51. Shrinking Man - Richard Matheson

While on a boating holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray. A few weeks later, following a series of medical examinations, he can no longer deny the extraordinary truth. Not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was. Scott Carey has begun to shrink. Richard Matheson's novel follows through its premise with remorseless logic, with Carey first attempting to continue some kind of normal life and later having left human contact behind, having to survive in a world where insects and spiders are giant adversaries. And even that is only a stage on his journey into the unknown.

52. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's reputation as perhaps the greatest contemporary science-fiction writer has grown steadily since his death. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is, by universal consent, one of his three key novels, and the book in which he first took his perennial interest in the fragile nature of reality to a new level of imaginative intensity.

53. Dancers at the End of Time - Michael Moorcock

Enter a decaying far, far future society, a time when anything and everything is possible, where words like ‘conscience’ and ‘morality’ are meaningless, and where heartfelt love blossoms mysteriously between Mrs Amelia Underwood, an unwilling time traveller, and Jherek Carnelian, a bemused denizen of the End of Time. The Dancers at the End of Time, containing the novels An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs, is a brilliant homage to the 1890s of Wilde, Beardsley and the fin de siècle decadents, satire at its sharpest and most colourful.

54. The Space Merchants - Cyril M Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl

Time: the near future Place: Madison Avenue, New York An overcrowded world is dominated by a few unscrupulous advertising agencies who have reduced the population to drug- and ad-conditioned consumers. Fowler Schocken Associates, who successfully organised India into a single giant cartel, have a new mission - the development and exploitation of Venus. Mitchell Courtenay, star-class copysmith, is chosen to sell it to potential colonists. But the Consies, a subversive conservation group, and a rival ad agency also want Venus, and Courtenay finds himself in the midst of a deadly struggle.

55. Time Out Of Joint - Philip K. Dick

Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man living an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day - and winning, every day. But he gradually begins to suspect that his life - indeed his whole world - is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing ‘Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?’

56. Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

One man must make a journey across a once colonised alien planet. Abandoned by man when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient, the planet is now a place of mystery. A mystery that obsesses the lone traveller Gundersen and takes him on a long trek to attempt to share the religious rebirthing of the aliens. A journey that offers redemption from guilt and sin. This is one of Silverberg's most intense novels and draws heavily on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It puts the reader at the heart of the experience and forces them to ask what they would do in the circumstances.