I love the Vorkosigan saga and I'm amazed it hasn't been turned into a show. It could surpass Game of Thrones but unlike GoT it's a positive uplifting story.
I also wanted to say that I like your recommendations but I also recommend British sci-fi writers. Arthur C Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton ... excellent writers.
Thanks! For some reason I usually can't get into British authors...glad you noticed the lack! Nick Harkaway is an exception. And of course Clarke is great, but I find his writing pretty cold. Wonder why I'm so anti-Brit!!
I have a soft sport for the Scottish SF Socialists... I'll add a rec for the Iain Banks Culture novels if you haven't tried them yet. And then Charlie Stross Laundry novels are more fantasy than sf, but still amazing. Stross' talk about how we _already have_ evil "paperclip maximizer" type AIs ruining the world, they just use human beings as functional components and we call them "corporations", is a really great listen.
Now there has to be something that would appeal to you among the amazing works of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Paul McAuley, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Brian Aldiss, Nina Allan, Ken Macleod, Ian R. Macleod, M. John Harrison, Simon Ings, China Mieville, Justina Robson, Charles Stross, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Christopher Priest, Dave Hutchinson, and Jo Walton. :-)
I've been reading SF for 60 years now, and haven't been exploring as much as I should for the past generation. Thanks for pushing me from my rut! Isolating here in a cow pasture in a high interAndean valley (yet with internet), I can see that I have a lot to download from Z-library. This helps me a lot: there is such as flood of bad SF out there that it's hard to find what's really good.
Of the 7 you listed that I've read, I agree with all of them. That gives me hope for the others. But I will probably pass on the dystopian SF.
My tastes have changed over time. I can no longer read most of the pre-70's SF books: the writing and characterization was too horrible and likewise the racist, misogynist, authoritarian culture I grew up in that so many stories assumed to be human nature.
The two oldies I would have included are Last And First Men (already mentioned) and "The Cyberiad".
I anxiously await your list of recommended Fantasy readings!
Lots of great choices, most of which I haven't yet read. I'm dating myself by saying I'm still a huge of fan of the big three of Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke. In fact, I'm working on a podcast retelling of the classic Foundation Trilogy but will include both sequels and prequels, then likely go on to do the Robot novels as well. I feel that Asimov is timeless and may surge in popularity with the Apple TV series coming up.
Your pick of Lucifer's Hammer reminds me of one by the same pair I liked even more called The Mote in God's Eye. Totally gripping.
Biggest contemporary snub for me is Kim Stanley Robinson. To me, he's the modern master.
I started with the classics and I'll always have a soft spot for them, especially Heinlein, but I like that Noah's list skews towards more recent and modern sci-fi. There are lots of lists out there telling me how great Dune and the Foundation series are (they are!), but it's nice to see more recent stuff get its due.
I definitely agree that The Mote in God's Eye is great--possibly Niven's best work. "Totally gripping" made me laugh (Iunderstoodthatreference.gif).
Thank you! I wanted to boost Kim Stanley Robinson too. He was influenced by (and friends with) Ursula Le Guin. Like her work, I think his writing also has that feeling of being speculative but "grounded", if that makes sense.
One of the prime examples of ecological fiction that I know.
Econ is a thing where you're one of the only writers who CAN do it really, really well. Anyone can do pop culture and fiction book reviews, but i like getting to see this side of you, too. :)
I haven’t seen anyone plugging First and Last Men, but that’s a fun read. A view of the next 20000 years of human evolution from a perspective of about 1930. By Olaf Stapledon.
I love so many of the books on this list, but my favorite is Pattern Recognition! Gibson really nailed it with this one, creating a SF novel/travelog that sent me Googling references as often as reading! Weirdly fun and interactive; more novels need to be like this....
Hey Noah, I'll try to check these out when I have the time, because I've been majorly slacking on my sci-fi reading. Would you have similar recs for fantasy? It's a genre I'm more familiar with and fond of on a personal level, but I've been slacking on that, too. I'm not really sure why, but I find I get to be a bit...anxious when I read scifi? Something about the sheer infinity of the future doesn't fit well with my brain. Maybe I should work to change that.
