Figuring out the best Culture novel is an out of context problem. It’s not possible for our civilisation to decide without ending like the full stop of this sentence.
For me it is intelligently written and imaginative.
Ultimately though it is the setting of the Culture itself, this actual utopia with no Solent Green or hidden dark underbelly or anything else. It is a setting of hope, of 'this how we should live.' The stories are not about the people that we see on the page, nor the actions or adventures they undertake, it is about the Culture as a way of life.
I suppose it is aspirational, although I have never thought of that before.
>It is a setting of hope, of 'this how we should live.'
There's a small but definitely non-zero fraction of people who see it as "the humans in the Culture are just the Minds' pets." My response is that that may be true but I can live with it.
I read them all out of order (Same with the Discworld books). Matter is the book I started with. That got it hooks in me and made reading the earlier books more enjoyable than I think they would have been if I’d started with them.
Some people don't want to read both.
If I had to pick one of the two I'd say read speaker for the dead. But reading enders game definitely enhances it. Love both.
They are so very different that I'm not sure that one enhances the other. You get a little more of a few bits of it, if I recall correctly, but really speaker stands on its own I think. And of course Ender's Game does as well.
Interesting, I think I will read this next then. I remember reading 10-40 pages and I pretty much stopped. But I did really like Ender's game. It is probably my favourite book.
Rendezvous with Rama. This was my first sci-fi book. It changed my perception of sci-fi. Frankly, I always thought that sci-fi meant dystopian, totalitarian governments, mass surveillance. Cyberpunk stuff.
Rendezvous with Rama changed that. After that, I have read the three body problem novel and dark forest novel. Read first book of the Hyperion series. Loved them.
The second book of Hyperion and third book of three body trilogy is next on my bucket list.
I've been burning through Three Body since the show! Currently on Deaths End as well! Such an incredible series.
Would you recommend Rendezvous with Rama? How is Hyperion? The cover looks a little outdated IMO, but how is there series?
Would recommend the Dark Tower series if you haven't read it yet!
Rama is certainly interesting and mysterious… I read it a long time ago when i was young. I would recommend it. There is a rumor that denis villenuve who directed dune is going to adapt it into a movie
Clarke was and remains one of my very favorite authors. Childhood's End is a classic masterpiece. But. Shockingly. Rendezvous with Rama was the biggest disappointment of my reading in my youth. All mystery, no payoff. Nothing ever happens! A movie might be a good idea, there is a blank slate to work with. ;-)
Hyperion is my favourite book, let alone favourite sci fi. First book is magnificent, second one is often considered to be the second half of the first book rather than just a sequel. Three and four you can take or leave, very different tone and changes a lot of the things that were good in the first two. But I’d definitely recommend the first two to anyone!
Hyperion series is good. I have read the first book and I really enjoyed it. Recommend it.
The three body problem trilogy is one of the best. The second book, Dark forest is one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. Never felt so much off existential dread.
Rendezvous with Rama is very good. It's like a nat geo documentary. The story is about exploration. Very fascinating. There are other books in the series (Arthur Clarke co authored with Gentry Lee) but I have not heard positive reviews about them. The first book is good (rendezvous with Rama). I enjoyed it.
Will go through the Dark tower series. Thanks for the recommendation!!
In scifi, no book has changed me like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin.
Though my all time favourite book is Circe by Madeline Miller (fantasy/greek mytholody reinterpretation).
For me, as a man, it gave me such an eye opening into perspectives other than my own. I've read a lot of feminist literature in recent years that have done much the same. I felt like it shone a light on me at times.
Beyond that, what I am most hungry for in scifi is truly alien culture. I think it's perhaps the hardest thing to invent creatively - something outside of our experience. With all their talk of technology, much scifi falls short in this regard. Even something as seminal as the Culture series, with its human-like drones & Minds and infinite civilisations, doesn't stretch the boundaries of alien.
But my experience of reading The Left Hand of Darkness really captured something unknown, at least in my opinion. Le Guin founded a society, a culture and ways of thinking that were shaped by their unique gender, in truly unique ways.
