Talk:List of science fiction novels

I changed a redirect concerning The Day After Tomorrow, also called Sixth Column by Heinlein Transcendentalist01 (talk) 20:53, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Listing numerical titles first is NOT correct bibliographical procedure. In a book they would be treated as if spelled out. What's wikipedia's policy on this?

Pringle's List removed, dead link.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.34.179.225 (talk) 20:45, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Is it worth spliting into sections (A | B | C etc)do you think? ledgerbob 16:58, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How are we defining "notable"? That is, how do we know what belongs on the list and what doesn't?

I also want to know what the criteria is for making this list, if I read an SF book and like it, does it make it worthy of entry to the list? 'Notable' seem to be quite a subjective classification method. --Kelby 19:23, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps 'Notable' was selected on the basis that it was 'All' was thought to be a too big an ambition to have any hope of achieving. Technically, notable could be based on the 'popularity', that is number of volumes sold (although these figures aren't consistent and can be 'inflated' by publishers). And 'significance' could be based on the number of citations in critical articles/essays etc (although it would be almost impossible to 'trawl' these 'citations' since we aren't talking about going to a limited number of academic/professional journals. We could look at awards (such as the Hugos) for winners and nominees, but we'd be left with a fairly short list (and it would belong on the Hugos page..). Therefore we are left with the notion that 'Notable' is whether we think it is, and whether someone else doesn't disagree so much that they delete our entry. One thought though... if we include the BookTitle, and the Author, and the Date AND a short text entry as to WHY we think the book is significant then I think that'd ensure that folk submitting titles had to put their rationale/passion 'on the line' - enabling the rest of us to understand/judge the significance for the submitters perspective as well as our own.Tban 22:54, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure that we should include a 'short text entry', as I think this will just make the list gigantic and unusable. The real point is that if a novel is on this list, it should warrant an entry of it's own on Wikipedia. So perhaps that's a good definition of 'notable' - that it warrants and entry on the main encyclopedia. If such an entry doesn't exist, then a listing here is a good indication that one is needed. Swpmre 09:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

'Notablility' would seem to be met by the existence of a Wikipedia article on the novel, which would signify that the book met the general notability criteria for an article. This seems to be the main practice of this list, as I see it exist in 2020. Also, I see a few novels in the list where the book does NOT have a WP article, but the author does. That would seem to be a weaker criteria, but as long as the author's article lists the book, with an acceptable level of verifiability and a reliable source citation, my personal view would be that would be sufficient as well.

Beyond that, it would be up to other editors to WP:CHALLENGE any added with no verifiable notable source. Cheers. N2e (talk) 23:33, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

why is animal farm by george orwell listed but not the more critically-acclaimed 1984?

Delisted Animal Farm (not SF), Nineteen Eighty-Four was already listed. -- The Anome 20:37, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This list is ludicrously incomplete. Isn't there some way to just automatically list articles which belong to the appropriate category or categories? Clarityfiend 07:49, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

It's a problem. A Category could be created called "Novels, Science Fiction," but that Category would have to be manually placed at the bottom of every article about a science fiction novel on Wiki, and my sense is there really aren't too many articles about novels. (But I'm relatively new here, so perhaps there is another solution.)PaulLev 14:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC

They somehow managed to list all the towns, I wonder if those were all manually put up, or if there was a robot program doing it? Brian Pearson 01:17, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I am trying to find a short story I read about 30 or 35 years ago. I no longer remember the title or the author, but I think I read the short story in a collection or anthology of short stories. The plot involves a colonist on an alian planet, where humans have lived for about 20 years with no hint of danger. While out on a hike, the colonist hears sounds that remind him of chitin rubbing on chitin, but on a LARGE scale. He turns around and begins a hasty retreat towards the colony as darkness starts to fall. The sounds follow him and even seem to be closing in as he starts to panic and run. The story ends when he realizes that the sounds are now in front of him as well as behind him. Can anyone tell me the title or author of this story? Thanks. Dave Hammock

Was it a planet way above the galactic plane, so the guy could see the spiral structure of the galaxy dominating the night sky? - Reaverdrop (talk/nl) 20:13, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Could it be "A Walk in the Dark" by Arthur C. Clarke? Clarityfiend 06:45, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, again. The problem is, I am very, very lonely since I was awarded a barnstar for the first time. I wanted some attention for once. I never knew that this would happen. I have never unknowingly plagarized any Internet page. If you want, look at the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard page so you can see me talk about this problem. Typingwestern015 (talk) 19:14, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better if the list was in chronological order instead of alphabetically? Or at least exist as an alternative? When you just can relate to the alphabet, the list becomes too messy. 84.210.23.42 (talk) 19:12, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

These are in the list but not novels...

1. Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov -- a novella. Was expanded into the novel, "The Positronic Man"

2. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek -- a short script for a short play

3. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov -- a collection of short stories about various robots. Some characters appear in many (maybe all?) of the stories. The title came from a short story entitled "I, Robot" by Eando Binder.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury -- a collection of short stories that take place on Mars. Not really tied together well enough to pass as a novel in my opinion.

An example of a set of short stories that do work as a novel is City by Clifford Simak. The stories plus the editorial introductions to each tell a continuing and very coherent story that spans many thousands of years. A classic.

Don't know what to do about it except mention it as I am doing. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bdbluesman (talk • contribs) 05:13, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

The science fiction title, "The Map of the Universe" by me, George Arnold Hall should be in the list. A short description is below.

