I’m obsessed with Science Fiction. It’s almost all I read. I used to run a Sci-Fi Book Club here in Vancouver (you can see a few posts from it like our short story contest and some of our reviews)
About every six years or so (it seems) I put together a list of what I think the best science fiction books are. You can see 2017’s list here and 2011’s list here.
The criteria for being on this list is that I have to absolutely love the book. Most of the books on this list I’ve re-read many times. I’ve gifted most of these books to people (“You HAVE to read this!”).
Most of the books on this list also aren’t for everyone. I like slow-moving books. I like subtle world-building. I like “big concept” sci-fi. I like big, depressing spaceships. I like stories about robots and Artificial Intelligence that make us question what it means to be human. I like series, as opposed to short stories, because they let me spend more time diving deeply into a new world.
I like sci-fi that asks “What if…?” and then lays out a thoughtful answer complete with implications, considerations, and complications over the span of a few hundred or more pages.
There are also always exceptions. The first book on my list below is a collection of three short stories and doesn’t have any robots. Wasp, also below, isn’t slow moving at all and doesn’t really have any spaceships.
With that, and in no particular order, my current favorite Science Fiction Books:
Worlds of Exile & Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin: Technically not a singular book but three novellas: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exiles, and City of Illusions. You can read them in any order, and they’re linked mostly by being part of the Hainish Cycle. But they’re also linked by being haunting stories of being isolated across time, space and knowledge.
Everything Ursula K Le Guin writes is absolute poetry. It can be hard to pick up a book by a lesser author after spending time in her pages. I’ve also been diving into a lot of her writing on writing, which has made me want to be a better writer myself.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: Kinda the opposite of the previous entry: rather than being three books in one this pick is one book across three. The story follows the first generation of colonists on Mars from when they landed all the way through to a hundred or so years later. It can be slow moving, and there are long chapters devoted to loving and detailed explanations of the Martian landscape. This is balanced with a few great action pieces and a truly human-centred view of exploring of space exploration.
I just recently re-read this entire series over the last year and it holds up on the 10th read through as much as it does the first. Every time I fall in love with the characters and the planet all over again, and every time I find another detail to make me think about what it means to be human. If you liked this, I’d also recommend the Three Californias trilogy by Robinson. Each one imagines a slightly different future (or asks a slightly different “what if…”?) About what might happen. Fun fact: Ursula K. Le Guin led some of the writing workshops where KSR honed his craft. You can sometimes feel her rhythm come alive in his work.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson: I read somewhere that KSR wrote Aurora as a way of recanting for his Mars trilogy, and a way of letting us know that there is no real escape from Earth. No plan B, no planet B.
It’s the story of a generation ship, halfway through a multi-hundred year journey to another star with the hopes of finding a hospitable place to live. It’s a story of science, of orbital mechanics, entropy, and a coming of age story of an Artificial Intelligence.
If this sounds interesting to you then you might also like Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. I’m obsessed with the fact that it was published just a few months apart from Aurora, and that both books have such similar themes: how hard it is to leave Earth, entropy, orbital mechanisms, and group behaviour in a closed system.
Blindsight, The Colonel & Echopraxia by Peter Watts: If Kim Stanley Robinson’s books are about understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos where we are most definitely alone, then Blindsight is about understanding what it means to be sentient in a place where we’re most definitely (and terrifyingly) not alone. It’s science and jargon HEAVY. And grim. I love it, and the follow-ups.
Wasp by Eric Frank Russell: Probably one of the most criminally underrated sci-fi books of all time. Wasp takes its name from the idea that a small insect can make a car crash, despite the massive size difference, by distracting the driver or passengers. The Wasp in this case is a special agent sent to infiltrate and disrupt an enemy planet. With a few minor changes this could very easily be the story of an Allied spy disrupting enemy supply lines and avoiding capture during the Cold War in an un-named Soviet Bloc country and all of the action that goes along with a story like that. What i love about is that sci-fi or not the story keeps up an incredible pace and delivers on the feeling of the protagonist getting closed in on by enemy forces.
