The popularity of such a literary genre as fiction can hardly be overestimated - the best science fiction books find their readers daily, and modern writers still add their works to the treasury of masterpieces. Moreover, the genre itself is so diverse that it can attract almost any person with a wide range of interests - in this section you can find a work in the style of fantasy, space opera, cyberpunk, epic, detective or love science fiction.
Any rating of the most famous literary works is opened by the best fantasy books - the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. Tolkien, the Song of Ice and Fire series by George Martin, and the newcomer Harry Potter Joan Rowling. These books are known all over the world, and need no introduction. It’s nice that in different ratings there are so many domestic authors who are currently writing in the fantasy genre, such as Alexey Glushanovsky with his series of books “The Way of the Demon”, Alexander Rudazov with the cycle “Archmage”, Olga Gromyko with the trilogy “The Witch” and many others .
The best science fiction books in the style of space opera are, first of all, Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Founding. Many talented authors wrote in the genre of space opera, for example, Ursula Le Guinn, Paul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, and this despite the fact that for a long time such books were considered primitive and miserable. Perhaps this was the case when the cosmoopera was born in the 40s of the last century, as a separate literary movement, but since then the genre has undergone dramatic changes. As an example, we can cite the cosmoopeer “Lord from Planet Earth” by Sergey Lukyanenko - this book was written 15 years ago, and it is still considered the best work of this direction among domestic writers.
The best science-fiction books in the style of cyberpunk are, first of all, Do Androids Dream of Electricians by Philip Dick and I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. The first work was born long before the very concept of “cyberpunk” appeared, so it can be called the progenitor of the genre, and the second book became a textbook, and it was from this work that mankind first learned about the three laws of robotics.
The best science fiction books with detective elements are undoubtedly the Dresden Dossier series by
Jim Butcher (the series has more than 10 books and is not finished yet) and a series about the adventures of Harriet private investigator from Glen Cook. Our compatriots working in this genre are not so pleased with readers - basically they are rather mediocre works. There are pleasant exceptions, in the form of the same Sergey Lukyanenko with his Dozors and
Andrei Belyanin with the series The Secret Detection of Tsar Gorokh, but this is still not detective fiction in its purest form, but a mixture of different styles. An interesting fact is that many of the best science fiction books have been filmed, some more than once, but in the case of the Dresden Dossier cycle, a blunder appeared. The creators tried to make a popular series, something like the movie "Supernatural", but things did not go beyond several episodes.
Fiction, as a literary genre, will remain popular for a long time, because it is these books that still allow people to believe in miracles. And in our everyday life, sometimes a spark of faith is simply necessary that the desired will certainly come true.