The Time Machine
By H. G. Wells
While I think Frankenstein deserves its ranking as the first science fiction novel, I give H. G. Wells pride of place as the father of the genre. Not because Wells was always the first (though he often was), but because he established the great archetypes of so many stories. Every alien invasion harkens back to The War of the Worlds, and in The Time Machine he invented time travel, whose long history James Gleick recently explored so well.
It was always part political allegory, and it’s interesting how much of that has stayed with us. The ambiguous myth of the Morlocks still crops up everywhere in popular culture, which is perhaps not so surprising given rising rates of social and economic inequality in our own time. At the end of the nineteenth century progress was being called into question, and degeneration being posited as just as likely an evolutionary outcome. A similar sense of decline seemed to set in at the end of the twentieth century, and has carried over into our own “automatic civilization.” The Time Traveler brought a warning from a future we’re waking up to.
For years now Jeff VanderMeer has been carving out his own genre niche, as an editor, anthologist, and author. The label most easily attached to it is that of “weird” fiction, identified as writing that is an imaginative, sometimes disorienting blend of SF, fantasy, and horror. VanderMeer co-edited a massive volume of 
Somewhere in the tangled state of metafiction there is a city known as Storyville. Detective John Nyquist, hero of Jeff Noon’s previous novel A Man of Shadows, arrives in Storyville on an assignment that has him being paid to trail someone. When that someone ends up dead in one of the towers of Melville Estate (located just across Calvino Road and past Rabelais Plaza), Nyquist finds himself dragged into a police investigation layered in scatterings of Nordic myth (the police being headquartered in Kafka Court, of course).
The Rosewater Redemption marks the triumphant conclusion of Tade Thompson’s wonderful Wormwood Trilogy. Humans are standing off against the alien Homians both on the ground (in the newly-independent city state of Rosewater) and in the magical xenosphere. The winner of this final battle has a world to gain.
The Machine Awakes is the second instalment in Adam Christopher’s Spider Wars trilogy, telling a stand-alone story set in the same universe as 
Head On is a sequel to John Scalzi’s 
It’s often said, correctly, that SF doesn’t predict the future so much as it reflects current anxieties about where we may be heading. If so, there seems to be near universal concern over growing social and economic inequality. In recent SF books and movies one of the most common elements is a vision of the world divided into rigid castes of haves and have nots.