Recommended Science Fiction

30 Dec 2023 16:21

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These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books. A raw ranking of them would be of little use to others, unless I explained why I gave them the ranks I did, and anyway I'd probably give different rankings by the time your read this. (When I know of an on-line review about a book which I agree with --- e.g., because I wrote it --- I've included a link; also some exceedingly short remarks about interesting cases.)

See also:
• Fantasy and Horror Recommendations
• Science Fiction (to read)
• The Dying Earth
• Italo Calvino
• Karel Capek
• C. J. Cherryh
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Jack Vance
• My blog posts filed under "Scientifiction and Fantastica"

• Craig Alanson
  1. Columbus Day
  2. SpecOps
• Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Spring [I don't include the other two books of the trilogy --- Helliconia Summer and Winter --- simply because I haven't read them yet...]
• Poul Anderson
  • The High Crusade
  • The Man who Counts
  • Orion Shall Rise
• Taylor Anderson [These could be summed up, entirely fairly, as "What these lemurs need is a boatload of vintage honkies".]
  1. Into the Storm
  2. Crusade
  3. Maelstrom
  4. Distant Thunders
  5. Rising Tides
  6. Iron Gray Seas
• Isaac Asimov
  • Foundation Trilogy [not the much-later sequels]
    • Foundation
    • Foundation and Empire
    • Second Foundation
  • I, Robot [Stories]
  • Nemesis
• Rachel Bach
  1. Fortune's Pawn
  2. Honor's Knight
  3. Heaven's Queen
• Iain M. Banks
  • The Culture:
    1. Consider Phlebas
    3. Use of Weapons
    6. Inversions
    7. Look to Windward
    9. Surface Detail
• Greg Bear
  • Forge of God [One of the scariest books I've ever read; the sequel, Anvil of Stars, didn't work anywhere near as well]
  • Heads
  • Queen of Angels and / [Review: De nos fabula]
  • Tangents [Stories]
  • The Wind from a Burning Woman [Stories]
  • Vitals [Thanks, Cris!]
• Cheryl Benard, Turning on the Girls [Not very imaginative as SF, but very funny]
• Alfred Bester
  • The Demolished Man
  • The Stars My Destination
• James Blish, A Case of Conscience [Theologically inaccurate Catholic first-contact story]
• Leigh Brackett, The Best of Leigh Brackett [i.e., I'm recommending her short stories...]
• Ray Bradbury [There's a posthumous omnibus edition of all his short stories, which is probably a better value than tracking down the individual collections published during his life]
  • Fahrenheit 451
  • I Sing the Body Electric [Stories]
  • The Martian Chronicles
  • R Is for Rocket [Stories]
• David Brin
  • The Practice Effect
  • The Uplift books [space-opera, but good space opera, except for the highly unfortunate last book in the series, which I shan't list]
    • Sundiver
    • Startide Rising
    • The Uplift War
    • Brightness Reef
    • Infinity's Shore
• Damien Broderick, The Black Grail
• John Brunner
  • The Atlantic Abomination [Lovecraftian monsters vs. early '60s technological optimism; not great but fun. Dated gender roles are dated.]
  • Double, Double
  • The Infinitive of Go
  • The Shockwave Rider
  • The Squares of the City [Perhaps the best novel ever written about urban planning]
  • Stand on Zanzibar
• Steven Brust, My Own Kind of Freedom [Free online]
• Lois McMaster Bujold [Normally, I have a special place in my heart for military SF, and it's run by the ghost of Felix Dzherzhinsky; but these are such well-written books (just think of the scene in Warrior's Apprentice where Miles ad libs the Dendarii into existence) that one hardly notices one's reading about utter monsters --- and the shock is all the greater when the realization does penetrate, which always happens. I literally read all I could lay hands upon in a week, have now gone through all of them, and wait impatiently for more.]
