What if improving the world meant letting someone edit everybody else's reality? George Orr's dreams make that question dangerously practical. Ursula K. Le Guin gives each attempted cure an unforeseen cost, turning a lucid, humane story into a test of who gets to decide what progress means. A strong first choice if you want the idea to unfold through people rather than technical exposition. Scribner edition: 192 pages.

Everyday objects begin slipping backwards into older forms, while messages from an apparently dead employer make certainty harder to hold. Philip K. Dick makes the reader keep revising the rules alongside his bewildered characters. Choose this for dark comedy, commercial absurdity and the peculiar pleasure of an explanation that may not stay explained. Gollancz edition: 224 pages.

An ocean that may be intelligent turns a research station into a confrontation with memory. Stanisław Lem makes first contact unsettling by questioning whether humans can recognise a mind that does not resemble their own. The grief is intimate; the limits of scientific explanation are vast. Best for readers who enjoy patient speculation as much as a mystery. Harvest edition: 204 pages.

Alien visitors have left, and the dangerous things they abandoned resist human understanding. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ask a wonderfully deflating question: what if our encounter with the cosmos mattered far less to the visitors than to us? A smuggler's hazardous work keeps that idea grounded in money, family and desperation. Chicago Review Press edition, translated by Olena Bormashenko: 224 pages.

A fugitive watches visitors on an island behave with a strange indifference to his presence. Adolfo Bioy Casares turns that small mystery into a precise enquiry into images, desire and what counts as a life. Go in knowing little: its short form lets each repeated detail acquire a different meaning. Ruth L. C. Simms's translation, NYRB edition: 120 pages. Also available in a newer translation as Morel's Invention.

Published in English as The Employees, Olga Ravn's novel lets a spaceship's human and humanoid workers speak through short statements to a committee. Their attachment to strange objects disturbs the boundary between programmed usefulness and inner life. The form makes you assemble the story from what official language cannot contain. Choose it for unsettling fragments rather than a conventional adventure. New Directions edition, translated by Martin Aitken: 144 pages.

Skin care becomes an unexpectedly rich starting point for questions about bodies, surveillance and the ownership of experience. In an undersea city, Momo's reunion with her mother unsettles what she knows about herself. Chi Ta-wei's compact Taiwanese novel draws its force from the intimacy of those questions, so resist summaries that reveal its later discoveries. Columbia University Press edition, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich: 168 pages.

H. G. Wells treats time as a dimension a person might travel through, then uses the journey to make Victorian confidence look very small. Its imagined future presses class divisions and evolutionary change into the same disturbing thought experiment. Pick it for an adventure whose widening timescale keeps changing what its discoveries mean. Penguin Archive edition: 128 pages.