The thing I loved about the characters in the expanse is that they were well fleshed out and while events were happening I could think about how other characters will react to it when news reaches them. It still had plenty of space opera/political intrigue for me too.
I recently read Artemis by Andy Weir, but the protagonist had so much teenage angst that it was difficult to finish despite its short length. I'll have to try one of his more popular books instead.
I ended up reading The Martian after seeing the movie and while poking a hole in the glove was mentioned in the book, I was a bit disappointed that the movie could not resist forcing to going through with it. Felt more silly and unnecessary even when originally watching the movie.
After that Project Hail Mary was a must read when I found out about it and was not disappointed. The amnesia was a bit forced, but necessary for the structure and didn't actually bother me much while reading. Also
spoiler
one of the best depictions of an alien that actually felt out of this world.
I am currently reading a collection of all of Asimov's short stories. That will take a while, it's a 2339 page epub. In the beginning there are some lesser stories but they keep getting better and better.
I feel like you’d really enjoy House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. One of the most “lived-in” feeling worlds I’ve encountered since Hyperion. I’m reading Pushing Ice now and haven’t read any of Revelation Space yet, but I’m planning on it.
“The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin is maybe the best political sci-fi book I’ve ever read. Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway” is also quite good and feels a bit like its spiritual successor.
I just finished The Dispossessed. I am simply in awe at how wonderful that story felt as I read it. I am about to dive into Ursula K Le Guin's catalog now.
Haven't read The Dispossessed yet, but love Le Guin's work ever since I read The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World is Forest, can't recommend these enough. Am reading through a collection of her short stories now.
Anyone interested in a general Le Guin discussion thread, or a reading group type thing where we discuss a different book each month?
'Consider Phlebas' is my top 1 favorite book and I'm more a fantasy guy.
Incredible 80s action adventure (it's from 1987) with philosophical musings, cool sci-fi world and good humor. And as a plus he creates awesome visual scenes, although I'm not good at mind images.
I really enjoyed Stranger in A Strange Land by Heinlein.. Its a classic and even though some concepts are a bit outdated, I think overall its amazing. Actually most of Heinleins books are my go to when I just want a lazy relaxing read. I've read them all so many times, its like visiting comfy friends.
I just finished listening to To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars. I really enjoyed it, and the audiobook version is narrated by Jennifer Hale (Sheppard from Mass Effect)
Dune, The Expanse, Seveneves, Snow Crash, Hitchikers Guide, Ancillary Justice are all good ones off the top of my head. I really enjoyed reading Neal Stephenson's novels because they are so thoroughly researched as to be plausible.
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (Giants Series) by James P. Hogan: How it revolutionizes our perceived history and place in the Solar System, and the whole idea of us finding an alien species and all they want to do is go home. Was made into a manga in Japan!
Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: A great take on surviving a global catastrophie. Especially enjoyed the scene at Cal Tech when they run outside.
Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn: The concept of a distopian future and astronauts being caught 'on the ground' and just trying to return to their space station. Never imagined car heaters would play such an important part in a story! :p
The Stainless Steel Rat (Series) by Harry Harrison: A great anti-hero series, lots of books in the series.
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: Another we meet aliens series, well done.
The Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: Heh, those two like to revisit a subject from a completely different angle.
Startide Rising (Uplift Series) by David Brin: Just loved the idea of talking dolphins and apes, etc.
With the Lightnings (Lt. Leary / RCN #1) by David Drake: A great series of space combat, and duty to service, etc. Taken from the old non-scifi series of novels of adventures on the open seas. The space combat from a distance is an enjoyable different take than what you would see in Star Wars/Trek, etc.
On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington / Honorverse series) by David Weber: Another great series of novels based on naval military warfare and duty to one's people/service.
I don't see many people recommending Ancillary Justice, but really enjoyed the series. I thought it was a pretty light read as far as Sci-fi goes, but it ticked all the right boxes for me.
I wouldn't call AJ a light read, just because you spend so much time wrapping your brain around what the narrator is doing and the cultures are so deliberately weird. All the more rewarding for it though imo.
"Ticking all the boxes" describes Ancillary Justice well for me, it has a bunch of interesting thing and the fit together and play out well. I also found it interesting to see how quickly the gender neutral thing felt natural.
The sequel however felt like a syndicated tv crime drama. Haven't gotten myself to read the third yet.
Just a few? I can't pick. Here's some I like to tell people to read though. I limited myself to five series you might not have heard of (and thus didn't say stuff like the Expanse and the Culture and Altered Carbon).
The Poseidon's Children series by Alastair Reynolds (the first is Blue Remembered Earth). It's not as dark as the Revelation Space books, more of a hopeful future. Africa is ascendant, AI is art. Concepts like pan-spermia and uplift are post religious life philosophies that people dedicate themselves to and a character who is a combination of Elon Musk and the Pizza Grandma from Stephen Universe dies at the beginning of the series - and is a main character. Revelation Space seems to be more popular, but I consider it Reynolds' Magnum Opus.
