The Best Space Opera Books of the 20th Century
M.G. HerronThe first time I saw Star Wars: A New Hope, I was sitting on the carpet with four other kids in front of my friend’s 30” CRT television. We were watching on a worn VHS tape while his dad smiled knowingly from the kitchen and microwaved bags of buttery popcorn.
I grew up in the 1990s, so I didn’t see the original trilogy in theaters. But I was raised by the generation who did. Space opera was still nerdy—it always will be—but it wasn’t new or fringe. It had been seeping into popular culture for the better part of a century before Star Wars had its blockbuster moment.
Space opera wasn’t invented for the screen, though that’s where I discovered it. It harks back to the page—first to the pulp magazines of the early 1900s, and then to the novels that followed throughout the century. (I trace this lineage in What Is Space Opera?)
This list picks up in the 1950s, when the genre found its modern form: the mass market paperback novel. These 10 books were among the most influential of their time.
Every space opera novel published since—my own included—descends from a lineage of romantic space adventure stories like these.
1. First Lensman (1950) by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Doc Smith had been running Lensman stories through the pulps since the 1930s, but First Lensman was written for the paperback market—a sweet landing spot for the readership those magazines grew for him.
The novel follows Virgil Samms, the first person in the galaxy to be handed a Lens: a telepathic badge of office, grown by an ancient alien race, that bonds to a single wearer and cannot be faked or stolen. Samms uses it to build the Galactic Patrol, and the enemies he builds it to defend against are pure pulp pleasure—crooked politicians, intergalactic drug-runners, and pirates raiding merchant ships. By the end, the fleets of Tellus have merged into a single force fighting to save the galaxy.
What it gave to space opera: the romantic idea that justice could be enforced by an virtuous institution—and the galactic scale on which every space opera since has turned.
If you like this, what to read next:
- Green Lantern (DC Comics)
- Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
- On Basilisk Station by David Weber
2. Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov
If Smith made the galaxy epic in size, Asimov painted a picture that’s epic in its timescale.
Foundation traces the fall of a Galactic Empire across epochs using the idea of psychohistory, a mathematics-based way of predicting human behavior and the impending societal consequences. Hari Seldon can’t stop the collapse, but he can shorten it. By planting a colony at the rim of the galaxy, he engineers a shortcut that cuts thirty thousand years of barbarism down to a single millennium. Five linked stories play out over the centuries, and the conflicts get settled by politics, religion, and trade rather than by battles.
Two warnings before you pick it up. Nobody lives long enough to be the hero—Asimov moves through time periods so vast that no single character can carry the story. And the cast is almost entirely men. The one woman of any consequence is minor, and she’s written as a shrew. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
Nonetheless, the Foundation Trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966, beating out the first entry on this list—the Lensman series by E.E. “Doc” Smith, which took runner-up. (Wikipedia citation)
What it gave to space opera: the galactic empire as a setting worth building on—and the idea that history itself can be the main character.
If you like this, what to read next:
- Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson
- Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury
- Ensign Flandry by Poul Anderson
3. Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
Everything in the most famous space opera novel ever written runs on spice, a psychedelic drug that sharpens the mind, extends life, and lets Guild navigators see far enough ahead to fold space without killing everyone aboard.
One problem: spice can be found only on Arrakis, a desert world the galactic empire can’t stop fighting over.
Paul Atreides arrives when his family is handed control of spice production, which is less a promotion than a trap. What follows braids palace politics with a messiah story—Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach, the culmination of a Bene Gesserit breeding program, and the figure the Fremen (the natives) have been waiting for to take their planet back.
Herbert gave the story a working planetary ecology, so the sandworms and the Fremen water discipline feel like real-world consequences. And where Doc Smith’s galaxy was frankly American in its inspiration, Herbert reached for the Middle East and its ancient religions, which is a large part of why Dune remains popular sixty years on.