  • Shards of Honor
  • Barrayar
  • Cordelia's Honor [=the first two collected]
  • The Warrior's Apprentice
  • The Vor Game
  • Young Miles [=Warrior's Apprentice plus Vor Game plus a story from Borders of Infinity which falls between them]
  • Cetaganda
  • Borders of Infinity
  • Brothers in Arms
  • Mirror Dance
  • Memory
  • Komarr
  • A Civil Campaign
  • Diplomatic Immunity
  • Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
  • Cryoburn
  • Falling Free [In the same universe, but a long time earlier]
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Octavia Butler
  • Patternist series;
    1. Wild Seed
    2. Mind of My Mind
• Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
• Jack Campbell, The Lost Fleet series [Horrible cover-art, titles I'm embarrassed to name, enjoyable stories]
  1. Dauntless
  2. Fearless
  3. Courageous
  4. Valiant
  5. Relentless
  6. Victorious
  7. Dreadnaught
  8. Invincible
• John W. Campbell, The Best of John W. Campbell [Campbell was a profoundly influential editor of SF, and also a pretty good writer at the short-story length...]
• Karel Capek, War with the Newts
• M. R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts [This is a horror novel, but it's also hard SF]
• Adam-Troy Castro, Emissaries from the Dead
• Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry
• C. J. Cherryh
  • Cyteen
  • Downbelow Station
  • Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor [There is a notable downward gradient in these books, and I do not recommend the further sequels]
  • Heavytime and Hellburner
  • Merchanter's Luck
  • Angel with the Sword
  • Rimrunners
  • Hestia
  • Sunfall
  • Chanur series:
    1. The Pride of Chanur
    2. Chanur's Venture
    3. The Kif Strike Back
    4. Chanur's Homecoming
  • Rider at the Gate
• Adam Christopher, The Burning Dark
• Arthur Clarke
  • 2001 and 2010
  • The City and the Stars
  • Imperial Earth
  • Tales from the White Hart
  • The Other Side of the Sky
  • Rendezvous with Rama [emphatically not any of the sequels]
  • Fountains of Paradise
  • The Nine Billion Names of God
• Helen Collins, Mutagenesis
• James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes [Half-recommended, for reasons discussed at the link]
• John Cramer, Twistor
• Sara Creasy, Song of Scarabaeus
• Brian Daley [Comic space opera]
  1. Reqiuem for a Ruler of Worlds
  2. Jinx on a Terran Inheritance
  3. The Fall of the White Ship Avatar
• Avram Davidson, The Avram Davidson Treasury [Davidson was mainly a short-story writer of genius; this is the only collection of his stories still in print, but it's very recent and very good. General review: Avram Davidson's Afterlife]
• Jenny Davidson, The Explosionist
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Debra Doyle and John D. MacDonald [The Mageworld books: discussed elsewhere. Publication order, which is not internal chronological order; reading them that way would actually spoil many plots.]
  1. The Price of the Stars
  2. Starpilot's Grave
  3. By Honor Betray'd
  4. The Gathering Flame
  5. The Long Hunt
  6. The Stars Asunder
  7. A Working of Stars
• George Alec Effinger
  1. When Gravity Fails
  2. Fire in the Sun
  3. The Exile Kiss
  • Schrödinger's Kitten
• Greg Egan
  • Permutation City
  • Distress
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Kipper's Game
• Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan [Yes, they're comic books. They're also brilliant: imagine Hunter Thompson and John Brunner collaborating on the script for a movie to be filmed by Fritz Lang, Capra and John Carpenter, rendered by a Hogarth who has seen the future and loathes it.]