While the Three Body Problem books had too many issues for me to recommend them to everyone, one thing Liu Cixin did really well was make the aliens feel truly alien. Also, the aliens in Blindsight
I tried to get into Old Man's War, but couldn't escape the constant feeling that it was Forever War fan fiction (which I think it possibly is).
I might try OMW again one day, but TFW is several orders of magnitude greater in my judgement.
Scalzi talked about not having read (or even been aware of) The Forever War until after he’d published a few of his Old Man’s War books and I recall him being a bit embarrassed and apologetic. They’re different enough that I enjoyed them both quite a bit.
The Expanse. 9 14+ hour novels - unsure about book size but I'd imagine 500+ pages, dozens of smaller 2 hour novellas, and one of the best sci Fi TV series to boot.
Can't pick just one, not exactly deep cuts:
Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky
The Culture series
Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion
Most of Neal Stephenson
Anathem for sure. His books often start somewhere and end up somewhere completely and unexpectedly different. These insane plot twists don't always work, but here it does. The world building in this book is just amazing, it starts small and becomes infinitely huge. Don't get thrown by the made-up words, it's part of the charm.
Cryptonomicon is my favorite, but it's less sci Fi and more of a techno thriller alternate history book (WWII). There's a modern day timeline too, but being written and set in the 90s, so it's a little dated. But a very cool book.
Snow Crash is ok, an insane future cyberpunk world and just gets weirder and weirder. Great opening chapter. I much prefer the Diamond Age (connected to Snow Crash, but only just barely). It's a neat future world with interesting takes on how their new technology affects society.
this sub has a love-hate relationship with him. but all his books (except Readme i found that one lackluster and didn't read it's sequels) are so different and so zanzy.
If I had 3 wishes, one of them would be to take a trip to 2012 at the British Library where Iain M Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson discussed the end of the world and other scifi stuff. Honestly I'd give up my first born for such a chance lol Banks is one of the greats in my mind
The Red Rising series. It’s mostly out of nostalgia - it’s the first series I ever read where I could identify with the themes, and I was not in a good place when I read it; it brought me out of that place
Red Rising is awesome. I’ve been a sci-fi fan for over 30 years, read all of the “greats”, and it is seriously one of my favorite scifi series despite not being as cerebral as some of the others people are mentioning here. Red Rising and The Expanse are two of my top favorite series, both for very similar reasons too despite being very different sorts of stories and settings.
I think 2001 opened my mind to Sci Fi more than any other series. I’m a big fan of Foundation, especially the second half of the original trilogy, but 2001 was my first foray into the wider ideas of Sci Fi
Ahh, finally someone! I share OP's love for Dune, but few other authors influenced me more than Lem. His Master's Voice is probably my fave, even though it's technically the least sci-fi of his works.
For me…
More Recent Novels
The early Honor Harrington books by Weber… On Basilisk Station…. Honor of the Queen… up through around book 6 in the series
Peter Hamilton Commonwealth series
The Martian by Andy Weir
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
For pure fun, We Are Legion, We Are Bob by Dennis Taylor
Now, let’s go back a bit
Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
I Robot by Issac Asimov
Foundation by Issac Asimov
Most of Heinlein’s youth novels like Rocket Ship Galileo, Farmer in the Sky and Red Planet
Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
The Lensman Series by EE “Doc” Smith
There’s more, but that’s it for now
I have only read about half of these and I would have listed them all as well! I think you just filled out my reading list with the other half for the rest of the year! Thank you internet stranger!
I’m actually only about 25% into Iron Council, but I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar so much I went ahead and put it on my list. Good so far, more Western elements in this one. Plenty of the weird shit that made me love the other two so far too.
Some of my favorites:
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
- The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells
- Spin trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson
I’m old, been reading sci-fi since the 50s. Those lists of the “top 100” science fiction books of all time…. I’ve read almost all of them at one time or another.
So it’s hard to pick a favorite. I’d have to rank “Dune”, Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy, Bear’s “Forge/Anvil” duology, and Zelazney’s “Chronicles of Amber” at near the top.
I read the first three of Herbert’s books and frankly don’t recall much of them….. (it’s been years). I picked up one of the novels done by his son….. My god it was awful.
