral ambiguity and counterculture
• Mythic to fractured prose