  1. Back on the Street
  2. Lust for Life
  3. Year of the Bastard
  4. The New Scum
  5. Lonely City
  6. Gouge Away
  7. Spider's Trash
  8. Dirge
  9. The Cure
  10. One Last time
• Harlan Ellison [Many of these short-story collections overlap; try starting with The Essential Ellison]
  • Angry Candy
  • Deathbird Stories
  • An Edge in My Voice [essay collection]
  • The Essential Ellison
  • Paingod and Other Delusions
  • Shatterday
  • Strange Wine
• Spencer Ellsworth, Starfire: A Red Peace
• Joe Clifford Faust, Handling It: How I Got Rich and Famous, Made Media Stars Out of Common Street Scum, and Almost Got the Girl [= Ferman's Devils + Bodekker's Demons]
• John M. Ford
  • The Final Reflection
  • Growing Up Weightless
  • How Much Just for the Planet?
  • The Princes of the Air
  • Web of Angels
• Karen Joy Fowler, Artificial Things
• Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
• R. García y Robertson, The Virgin and the Dinosaur
• Alexis A. Gilliland, The Revolution from Rosinante
• Phylis Gotlieb, Flesh and Gold
• Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep
• Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
• Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker
• Thomas Harlan
  1. Wasteland of Flint
  2. House of Reeds
  3. Land of the Dead
• M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
• Robert Heinlein
  • Citizen of the Galaxy [Review by James Davis Nicoll]
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
• John G. Hemry, A Just Determination
• Frank Herbert, Dune [I think I've read all the fiction he ever published; I cannot now imagine why. But Dune is a genuinely great accomplishment.]
• Jim C. Hines, Terminal Alliance
• Tanya Huff
  1. Valor's Choice
  2. The Better Part of Valor
  3. The Heart of Valor
  4. Valor's Trial
  5. The Truth of Valor
• M. C. A. Hogarth, Spots the Space Marine
• Kameron Hurley
  1. God's War
  2. Infidel
• Matthew Johnson, Fall from Earth
• Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War
• Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees [Parallel, distributed robotic artificial intelligence, as seen by an immensely cultivated, immensely reactionary German novelist and cavalry officer around 1957. Which sounds like it should be in a science fiction novel. The New York Review edition has, aptly enough, an introduction by Bruce Sterling.]
• Janet Kagan, Mirabile
• Elliott Kay
  1. Poor Man's Fight
  2. Rich Man's War
  3. Dead Man's Debt
  4. No Medal for Secrets
  5. Last Man Out
• Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge
  1. Black and White
  2. Shades of Gray
• Rosemary Kirstein [Appreciations by Jo Walton, James Nicoll]
  1. Steerswoman's Road [=Steerswoman + The Outskirter's Secret]
  2. The Lost Steersman
  3. The Language of Power
• David Koepp, Cold Storage
• Nancy Kress
  • Crossfire
  • [These books are technically technothrillers, but Kress is really an SF writer, and it shows]
    1. Oaths and Miracles
    2. Stinger
• Kristin Landon, The Hidden Worlds
• Ann Leckie
  • The "Imperial Raadch" series
    1. Ancillary Justice
    2. Ancillary Sword
    3. Ancillary Mercy
  • Provenance
• Sharon Lee and Steven Miller, Partners in Necessity [= omnibus edition of A Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change and Carpe Diem. Light entertainments, which owe more than I'd usually like to romance novels, but fun reads.]
• Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit
• Ursula Le Guin
  • The Dispossessed
  • Four Ways to Forgiveness
  • Rocannon's World
• Fritz Leiber
  • Gather, Darkness
  • A Sepcter Is Haunting Texas
• Stanislaw Lem [Lem was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. People didn't realize this, because he put his social philosophy and epistemology in science fiction, but it's there all the same.]
  • The Cyberiad
  • The Futurological Congress [Review by Danny Yee]
  • His Master's Voice [The Great Information Theory Novel]
  • Imaginary Magnitude [Introductions to imaginary books]
  • The Invincible
  • Peace on Earth
  • A Perfect Vacuum [Reviews of imaginary books, including a harsh take on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum. Brilliant and funny; includes what I think was a then-novel probabilistic fallacy, and several weird cosmologies, all hard to refute and utterly incompatible.]