Speaking of, I just started Dune, which seems like the sort of thing that'd be up my alley. I know I'm late to the party, but I'm interested to see where this blend of scifi and fantasy goes.
I love Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. The stories reach many different levels and tones. Why no Catherine Asaro? Her characters are very human, despite their psychic abilities. As a sixty something White male, I'm finding myself drawn to female artists of all sorts.
Can't go wrong with the Drowned World by JG Ballard or the Prestige by Christopher Priest. Ridley Walker by Russell Holban is a bit of a cult classic. All of the above are "literary" science fiction. The Strugatsky brothers were the preeminent Soviet sci-fi authors. Roadside Picnic is their most famous, which was made into a Tarkovsky film. Which reminds me: Stanislav Lem and especially Solaris. Okay I'm done.
Strugatskies are good. Also, Orwell's 1984 was highly inspired from Zamyatin - We that was released 25 years before Orwell's work and 5 years after Soviet's came to power in Russia. Very recommended.
I heartily endorse the recommendations of Hyperion (one of the best novels ever written, absolutely heart-rending, beautifully written) and Oryx and Crake (modified my view of morality).
If you like Yoon Ha Lee, you'll also like Ancillary Justice! Also military sci-fi, set in a world where a) consciousness can be distributed across several bodies including those of starships and b) the protagonist's polity doesn't see gender and everyone uses 'she' pronouns.
I would also recommend Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang, which I'm currently reading. Caveat that I haven't finished it yet, but: it's a lot like The Dispossessed in that it contrasts a materialistic society with one (on Mars) that is deliberately non-materialistic. So far it's looking like a cri de coeur for individual self-determination and cross-cultural exchange, which makes it a useful corrective for Westerners [*looks pointedly at the American pundit class writ large*] who subscribe to cheap stereotypes about how Chinese people see the world.
Thanks Noah, my Goodreads list is going to get a lot bigger!
Some recommendations (or curious to get your thoughts if you’ve read): Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Recursion), the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, Embassytown by China Miéville, the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer, The Just City by Jo Walton, the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, and finally seconding another commenter on Christopher Priest, specifically The Inverted World.
Kraken by China Miéville is good if extremely bizarre. It doesn't even really count as sci-fi, just fantasy, but extremely creative fantasy, worlds apart from your swords and sorcery stuff.
Fun fact - Miéville wrote an article more than a decade ago about how evil and stupid seasteading was. The online version used my material without citation, though it turned out that was the editors fault who shortened the piece for the web and Miéville was appropriately apologetic.
I still find his extreme leftism quite distasteful but everyone has their own taste...
I love the Vorkosigan saga and I'm amazed it hasn't been turned into a show. It could surpass Game of Thrones but unlike GoT it's a positive uplifting story.
I also wanted to say that I like your recommendations but I also recommend British sci-fi writers. Arthur C Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Ian Banks, Peter Hamilton ... excellent writers.
Thanks! For some reason I usually can't get into British authors...glad you noticed the lack! Nick Harkaway is an exception. And of course Clarke is great, but I find his writing pretty cold. Wonder why I'm so anti-Brit!!
I have a soft sport for the Scottish SF Socialists... I'll add a rec for the Iain Banks Culture novels if you haven't tried them yet. And then Charlie Stross Laundry novels are more fantasy than sf, but still amazing. Stross' talk about how we _already have_ evil "paperclip maximizer" type AIs ruining the world, they just use human beings as functional components and we call them "corporations", is a really great listen.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html
Banks was great and is one of the writers I mentioned. I'm a big fan of the Culture novels. I love Stross, big fan of his work and I like his blog.
