Suggest me a book -new to this

These books are my top recommendations for those just starting to read:

* The author Sarah Pinsker. I love her novella [And Then There Were N-1](https://escapepod.org/2018/11/01/escape-pod-652-and-then-there-were-n-one-part-1/). A woman gets an invitation from an alternate universe version of her. This other version has invented multiverse travel and is hosting a convention just for all of her.

* The author Blake Crouch. I’ve seen lots of people recommend and talk about his books here, but I read his book Dark Matter and it was about similar things as And Then There Were N-1 but imo not quite as good. It was more like a blockbuster movie of the same ideas, while the novella was more like a story meant to be read.

* Books by Peter Clines. I read his book The Fold and thought it was pretty good. He has a similar sci fi thriller-y style to the previous two authors on this list, which a lot of new readers tend to like.

* Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding. It’s like the TV show Firefly but only on one planet, with airships instead of space ships.

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Some of my own favourite books of all time. About 90% of what I read is sci fi and these are all sci fi:

* Leech by Hiron Ennes. Post apocalyptic sci fi horror. It’s very strange and things only get stranger the more you read.

* The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley, cosmic horror/body horror sci fi

* The City in the Middle of the Night. About two pairs of women on a tidally locked planet with one blazing hot side, one freezing cold side, and a narrow stripe of habitable twilight all around. There are two cities on opposite sides of the planet.

* The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie. You could start either with Ancillary Justice or Provenance. Ancillary Justice is about a troop carrier AI on a mysterious quest. Her ship was destroyed, so she’s reduced to one human body that she can puppet around.

* Rocannon’s World, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Great classics, technically part of a series but they all stand alone. You can really see the evolution of the author’s style from fantasy-flavoured sci fi to more “undiluted” sci fi. They are set in a universe where humanity colonized a lot of planets but travel is slow enough and contact is difficult enough that people have evolved in very different ways on each world and may or may not remember space travel. The galactic civilization sends envoys to planets in order to ask them to join the larger human society.

* Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. Post apocalyptic city survival, while all kinds of genetically engineered monstrosities prowl around. I’ve been trying to read his Area X/Southern Reach trilogy as well, but haven’t been able to get into it because it’s too creepy.

* The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. He’s “Iain Banks” when writing non sci fi, so if you like the author’s style but aren’t a huge sci fi fan, this is an author to keep an eye out for. Set in the far future in a utopian society run by AIs. The main character is a great strategist who is known for playing any kind of game. An AI asks him to go to an empire whose whole society is based around an extraordinarily complicated board game, and enter the competition.

* The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. About a ruthless career woman whose husband leaves her. Whether you like this book depends on what you think of her.

* Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. He writes books that are about a billion different things at once, yet he’s good enough at exposition that they are still entertaining and make sense. Snow Crash is one of his earlier books and at this point really shows its age, but it’s great fun. About a thirty year old trying to make it in the gig economy (or what we would nowadays call the gig economy, that term didn’t exist back then). This book coined the term “metaverse” for a virtual reality and augmented reality version of the internet, but the real world internet didn’t exist yet when he wrote this and the author is *extremely* not a fan of real world attempts at making the metaverse.

* Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller. About a floating city with lots of refugees and economic inequality. There’s also nanotech.