  • Solaris
  • Summa Technologiae [Non-fiction]
• Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
• Nathan Long
  1. Jane Carver of Waar
  2. Swords of Waar
• Anne McCaffrey
  • Decision at Doona
  • The Ship Who Sang
  • The first three Dragonriders of Pern books
• Wil McCarthy
  • Bloom
  • Murder in the Solid State
• Paul J. McAuley
  • Confluence [A mutant member of the Dying Earth sub-genre.]
    1. Child of the River
    2. Ancients of Days
    3. Shrine of Stars
  • Fairyland
  • Pasquale's Angel [Alternate history where Leonardo started the industrial revolution during the Renaissance. I introduced Danny Yee to this book, producing this review.]
  • The Quiet War series:
    1. The Quiet War
    2. Gardens of the Sun
    3. In the Mouth of the Whale
  • Duology whose name (if any) I don't know:
    1. Something Coming Through
    2. Into Everywhere
  • The War of the Maps
• Ian McDonald
  • Out on Blue Six
  • Scissor Cut Paper Wrap Stone
• Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars
• Maureen McHugh
  • China Mountain Zhang
  • Half the Day Is Night
• Patricia McKillip, Fool's Run
• Ken MacLeod
  • The Fall Revolution
    1. The Star Fraction
    2. The Cassini Division
    4. The Sky Road
  • The Engines of Light
    1. Cosmonaut Keep
    2. Dark Light
    3. Engine City
  • Learning the World
  • The Restoration Game
• George R. R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging
• Elizabeth Moon
  ["Familias Regnant" books.]
  • Hunting Party
  • Sporting Chance
  • Winning Colors
  • Once a Hero
  • Rules of Engagement
  • Change of Command
  • Against the Odds
  [A different series, in a different universe]
  • Trading in Danger
  • Marque and Reprisal
• C. L. Moore, The Best of C. L. Moore
• Chris Moriarty, Spin State
• Linda Nagata
  • The Nanotech Succession
    1. The Bohr Maker
    2. Deception Well
    3. Vast
    4. Edges
    5. Silver
    6. Needle
  • The Red
    1. First Light
    2. Trials
• Peter Nicholls (ed.), The Science in Science Fiction (1982) [It tells you almost everything you need to know about me as a boy that this was long one of my favorite books; but it's good!]
• Larry Niven [All from back when Niven was good.]
  • The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton [Stories]
  • World of Ptaavs
  • A Gift from Earth
  • Neutron Star [Stories]
  • Ringworld [Not the sequels]
  • The Smoke Ring and The Integral Trees
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye [Not the sequels]
• Alexei Panshin
  • Rite of Passage
  • The Anthony Villiers books [Omnibus edition, New Celebrations]
    1. Starwell
    2. The Thurb Revolution
    3. Masque World
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye
• Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
• Frederik Pohl [Pohl has written a few excellent books, a very large number of good ones, and none (that I've read) which wasn't an at least OK way to pass the time. At the moment, I'd say his three best are Gateway, The Space Merchants and the Eschaton Sequence (taken as a whole), but I'm open to persuasion.]
  • Black Star Rising
  • The Eschaton Sequence [Series premised on Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory, only correcting a serious defect in Tipler's formulation, viz., realizing that there's no reason why Omega should be benevolent.]
    1. The Other End of Time
    2. The Siege of Eternity
    3. The Far Shore of Time
  • Gateway [The sequels are OK]
  • Homegoing
  • Mining the Oort
  • Narabedla Ltd.
  • O Pioneer!
  • Outnumbering the Dead
  • The World at the End of Time
  • and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
• Laura E. Reeve
  1. Peacekeeper
  2. Vigilante
  3. Pathfinder
• Alastair Reynolds [Narrative order. Extremely hard science space opera.]