Now there has to be something that would appeal to you among the amazing works of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Paul McAuley, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Brian Aldiss, Nina Allan, Ken Macleod, Ian R. Macleod, M. John Harrison, Simon Ings, China Mieville, Justina Robson, Charles Stross, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Christopher Priest, Dave Hutchinson, and Jo Walton. :-)
I've been reading SF for 60 years now, and haven't been exploring as much as I should for the past generation. Thanks for pushing me from my rut! Isolating here in a cow pasture in a high interAndean valley (yet with internet), I can see that I have a lot to download from Z-library. This helps me a lot: there is such as flood of bad SF out there that it's hard to find what's really good.
Of the 7 you listed that I've read, I agree with all of them. That gives me hope for the others. But I will probably pass on the dystopian SF.
My tastes have changed over time. I can no longer read most of the pre-70's SF books: the writing and characterization was too horrible and likewise the racist, misogynist, authoritarian culture I grew up in that so many stories assumed to be human nature.
The two oldies I would have included are Last And First Men (already mentioned) and "The Cyberiad".
I anxiously await your list of recommended Fantasy readings!
I like the Cyberiad!
Lots of great choices, most of which I haven't yet read. I'm dating myself by saying I'm still a huge of fan of the big three of Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke. In fact, I'm working on a podcast retelling of the classic Foundation Trilogy but will include both sequels and prequels, then likely go on to do the Robot novels as well. I feel that Asimov is timeless and may surge in popularity with the Apple TV series coming up.
Your pick of Lucifer's Hammer reminds me of one by the same pair I liked even more called The Mote in God's Eye. Totally gripping.
Biggest contemporary snub for me is Kim Stanley Robinson. To me, he's the modern master.
Ted Chiang is fabulous. Reading him right now.
I started with the classics and I'll always have a soft spot for them, especially Heinlein, but I like that Noah's list skews towards more recent and modern sci-fi. There are lots of lists out there telling me how great Dune and the Foundation series are (they are!), but it's nice to see more recent stuff get its due.
I definitely agree that The Mote in God's Eye is great--possibly Niven's best work. "Totally gripping" made me laugh (Iunderstoodthatreference.gif).
No KSR love? His latest, The Ministry for the Future, is still rocking my world months after reading it. Seems right up Noah's alley.
I agree. For those of us who like our sci-fi sans the fantasy, I find Robinson the most interesting.
I love KSR.
Thank you! I wanted to boost Kim Stanley Robinson too. He was influenced by (and friends with) Ursula Le Guin. Like her work, I think his writing also has that feeling of being speculative but "grounded", if that makes sense.
One of the prime examples of ecological fiction that I know.
I
I love KSR.
I'm certainly enjoying Noah the pop culture writer more than Noah the econ blogger :D. Waiting for the upcoming blogposts on fantasy & FLCL
Those are coming too! But econ is still going to be the main thing... ;-)
Econ is a thing where you're one of the only writers who CAN do it really, really well. Anyone can do pop culture and fiction book reviews, but i like getting to see this side of you, too. :)
I haven’t seen anyone plugging First and Last Men, but that’s a fun read. A view of the next 20000 years of human evolution from a perspective of about 1930. By Olaf Stapledon.
Thanks! Haven't read that one!!
Lots of stuff for me to check out, thank you. In return - have you read the Murderbot novellas?
I have only read two so far! Need to read the others...
I love so many of the books on this list, but my favorite is Pattern Recognition! Gibson really nailed it with this one, creating a SF novel/travelog that sent me Googling references as often as reading! Weirdly fun and interactive; more novels need to be like this....
Thanks for the endorsement - I added it to my amazon cart for whenever this pandemic ends and I can buy things again. :)
"If you want to have your brain blown right out the back of your skull, read this book!"
Sounds like it will break up the monotony of winter pandemic life a bit. My brain is far too comfortable with its usual position in my skull.
Right?
Hey Noah, I'll try to check these out when I have the time, because I've been majorly slacking on my sci-fi reading. Would you have similar recs for fantasy? It's a genre I'm more familiar with and fond of on a personal level, but I've been slacking on that, too. I'm not really sure why, but I find I get to be a bit...anxious when I read scifi? Something about the sheer infinity of the future doesn't fit well with my brain. Maybe I should work to change that.
