Although a great many of us geeks truly love science fiction and the science fiction genre, we sometimes need to remember it is not easily accessible by all. Some can find all the future and tech talk quite jarring and confusing. So are there still science fiction books out there that can appeal to a more casual reader?

Hell yes there are!

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Yeah, this is the book we all saw at airports in the mid-2000s, but there’s a reason why it had a wider reach than most science fiction novels. It’s about the lives and the eventual marriage of a woman and a man, when the man spontaneously and uncontrollably time-travels, showing up naked in all different places at a moment’s notice. The movie adaptation that came out in 2009 was short-changed by a trailer that made it look like a Nicholas Sparks romance. And the movie itself short-changed the book, chiseling away its most disturbing scenes. It’s tough to say whether any movie could really capture the nature of the book, in which we see a couple who love each other but are often out-of-sync because at any given moment, one of them can be furious about a fight that, for the other one, happened ten years ago. It throws in a few winks at the absurdity of time travel as well, asking people if you’re really married to someone who, from their perspective, won’t marry you for another twenty years.

These 9 books would also act as a great bridge for someone looking to ease into the genre without being overwhelmed by it.

(image, story via i09)

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