  1. Revelation Space [Or, Some of My Best Friends Are Monstrous Chimeras of Tortured Flesh and Nanomechanical Viruses]
  2. Chasm City
  3. Redemption Ark
  4. The Prefect
• Chris Roberson, Paragaea
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt [This is clearly the most probable path for world history to have taken; we are a very unlikely fluctuation.]
• Kat Rosenfield, A Trick of Light
• Matt Ruff, Sewer Gas & Electric
• Robert Sawyer, Calculating God
• John Scalzi
  • Agent to the Stars
  • Old Man's War:
    1. Old Man's War
    2. The Ghost Brigades
    3. The Last Colony
    4. Zoe's Tale
    5. The Human Division
    6. The End of All Things
  • Fuzzy Nation
  • Redshirts
  • The Kaiju Preservation Society
• James Schmitz
  • The Demon Breed
  • The Witches of Karres
• David Shafer, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
• Joel Shepherd, Crossover
• Mike Shepherd, Kris Longknife [I'm slightly ashamed of myself for finding this series compulsively readable, but I do.]
  1. Mutineer
  2. Deserter
  3. Defiant
  4. Resolute
  5. Audacious
  6. Intrepid
• Robert Silverberg
  • Nightwings
  • The Stochastic Man
• Dan Simmons
  • Children of the Night [A vampire story; but really SF]
  • The Hyperion series [Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are really a single novel, and that novel is one of the best I've read. It has all the virtues: plot, character, world-building, neat ideas, description, suspension of disbelief, prose style (at least eight, all handled expertly), nuance of language and allusion and construction. "The Scholar's Tale" in Hyperion reduced me to tears; "The Detective's Tale", immediately following, is a hilarous dead-pan satire of hardboiled detective stories. Simmons must have cackled while writing this book, thinking of what he was doing to the reader's mind. It deserved every award which was thrown at it and more. The second set of novels, Endymion and Rise of Enydmion, are however vastly inferior.]
    1. Hyperion
    2. Fall of Hyperion
• Mary Sisson
  1. Trang
  2. Trust
  3. Tribulations
• John Sladek
• Kristine Smith, Code of Conduct
• K. B. Spangler
  1. Digital Divide
  2. Maker Space
  3. State Machine
  4. Brute Force
• Francis Spufford, Red Plenty [Historical science fiction about our actual history (or at least that of the USSR). Not-exactly-a-review: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You]
• Olaf Stapeldon
  • The Last and the First Men [I read this as a boy, and it warped my vision of the future forever; but A Last Man in London did nothing for me]
  • Star Maker
• Neal Stephenson [Stephenson is funny, he tells a good story, he's a sucker for neat techy ideas which he does really well (when I teach theory of computation I'm going to use excerpts from the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), and he can't write a decent ending to save his life.]
  • The Big U [Monstrous campus architecture meets the bicameral mind. Very plainly a first novel, but very amusing to anyone who's attended an American college of over, say, 20,000 students. The first edition has an especially embarrassing cover.]
  • Cryptonomicon [No visible SF elements. I liked the historical part, during the Second World War, far better than the modern story about the descendants of those characters. Said characters are, principally, twerps and idiots. (Will somebody tell me why the cornflakes scene is supposed to be funny?) Plus, Stephenson rode various unruly hobby-horses with them, showing profound cluelessness about economics. And the ending was bizarre and pointless --- whereas normally his endings are strained, abrupt and unsatisfying. But the WWII story was brilliant.]
