Best Short Sci-Fi Books Under 300 Pages

A security robot that has hacked its own controls would rather watch television than protect its clients, until something tries to kill them. Short, funny and the start of a series readers devour.

A tea monk traveling a world where robots long ago walked off into the wilderness meets one who has come back with a question. Kind, calm and complete in itself.

Earth is demolished for a hyperspace bypass and the last Englishman hitches a ride. Silly, endlessly quotable and much cleverer than it pretends to be.

Two agents on opposite sides of a war across time begin leaving each other letters, and fall in love. Written by two authors in alternating letters, and lovely line by line.

An American soldier survives the firebombing of Dresden and becomes unstuck in time. Funny, bleak and anti-war, and shelved as literary fiction as often as science fiction.

A man whose dreams change reality falls into the hands of a psychiatrist who decides to use them to improve the world. Every improvement goes wrong, and Le Guin makes the consequences both funny and chilling.

Vast alien ships appear over Earth's cities, and their unseen Overlords bring an end to war and poverty, at a price. A short classic of first contact, and far stranger than its opening suggests.

A physicist drafted into an interstellar war returns from each tour to find that centuries have passed at home. Written by a Vietnam veteran, it uses relativity to show how war estranges soldiers from the world they fight for.