SF/F Fan Should Listen To:

评语：They made this Woodstock-friendly concept album, featuring Graham Nash, about a counter-cultural revolution against the cruel "Uncle Samuel" who oppresses the people living in "Amerika," and the rebels steal a starship and fly off into outer space to sear

评语：Ziggy Stardust is the album where Bowie creates his most complete science fictional, mind-expanding transformation. It's full of sadness and androgyny and friskiness and apocalyptic passion.

评语： This album, with its themes of android liberation, manages to cover a ton of musical styles, from classical to classic R&B, while defying all of our preconceptions about gender and race. It's joyful and amazing and the music you'll dance

评语：Rush is one of those 1970s bands whose proggy sound and fantasy/scifi lyrics appealed to Tolkien fans and Star Wars lovers alike.

评语： The incredibly intense voiceover by Richard Burton perfectly complements the fuzzed-out guitar and driving rhythms, especially when the Martians actually show up and start slaughtering everybody with their heat rays.

评语：This is like the greatest jazz party album about flying up to a giant mothership in space you'll ever hear, featuring insane Fred Wesley horn charts, Bernie Worrell synthesizers and the tightest band on Earth in full swing.

评语：we could populate half of this final ten with Kraftwerk albums — thanks to immortal tracks about radioactivity, synthetic romance, living mannequins, and the technological marvel that is the German highway system

评语：The record that launched a thousand laser planetarium shows, it's way easier to sync up Dark Side with the stellar flickers of the countryside night sky than The Wizard of Oz.

评语：Even before they name-dropped The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and gave Bob Dylan an extraterrestrial veneer, Radiohead had already written history's greatest dystopian prom song.

评语：this cosmic concept album makes our minds to turn to Carl Sagan, on the sheer force of "Pulstar" and "Alpha" alone.

评语：This music is so addictive it will close out every Sweet 16 for the next billion or so years, until the Sun's rising temperature turns our planet into a desiccated hellhole. Hopefully humanity will be jamming across the stars by then, not unlike the alien

评语：Often imitated but never recreated, Octagonecologyst remains a singularly bizarre record 15 years later.

评语：Side two of this album ("the Black Side") is basically a series of dark fantasy short stories, in song form, written entirely by Freddie Mercury.

评语：A glorious slab of messianic fantasy metal from the band who once covered Colderidge with shredding, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son causes your mind's eye to go LARPing.

评语：The original Solar System concept album, hands down. In a historical sense, probably the most important composition on this list. In a personal sense, I want "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" to suddenly thunder on whenever I enter a room. - CL

评语：It starts out with a weird dystopian hospital setting, complete with jarring news reports and a cheery/evil nurse threatening to drug you.

评语：Thanks to input from techno stalwarts Underworld, the score to Danny Boyle's flick about a grim solar expedition resembles the world's most depressing National Geographic documentary.

评语：It's hard to choose between the releases of Sun Ra and his prolific Solar Arkestra — hello, Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra — but Space Is The Place earns our vote. And if you loved this album by jazz's all-time strangest dude, watch the movie! - CL

评语：Inspired by acid trips, police sirens, nursery rhymes, and a sprinkle of complete nonsense, Magical Mystery Tour is solid psychedelic rock that pushes your mind into new worlds (even if the movie didn't).

评语：This might be the ultimate apotheosis of prog rock — from the first blaring crescendo which you expect to turn into an "Eye of the Tiger" crash but instead goes "plink," this album keeps challenging your preconceptions. Musical and otherwise.

评语：Dolby's steampunk videos and bizarre tales of scientists, sentient machines, and sustainable energy brought a welcome dose of weirdness to early 1980s new wave. He's the original mad scientist musician. - AN

评语：after all those metal albums about overthrowing the oppressive state and fleeing through a black hole with an army of cyber mutants, this is what we get.

评语：This is the music from the cult flick that inspired generations of young people to cast off gender norms, embrace lingerie, and dance like aliens. Need we really say more? - AN

评语：When Daft Punk did the soundtrack to Tron Legacy, they were partly paying tribute to the strange time signatures and dischordant crashing tunes that Carlos burned into all our brains.