  • The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
  • Snowcrash
• Bruce Sterling
  • Ascendancies [Best-of stories]
  • The Caryatids
  • Crystal Express [Stories]
  • Distraction
  • A Good Old-Fashioned Future [Stories]
  • The Hacker Crackdown [Nonfiction, actually]
  • Heavy Weather
  • Holy Fire
  • Islands in the Net
  • Pirate Utopia
  • Schismatrix [Now available in Schismatrix Plus, the plus being a new introduction and about half the stories earlier collected in Crystal Express, which are set in the same universe]
  • Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years [Nonfiction, 2002]
  • Zeitgeist [Taking the social construction of reality seriously is so science fiction]
• R. Jean Stevenson, Tisiphone's Quest
• S. M. Stirling [A writer of unusually noxious politics, at least as he used to express them on rec.arts.sf.written back in the day, spoiling most of his books for me]
  • Island in the Sea of Time
  • The Sky People
• Charles Stross
  The Merchant Princes [This is science fiction; who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes looking at the cover?]
  1. The Family Trade
  2. The Hidden Family
  3. The Clan Corporate
  • The Eschaton
    1. Singularity Sky
    2. Iron Sunrise
  • Nameless series of near-future mysteries in Edinburgh
    1. Halting State
    2. Rule 34
  • Saturn's Children
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
• Michael Swanwick
  • Stations of the Tide
  • Vacuum Flowers
• William Tenn, anything
• Maggy Thomas, Broken Time
• Catherynne M. Valente
  Silently and Very Fast
  • Space Opera
• Jack Vance deserves his own page
• Jeff VanderMeer, The Southern Reach
  1. Annihilation
  2. Authority
  3. Acceptance
• John Varley
  • Blue Champagne
  • The Persistence of Vision
  • Titan
• Kurt Vonnegut
  • Breakfast of Champions
  • Cat's Cradle
  • Palm Sunday [Not fiction]
  • Player Piano
  • Slapstick
  • Slaughterhouse Five
• Jo Walton, The Just City
• H. G. Wells
  • The Time Machine [See under Dying Earth]
  • The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Martha Wells, All Systems Red
• Chuck Wendig, Invasive
• Scott Westerfeld
  • The Risen Empire
  • Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath
• Walter Jon Williams
  • Ambassador of Progress
  • Aristoi
  • Day of Atonement
  • Dread Empire's Fall [Space opera, with ugly cover art and highly misleading blurbs; also really good novels. For instance, I don't think I've ever read a better portrayal of the special intoxication which comes when sexual love coincides with intellectual collaboration. And The Praxis, in particular, contains an embedded novella about identity, ambition, friendship and betrayal which is simply devastating.]
    1. The Praxis
    2. The Sundering
    3. Conventions of War
    4. Impersonations
    5. Investments
    6. The Accidental War
    7. Fleet Elements
    8. Imperium Restored
  • Facets [Stories]
  • Knight Moves
  • Implied Spaces
  • Voice of the Whirlwind
  • The near-future-if-not-present alternate reality game series:
    1. This Is Not a Game
    2. Deep State
    3. The Fourth Wall
• Connie Willis
  • And Not Forgetting the Dog [Sequel to Doomsday Book, but can be enjoyed independently]
  • Impossible Things [Stories]
  • Doomsday Book [Prequel to the title story in Fire Watch, but can be enjoyed --- if that is the word --- independently]
  • Fire Watch [Stories]
  • Remake
• Gene Wolfe
  • The Book of the New Sun
    1. Shadow of the Torturer
    2. Claw of the Conciliator
    3. Sword of the Lictor
    4. Citadel of the Autarch
  • The Book of the Long Sun
    1. Nightside the Long Sun
    2. Lake of the Long Sun
  • There Are Doors
• David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
• John Wyndham
  • Consider Her Ways [Stories]
  • Day of the Triffids
  • Gooseflesh and Laughter [Stories]
  • Kraken
  • The Midwich Cuckoos
• Roger Zelazny
  • Creatures of Light and Darkness
  • The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth [Stories]
  • Doorways in the Sand
  • Four for Tomorrow
  • Jack of Shadows
  • Lord of Light [Review by Danny Yee]
  • My Name is Legion
• Sarah Zettel
  • Fool's War
  • The Quiet Invasion
  • Bitter Angels (as "C. L. Anderson")
• Joe Zieja, Mechanical Failure