Neuromancer by William Gibson: If the Mars Trilogy was my entry point into loving sci-fi then Neuromancer was the gateway drug to an obsession with cyberpunk specifically. In fact, it was likely that for a lot of people. As my friend pointed out, it feels derivative if you read it now. But that’s only because so much of our popular conception of “high tech, low life” stems directly from Neuromancer.
For more cyberpunk, read When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. It takes some of the familiar genre tropes (inserting chips directly into brains, hackers in bars) but sets them in an unnamed country in the Middle East. The result feels super modern and is a blend of culture, high tech and low life that you won’t find elsewhere. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkway brings us a few great variations on the cyberpunk detective story, as does The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein will always have a soft spot in my heart. But it’s good to balance it out with the Old Man’s War by Scalzi and The Forever War by Joe Halderman for a few different view points on what military action in our future probably won’t look like. All of them touch on the idea of fighting far from home, and how coming back will be difficult if not impossible.
Matter by Iain Banks: All of the books in The Culture Series are good. Matter is particularly good. It's good enough that it almost makes me want to add another category to the type of books I like: Medieval worlds and characters existing in futuristic universes.
If you like the idea of the medieval/future combo I’d recommend: Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (not THAT Michael Flynn), which asks the question of “What if an alien ship crashed in Germany during the black plague?”) and Hard To Be A God by the Strugatsky Brothers, which is about a group of scientists from futuristic Earth who visit a medieval planet that is profoundly anti-intellectual. Although I’m sure the Strugaksys were making a commentary about Russia in 1964, their message feels even more clear today.
Also in this category is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson: Imagine a group of monks who are devoted to the study of science, physics and mathematics inside the walls of their monastery, while the outside world is obsessed with religion. When something incredible happens the monks are called to make sense of it. What follows results in the most amount of profound “whoahs” I’ve muttered while reading a book, even on multiple re-reads.
Ilium & Olympos by Dan Simmons might also fit into this category and is an absolute treat every time I read it. It’s the Trojan War reenacted by super-advanced humans playing the role of Gods & Goddesses. There are plucky robots, Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban, and an incredible Odysseus. Nothing should really fit together, and yet it does. The Hyperion series, also by Simmons, deserves an honourable mention here. It might be bolder in scope but not quite as imaginative.
And finally, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. An incredible journey across time and space with some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever read. The story imagines 1,000 clones who spend hundreds of thousands of years exploring the galaxy. When they reunite, they spend 1,000 nights together, each night sharing one of their memories with the others, as a way of living forever. There are some incredible locations the characters visit, and the book features Hesperus, who is maybe my favourite character of all time.
The book is as much a mystery as it is a space opera, and in that respect is a bit like the slightly less epic 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. More of a tour of the solar system as it might look in 2312 (complete with hollowed-out asteroids and most of the moons occupied) it also has a confusing mystery plot to keep you interested.
For something MORE epic and sprawling than House of Suns, read The Marrow Series by Robert Reed, which follows a planet-sized spaceship as it navigates around the universe of the span of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years. I’m also 90% sure that Robert Reed’s book Sister Alice as a bit source of inspiration for House of Suns (there are a lot of plot similarities).
After writing this out I want to pick up every single one of those books and read them for the first time again. I know that I already have copies of each of them, and that I’ll still seek out old copies hidden in the dusty, musty shelves of used bookstores or old copies with beautiful new covers in new bookstores. I’ll get some to keep, but most to give away, to push into someone’s hands and say “here, read this: it’s so rad: It’s got space vampires” or “you gotta read this, man – it’s so epic.”
But it also makes me want to keep exploring what else is out there in science-fiction. There is still so much great stuff being written and I can’t wait to read it.
by NeonWaterBeast