by Dan Simmons (1989)
On the eve of armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims embark on a final voyage to Hyperion to seek the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. A towering epic of literary space opera.
Frank Herbert
Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the "spice" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
A race for survival among the stars that spans millennia. On a terraformed planet, a nanovirus designed to uplift monkeys accidentally accelerates the evolution of spiders instead. When a dying generation ship carrying the last remnants of human civilization arrives, two drastically different evolutionary paths collide.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A human envoy is sent to the icy world of Gethen with the mission of facilitating its inclusion in a growing intergalactic confederation. But Gethen is unlike any world he has ever known: its inhabitants are ambisexual, possessing no fixed gender. To survive political scheming, Genly must make an impossible trek across the Karhide glacier with a disgraced politician.
Isaac Asimov
Mathematician Hari Seldon uses the revolutionary science of psychohistory to predict the imminent collapse of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire and creates the Foundation at the edge of the galaxy to preserve human knowledge and shorten the dark ages.