The Suneater books by Christopher Roucchio are probably the series I most look forward to new releases of. It's a little bit thematically similar to Red Rising (but not as YA) in the sense that both series are
1) Narrated in the first person by a Great Man (in the Theory of History) sense who is really just a confused and wounded boy swept up in the tide of history.
2) Both feature space empires openly inspired by Imperial Rome.
3) Both of said space empires are ruled by a genetically modified ruling caste.
4) Graphic violence and cheapness of human life are central themes.
5) Both authors are prone to poetic prose and waxing philosophically about the human condition.
All that is to say, if you liked one you'll probably like the other, but something else to keep in mind about Suneater is that the whole series is a homage to Science Fiction and a bunch of other stuff. No, really, one of coolest parts of the first book is inspired by an obscure J Pop song by Maya Sakamoto and makes reference to the lyrics throughout in various different ways. Roucchio even admits as much. Everything is inspired by something, to the point that at the very beginning it feels obnoxiously derivative of Dune and Star Wars (push through this, it's common for people to get frustrated in the first couple chapters of the first book). It's not a rip off if you manage to make it a tribute and I feel like Roucchio ultimately succeeds at this.
I have a bit of guilty pleasure in following G.S. Jennsen's Amaranthe books (the first is Star Shine). These books have lots of flaws, not the least of which being the Jennsen self publishes and would benefit from an editor who can say no to her. But they scratch an itch for military adventure sci-fi that I find it hard to scratch at this stage of my life. Military adventure sci-fi (as a sub genre) is obnoxiously dominated by conservative old white men writing for teenage boys (and they seem to be writing more aggressively conservative stuff lately... I blame the Hugo drama of recent memory). G.S. Jennsen if a female writer who writes books with strong and powerful female characters, sensitive and emotionally vulnerable male characters, gay characters, etc).
If you read my next two paragraphs, you'll probably think "Why the hell would I read these [email protected]? You make them sound stupid." So before you do, I want to say that while my pleasure in these books is a little guilty, that pleasure is actually great. When a new one comes out, I immediately buy it direct from the author (because fuck Jeff Bezos). If you, like me, have found military adventure sci-fi to be frustratingly male and conservative and if you enjoy good, entertaining stories for the sake of them being good, entertaining stories and you're willing to overlook a few flaws, READ THESE, you will have fun.
My standard warning about Jennsen is that the books are a genre mash of what I think are her two favorite genres: Military adventure sci-fi and... trashy bodice ripper romances. The kind with titles like "Highland Passion" and "In the Captains Arms." The kind of 90s supermarket checkout line garbage your cat lady aunt has 5 bookshelves of in her basement. Everyone (I mean everyone) will find their perfect, "forever partner", who they will love passionately, deeply and monogamously literally forever (the later books have a 100,000 year old cyborg woman who's mind gets erased and she manages to refind her lover from before the mindwipe and gets to fall in love with him all over again as she rediscovers herself.
Another thing about these books is that the technological escalation strains credulity. Book one takes place in a classic early interstellar era (slow FTL, nearby colonies rebelling against Earth). Book 18, taking place a mere generation later, mostly following the same characters, has escalated to artificial universes and universe hopping, warp bubbles that can shield whole planets, post singularity human / AI fusions that can wormhole themselves across intergalactic space (or do a kind of astral projection thing where they can just send their disembodied minds to go spy on enemy post singularity gray goo entities on the other side of the local super cluster - no, that happens).
I just readSemiosis and Interference by Sue Burke and REALLY liked them much more than I was expecting to. I don't know that I've ever encountered books quite like them. The physical science is a little vague and soft but the biological science is really cool (and totally inspired by all that stuff you've read about how the roots and fungus in an acre of forest have more chemical connections than the human brain has synapses). The first book is like a series of short stories, set on a planet where the plants are sentient (and some are sapient) and the human colonists form a symbiotic relationship with them over the course of 100 years or so. Also, lots of pacifist political philosophy (if that doesn't intrigue you, it will probably seem heavy handed, as an anarcho-pacifist myself, I quite enjoyed this aspect). Funny enough, I probably would have passed these over after reading the synopsis, but ChatGPT talked me into reading them after I gave it a list of my interests and personal sentiments and it was 100% right.
Taking a swing back into harder sci-fi, I also just read Daniel Suarez's space entrepreneur books Delta V and Critical Mass. A thinly veiled Elon Musk like character over leverages his personal wealth to launch a secret (the crew don't know just how secret), probably illegal asteroid mining mission. The second book is about their highly politically charged return to Earth and a second mission to mine the lunar surface, and I liked it much better than the first book. The first book is fun, but is kind of laying the groundwork for the second book which is more about building a near future space economy / society, much the way Daemon was a fun technothrillar laying the ground work for the weirdly libertarian yet progressive gamified political thought experiment that was Freedom. I found Suarez's other work to be pretty lackluster after Daemon and Freedom so these were a nice surprise.