What it gave to space opera: planetary ecology—the idea that a world isn’t a backdrop but a system, with rules the story has to obey.
If you like this, what to read next:
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
- Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke’s most ambitious space opera was written in partnership with Stanley Kubrick. The two developed the story together, with Clarke writing the novel and Kubrick producing the film. The book was published after the movie came out.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a near-future space adventure that turns into space horror. An intelligent computer takes over a ship and methodically kills the crew while insisting it’s protecting them. HAL 9000 is the reason most people remember the story.
But a red thread runs back through human prehistory: a mysterious alien civilization has been leaving large crystalline monoliths on any world that starts developing intelligent life—which suggests the thing that made us clever in the first place is the same thing waiting to take us out.
Plenty of people find Kubrick’s version the more poetic of the two, but the novel has more depth, and, honestly, the only way to get the whole thing is to watch the film and then read the book, or the other way around.
What it gave to space opera: space horror—the terror of being sealed inside the ship, with nothing outside to save you except the escape of the vacuum.
If you like this, what to read next:
- Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
- Solaris by Stanisław Lem
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
5. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin
Genly Ai is an envoy from Terra, sent alone to the frozen planet Gethen to invite it into a federation of worlds. The people he’s been sent to negotiate with have no fixed sex. For most of the month a Gethenian is neither man nor woman; during kemmer, their brief fertile period, they become one or the other—unpredictably, and not necessarily the same one twice. Genly’s failure to understand this is the plot.
The book’s real subject is how sex and gender shape a culture, and it comes clear through Genly’s slow, difficult friendship with Estraven, a Gethenian politician who trusts him long before he trusts back.
What it gave to space opera: the invented world as a thought experiment—build a civilization without our assumptions about sex and gender, and you can see how deeply they shape our own.
If you like this, what to read next:
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
- The Female Man by Joanna Russ
6. The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman
This book taught me what time dilation was, and I’ve never quite gotten over it. The Forever War gets filed as military science fiction, but so much of it happens aboard starships crossing impossible distances that the galactic scale is never out of view.
William Mandella is a physics student conscripted to fight the Taurans, an alien species nobody has ever managed to speak to. He fights, survives a handful of engagements, and comes home to an Earth that has moved on by centuries. Friends, family, the culture he was born into—all of it leaves him behind while he’s away for what feels to him like a couple of years.
Haldeman came back from Vietnam and wrote the war he knew into the physics of interstellar travel. What comes out is the isolation of any long deployment, multiplied by relativity, and it’s the reason the book still reads like it was written last year instead of fifty years ago.
What it gave to space opera: time dilation with a human cost—the recognition that crossing real distances would cost a person everyone they left behind.
If you like this, what to read next:
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
- The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
- Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
7. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
Earth gets demolished in the opening chapters to make way for an interstellar bypass. Arthur Dent’s house goes first, and the demolition notice, he’s told, had been on display all along—“in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
Arthur Dent survives the demolition in his dressing gown and joins a revolving circus of adventure and exigent circumstance: terrible poetry, depressed robots, bureaucratic aliens, and a galaxy-spanning search for the meaning of life.
Hitchhiker’s Guide is often called the funniest science fiction novel ever written, and I’ve rounded up seven more that deserve the same praise. But I’d go further with this one. It’s a fully furnished space opera in its own right, and the satirical pinnacle of the genre in the 20th century.
What it gave to space opera: permission to laugh at itself—and a standing reminder to never forget your towel.
If you like this, what to read next:
- Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
- Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
8. Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card
Ender Wiggin is a prodigy, recruited along with other children from around the world and sent up to Battle School to play war games in zero gravity. They’re divided into teams, trained relentlessly, drugged, manipulated, and set against each other. It’s a ruthless boot camp for children, and Ender is very good at it.
What makes the book last is the ending. Card withholds one piece of information from Ender—and from the reader—until the last possible moment, and when it lands, everything before it becomes a different story.