Speaking of, I just started Dune, which seems like the sort of thing that'd be up my alley. I know I'm late to the party, but I'm interested to see where this blend of scifi and fantasy goes.
Dune is solid! I will definitely write a list of fantasy recs.
Try, When you Reach Me, and the Passage Trilogy.
Those are both "sweet" and uplifting, and the time issues won't bother you the way some books about time travel and the future do (I'm pretty sure).
I love Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. The stories reach many different levels and tones. Why no Catherine Asaro? Her characters are very human, despite their psychic abilities. As a sixty something White male, I'm finding myself drawn to female artists of all sorts.
I like Catherine Asaro! Wouldn't put her stuff on my favorites list, but I do like it!
I've read about half of these and they were all great, so guess I'll just have to read the rest now.
I can't help myself. What about JG Ballard, Christopher Priest, Russell Hoban, the Strugatskys, and Chris Beckett.
I haven't read any of those! :-)
Can't go wrong with the Drowned World by JG Ballard or the Prestige by Christopher Priest. Ridley Walker by Russell Holban is a bit of a cult classic. All of the above are "literary" science fiction. The Strugatsky brothers were the preeminent Soviet sci-fi authors. Roadside Picnic is their most famous, which was made into a Tarkovsky film. Which reminds me: Stanislav Lem and especially Solaris. Okay I'm done.
Thanks!! I do like Solaris a lot.
Strugatskies are good. Also, Orwell's 1984 was highly inspired from Zamyatin - We that was released 25 years before Orwell's work and 5 years after Soviet's came to power in Russia. Very recommended.
Good point! We is great.
I've read all these folks. I didn't like any of them. I think it is the "literary"ness of these authors.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky is a great book. I recommend it.
Snowcrash should make the cut, but maybe you were already Neal S. heavy.
Shout out to David Brin for his accurate and excellent explanations of science.
I heartily endorse the recommendations of Hyperion (one of the best novels ever written, absolutely heart-rending, beautifully written) and Oryx and Crake (modified my view of morality).
If you like Yoon Ha Lee, you'll also like Ancillary Justice! Also military sci-fi, set in a world where a) consciousness can be distributed across several bodies including those of starships and b) the protagonist's polity doesn't see gender and everyone uses 'she' pronouns.
I would also recommend Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang, which I'm currently reading. Caveat that I haven't finished it yet, but: it's a lot like The Dispossessed in that it contrasts a materialistic society with one (on Mars) that is deliberately non-materialistic. So far it's looking like a cri de coeur for individual self-determination and cross-cultural exchange, which makes it a useful corrective for Westerners [*looks pointedly at the American pundit class writ large*] who subscribe to cheap stereotypes about how Chinese people see the world.
Thanks! Couldn't get into Ancillary Justice for some reason, no matter how hard I tried. I will check out Vagabonds!!
What, no Peter F Hamilton? The 10,000 years span of his newest saga Salvation is impressive, and also human-optimist.
I liked Hamilton's Commonwealth books, but I wouldn't call them my favorites! Haven't read the newest one!
Thanks Noah, my Goodreads list is going to get a lot bigger!
Some recommendations (or curious to get your thoughts if you’ve read): Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Recursion), the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, Embassytown by China Miéville, the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer, The Just City by Jo Walton, the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, and finally seconding another commenter on Christopher Priest, specifically The Inverted World.
Thanks! I have read almost none of those (except Foundation)!!
Kraken by China Miéville is good if extremely bizarre. It doesn't even really count as sci-fi, just fantasy, but extremely creative fantasy, worlds apart from your swords and sorcery stuff.
Fun fact - Miéville wrote an article more than a decade ago about how evil and stupid seasteading was. The online version used my material without citation, though it turned out that was the editors fault who shortened the piece for the web and Miéville was appropriately apologetic.
I still find his extreme leftism quite distasteful but everyone has their own taste...
Thanks. I've added this to the Critiques of Libertarianism Seasteads index. Any more you'd like to suggest?
His extreme leftism plays out well in Perdido Street Station and the other stories of New Crobuzon.