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman: Basically the vastly better Starship Troopers. Just don't read the sequel.
Old Man's War - John Scalzi: Very much feels like an modern update of The Forever War
Cities in Flight - James Blish: I just love the bonker's idea of whole cities declaring their independence from Earth and just buggering off into space
Ubik - Philip K. Dick: Hard to pick a favourite Dick, but this one just has all the mindfuckery and weirdness of that particular author in a perfect blend
For me it is Foundation series because I like it's themes and how they are presented, I really like some characters like Mule and Hari Seldon and it is very interesting to read.
Is also one of my favourite books full stop. The followingups are pretty solid as well. It's amazing that he was writing Shards of Earth and its followups at the same time.
The Use of Weapons
is Piranesi sci-fi or is it crossing more over to that crossover genres of science fantasy?
Tough, hard to follow or understand (deliberately so - this book and a number of the author's other books are well known for "unreliable narrator"), excellent prose, and thought provoking. I generally dislike rereading a book, with all the other books to read and new ones coming out every year, but this is an exception.
One of my absolute favourites that I haven't seen on this list is Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. A bunch of friends at a bar swap puns, stories and save the world, random strangers and each other using logic, love and the occasional nuclear weapon in a series of short stories.
Diamond Age ranks way up there for me. All the UBI discussions that have been happening? In there. AI education tools? Yep. Differing views on IP? Also there. Some good thought works.
A Deepness in the Sky - A good story with plenty of thought bombs. The Focused and the localizers are good examples.
Rainbows End - our concerns about AI? How about an AI that never comes up with anything new but is great at mixing and harnessing individual and groups of people?
Poor Man's Fight series. A good adventure story based around student loans and macroeconomics. :-)
Hard to pick just a few. I think I am going with authors to sort of cheat a bit. ;p
I love me some Arthur C Clarke and Asimov and other oldskool stuff but every age had their greats. Greg Bear left a pretty deep Impression with his Blood Music, written in the 80s, and these days I really love me some Alastair Reynolds. Blindsight by Peter Watts, from the early 2000s, is another standout for me but feels kind of unfair to single out specific books cuz there are so many great ones. Almost anything, old and new, released under the SF Masterworks label is great!
So many good recommendations! I'd like to add Ernest Cline's 'Ready Player One' which I thoroughly enjoyed. Look into it if you are looking for a fun quick read and are somewhat interested in computer games and/or role playing.
For all suggested titles I can only recommend to read the books first. The movies are just a pale imitation and are lacking so much! Especially The Expanse but also the above mentioned Ready Player One are to be read IMHO.
Sea of Tranquility is amazing! Emily St. John Mandel just has a really great writing style and even though the main plot of this novel is very much connected to sci-fi themes it does not read like a dissertation on specific futuristic concepts.
A bit unorthodox, but I found "Off on a Comet" by Jules Verne interesting. Definitely in-depth explanations. Plus, it's not copyrighted so you can read it for free on project Gutenburg.
I also found Spin by Robert Charles a good read (note: I tend to go for more emotional epics, so the tone is that, but Spin definitely contains sciency stuff).
Another one I keep hearkening back to is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The ending is really grim, but the author provides a lot of detailed explanation for how the ship goes to the planet (attaching to an asteroid and accelerating based on the asteroid's energy).
Three Body Problem and Children of Time were both great!
I also really enjoyed Jack McDevitt's "Hutch" series, starting with The Engines of God. Great concepts with exploring alien ruins.
Check out Jessie Mihalik's Polaris Rising, too. It blurs the lines between sf and romance which might not be everyone's cup of tea, but what I adored was how the main character's use of technology felt authentic to me. That's rare in science fiction.
Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi, probably better know by the first book of the series: Quantum Thief.
The world building is AMAZING. The author has a PhD in mathematical physics and the world is a far future extrapolation of what human societies could become. The "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" kind of future without blatant contradictions with what could be possible by current science. It's not a utopia or a dystopia, it's "just" a world with multiple societies with their own lifestyles, ideals and problems.
The other notable thing is that reading is a bit of a puzzle. You can understand the story without understanding every term and that's essential because the workings of the world are obvious and mundane for the chracters and they do not go out of their way to explain them just for the benefit of the reader. But for me that is a big part of the charm to be tossed in a very foreign culture to figure out it all by yourself.
Also since the author is originally from Finland (the book is still originally written in English) there are people who mostly chill in the Oort cloud in zero gravity saunas and making snow sculptures.
Excession by Iain M Banks is one of my Culture favorites. I really like the far future universe he built with all its anarchy and culture clashes. Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris books are my favorite kind of creepy weird. The first book is massive and a bit of a slog to read but worth it in my opinion. Just like everyone else I like the Foundation series by Asimov.