Description:

(description removed)

It is available on iTunes and the Kindle More information is on the facebook page and still more is on the official website. I have tried before, but the pages get deleted so easier if I just ask if someone can make the pages. I also removed the links even though they are sources for more information. (Jentus (talk) 22:28, 1 May 2011 (UTC))

I'm sorry, George; please read our guidelines on WP:Notability and WP:Conflict of interest. DS (talk) 04:31, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

What do people think about the inclusion of Oh._My._Gods. in this list? Should it be considered a fantasy novel rather than a science fiction novel? Transcendentalist01 (talk) 03:43, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Why aren't books like The Hunger Games, The Giver, Maze Runner, or Divergent on this list? Those are definitely notable and definitely science fiction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.2.251.3 (talk) 07:20, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

Probably, 'cause you or any other interested editor did not add them at the time in 2016. After all, on Wikipedia, WP:ANYONECANEDIT. As long as they already have a Wikipedia article, they are good to be added to the list.

The Hunger Games has been added since, by some editor. And I just added The Giver, The Maze Runner, and Divergent trilogy Cheers. N2e (talk) 23:26, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Apropos of nothing, I wonder if anyone can identify an older novel which was set on a world the protagonist may have been deliberately abandoned on which had at least two concurrent cultures; one with a viciously-guarded steam engine culture (attempting to disassemble the steam engines would release deliberately enclosed poison gas), and the other was I suppose a hunter-gatherer-slave culture. The protagonist was dumped into the hunter-gatherer-slave society, briefly fought a slave-owner-boss-leader to survive (& took over responsibilities for that bosses slaves), then encountered another 'boss' at boundary between their territories, and offered the other boss some water. The other boss was very pleased by the offer, and promptly asked, "Oh, where'd you get the poison water?", clearly intending to use what he assumed to be poisoned water to kill rivals. Another incident in the story was that one of the women slaves the protagonist 'won' offered to show him her 'special thing', and it was not what you might think.UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 23:58, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

I think I found the title myself, as the name Harry Harrison came to mind as a possible author. It looks like it's Deathworld2. UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 00:41, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

The lack of publication dates makes this list much less useful than it could be! Skyerise (talk) 17:58, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

The outcome of the recent AfD on this article was that the list should be split. Please consider logical ways of carrying out this split, and proceeding accordingly. If the split is not carried out per the outcome of the discussion, then this could be subject to a renewed deletion effort. BD2412 T 02:43, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

My first impulse is that a division by time period is more helpful than alphabetically. Except we don't have that data yet, but we do have the categories. So ideally we could implement a big solution by bots as suggested by TompaDompa in the deletion discussion first. I don't know how this could be done, but if there's something I could help with that does not require knowledge of bots, please let me know. If we were to pull that of, it could be a pilot project for similar cases. Daranios (talk) 10:47, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

There are very many ways the article could be split (country of first publication, original language, word count, subgenre...), but not many good ones.

Alphabetically by title is one of the most intuitive ways, but it is more than a little bit unhelpful. One of the reasons is that novels in the same series may end up far from each other (e.g. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe and Everything). Another is that many novels have more than one official title (e.g. Under the Moons of Mars/A Princess of Mars). A third is the issue of translations: do we list the original title or the English translation (Hector Servadac or Off on a Comet)? If the latter, what do we do in cases where the novel/title has not been translated (e.g. Deux mille ans sous la mer [fr]), and what do we do in cases where it has been translated more than once with different titles (Prisoners of Power or The Inhabited Island)? What do we do about novels that are better known by something other than their actual title (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships or Gulliver's Travels)?

Sorting alphabetically by author is another fairly intuitive way, but it also has some drawbacks. One of this is the issue of what to do about novels by multiple authors (e.g. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle). Another is that novels in the same series may end up far from each other if different entries were written by different authors (e.g. the non-Asimov Foundation books such as Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford).

Doing it chronologically is probably the approach with the least problems (out of the fairly intuitive ones, anyway), but also not without its problems. Again, novels in the same series may end up far from each other (e.g. the novels in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle). What do we do about novels that were published many years after they were written (e.g. Wernher von Braun's Project Mars: A Technical Tale), go by when they were written or published? Neither option is ideal. What do we do about novels that were first published as a serialization in a magazine and only later in book form (e.g. Islands of Space, serialized in 1931 and published in book form in 1957)? What about works that were initially published in censored versions with the full text only published many years later (such as Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Beach of Falesá", though that's not a science fiction novel)?

Generally speaking, to the extent that there is any benefit to having this as a list at all (which seems dubious to me), it would be significantly undercut by splitting the list across several pages. Frankly, I think we are past WP:DOAL#6 (Some topics are so broad that a list would be unmanageably long and effectively unmaintainable.) by a long shot already. TompaDompa (talk) 21:31, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes. By period is "which"? Frankly, outside yearly, I see no good period split (decades are very artificial, other periods even more so and rarely global). By country is doable, but for larger countries it is just a stop gap measure anyway, and particularly for UK-US and other Anglophone countries, the division is often artificial. By genre leads us to the problem of multigenra split. Alphabetical is also stop-gapish, and not that helpful, which, frankly, is true for all splits. This is just too big to be useful if complete, and pointless otherwise; and should've been just a list of lists as suggested at AfD. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:14, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

So interestingly all participants here so far are against a split, if for different reasons: I personally agree that a split at this point makes the list less helpful, while with 61 kByte I don't see a split as necessary for size reasons until significant further expansion. It would be interesting to hear the perspective of those !voting for a split in the AfD discussion at this point (some trimming has happened after all). All that said, History of science fiction does suggest a distinction into seven periods, if one wanted to avoid the arbitraryness and high number of splits when using "by decade". Daranios (talk) 15:38, 9 January 2026 (UTC)