Outsider Visions: How the Marginalized Imagined Tomorrow

Liu Cixin's *The Three-Body Problem* (*三体*) was first serialized in *Science Fiction World* magazine in China in 2006, then published as a standalone novel in 2008, and won China's Galaxy Award. Translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor... more

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize and is the most austere climate apocalypse novel ever written. An unnamed father and son walk south through a dead America — ash-covered, treeless, populated by cannibals — carrying 'the fire' ... more

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines Gethen, a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual — they have no fixed gender, entering a brief fertile period (kemmer) during which they may become either male or female. An envoy from a ... more

Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) is not comfortable time travel. Dana, a modern Black woman, is repeatedly dragged back to an antebellum Maryland plantation whenever her white ancestor Rufus Weylin's life is in danger — and she must keep him alive bec... more

Published serially in Gilman's own magazine The Forerunner in 1915, 'Herland' imagines a hidden country that has been entirely female for 2,000 years after a catastrophe killed all the men. The women reproduce through parthenogenesis — virgin birth —... more

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975) is 800 pages long, has sold over a million copies, and has never been out of print — despite being formally experimental, sexually explicit, and radically queer. The novel follows Kid, a bisexual, possibly Native Am... more

Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908) is arguably the most prescient political novel of the 20th century: a socialist working-class writer predicting the rise of a fascist corporate oligarchy — the Iron Heel — that crushes labor movements, builds fortif... more

Published in January 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is one of the founding texts of feminist speculative fiction. Written after Gilman herself was subjected to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell's infamous 'rest cure' in 1887 — which pr... more