It’s the most shocking take on first contact I’ve ever read, and it upends the chosen-one trope in a surprising yet inevitable way.
Ender's Game won the Nebula in 1985 and the Hugo in 1986. The series that followed is uneven, but Speaker for the Dead, the immediate sequel, deserves an honorable mention.
What it gave to space opera: a first contact story that ends somewhere no reader sees coming.
If you like this, what to read next:
- The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Armor by John Steakley
9. Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons
The Shrike is a four-armed creature made of blades and mirrors that moves through time as easily as through a room—and it hangs the people who come hunting it on a tree of steel thorns. Space opera has produced few other beings as scary as this one.
But this isn’t your standard horror story—it’s a work of literature, too. The first book of the Hyperion Cantos borrows its shape from The Canterbury Tales. Seven pilgrims are making their way to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion. Each of them wants something from the Shrike, and each tells their story on the road.
It’s dense, it’s weird, and at over 450 pages you have to be genuinely invested to read it. It’s also light on plot: a lot of people telling stories about things that already happened. What you get instead is six lives told well enough to hold the frame together, and passages that are, at times, hard to follow, and then suddenly horrifying in their clarity.
What it gave to space opera: proof that the genre could be literary—and a creature frightening enough that nothing since has rivaled it.
If you like this, what to read next:
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
- The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
10. A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) by Vernor Vinge
Vinge divides the galaxy into Zones of Thought. The laws governing intelligence and technology change depending on where you are in space. Near the galactic core, in the Unthinking Depths, only simple minds and simple machines work at all. Further out, in the Beyond, starships and superintelligent AI both function fine. Nobody knows who partitioned space this way, or why.
It’s a structural choice that solves an old problem. Space opera usually has to choose between faster-than-light travel and physics that hold up under the microscope. Vinge built a universe capable of housing both ends of the spectrum.
The story starts when a human expedition digs into an ancient archive and wakes something inside it—a power that begins consuming civilizations wholesale. A ship carrying two children escapes to a medieval world at the bottom of the Beyond, home to the Tines: dog-like pack animals whose individual bodies mean nothing, and whose minds exist only in groups of four to eight.
What it gave to space opera: alien minds that are actually alien—not people in costume, but consciousness assembled on a different principle entirely.
If you like this, what to read next:
- A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
- Embassytown by China Miéville
- Startide Rising by David Brin
Forty-two years separate First Lensman from A Fire Upon the Deep. In that time the genre has grown, developed, explored and experimented—but the shape of the space adventure remains uniquely recognizable. That’s what makes these ten classic science fiction novels worth revisiting.
Space opera continues to be a popular genre in the modern novel, and the 21st century has seen its fair share of iconic work in this space. It’s too early to tell what will be the most influential books of this century—authors are reinventing the genre all the time—but I’m keeping my ear to the ground.
What will always be true is that the imaginative land of the space opera story remains rich and fertile, renewed every generation by new writers who take up the mantle.
More sci-fi reading recommendations
- 8 Funny Science Fiction Novels You Can’t Miss - Space opera loves to take itself seriously—epic wars, existential stakes, civilizations on the brink. This list is the antidote: eight novels that prove the genre can make you snort-laugh on the bus.
- The Best Sci-Fi Noir Mystery Novels: 10 Picks That Deliver - Ten picks where the mystery is the hook and the universe is the payoff, from Asimov’s robot-and-human detective pair to the first-contact conspiracy buried inside Leviathan Wakes.
- 25+ Best Sci-Fi Short Stories in the Public Domain - Golden Age science fiction, free to read right now, pulled from the pulp magazines that taught the genre how to hook fast and land hard. Start with Asimov’s “Youth” or Jules Verne’s unsettlingly accurate vision of 2889.
- The Sci-Fi Short Stories of Isaac Asimov — A Guide for New Readers - A decade-by-decade guide to the writer who arguably invented how science fiction thinks about robots—and detectives.