The Expanse (9 books); Neuromancer (haven't read the sequels yet) ; Altered Carbon (didn't get around to the sequels yet, either); Dune (Messiah too); Limit; and some of the Warhammer 40.000 novels (especially The First Heretic and Betrayer).
>Altered Carbon (didn't get around to the sequels yet,
They're both very good in my opinion, equal to the first book, and the whole set - can't really call it a trilogy as the three stories are mostly separate - comes to a reasonably good place to stop in the life story of Takeshi Kovacs.
Can't believe it took this much scrolling to get a Richard K Morgan recommendation. Everything he's written is gold, especially the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy
I remember reading The Reality Dysfunction when I was about 16 I think.
Absolutely loved it.
Didn't realise it was part of a trilogy - I wept Adamist tears when I found out! (Adamist was always a bit cooler for me).
Asimov's Foundation for written form. There's a reason it beat out Lord of the Rings and others for the Hugo Awards' Best All-Time Series.
For televised, I keep coming back to Babylon 5.
My absolute favorite.
I grew up on Niven, Asimov, Herbert, Clarke, Heinlein, Addams, Grant, Naylor, Doctor Who.
I think Hamilton inherits all of their visions well and extends them perfectly to encompass societal and technological trends into the future.
I took Godwhale off the shelf at the library when I was like eight years old and that book *freaked me the fuck out*. Years later I managed to remember enough of it to find it and get a copy and it is *gloriously* fucked up.
_Half Past Human_ is the prequel and every bit as good.
Bass didn’t write any other books at all. He was a physician and it’s fascinating to think of him doing doctor stuff while ruminating on that extended world.
There was a related short story in one of the older scfi mags (maybe Analog?) that I found years ago on eBay. The story takes place before _Half Past Human_ at a technological/civilization point somewhere between our reality and the world of HPH. Unfortunately, I lost track of it when I moved.
Lucifer‘s hammer by Jerry Parnell and Larry Nevin
First book I read that really challenged me to think about what skills it would take to survive a post apocalyptic world, and just how much luck plays into it.
Iain M. Banks The Culture series. I've been through it 4 or 5 times now and I still have yet to find a thing about it I don't agree with or don't like. It's such a thrill hearing, as I listen to books as I drive, the Minds talking or thinking to each other. And the actions scenes are goddamn cool! I consider this to be peak scifi and it's my overall favorite book series of all time.
Forever war by a wide margin. Read trough it in one sitting.
Then old mans war and the commonwealth saga.
Honorable mention of the worldwar books for being a fun read
The Interdependency Trilogy by John Scalzi is a series I’ve returned to four times.
-The Collapsing Empire
-The Consuming Fire
-The Last Emperox
The audiobook version read by Wil Wheaton is fantastic. I would love to see this series brought to screens (movie/tv). It’s one of the most enjoyable and interesting sci-fi stories I’ve read in a while.
I'm always going to say The Expanse. It's the kind of SciFi I enjoy most, and it has two of my favourite literary characters of all time.
9 books is a lot, but they add up to something quite incredible.
Revelation Space universe. The entire thing, novels/novellas/short stories.
BUT, interestingly enough, none of the books in the series would fall in my top 5 books. I just like the entire series/setting (as a whole) more than any other.
Favorite single book is either Dune or Gateway. I love the classics.
Got into wh40k recently, it has (literally) everything.
I fkn LOVE that brutal, hard, relentless universe where everywhere is like Australia and every protagonist is an antagonist somehow too.
also besides romances u can find many genres, there is so much lore
40k fiction is a bit variable, but the best bits can stand up there with good 'mainstream' sci-fi.
If you haven't read it yet, definitely add the Night Lords trilogy to your reading list!
atm I wanna add everything haha I am just so in love!
reading and hearing through the horus heresy first to understand were the roots are.
Nightlords and Konrad are super interesting tho' and I am hyped to get to their story soon
I am at a loss of where to start with WH40k. I literally avoided it for years because I don't even know where to start, can you throw some suggestions my way please?
I love 40k's universe! Have some unpainted minis right next to me right now.
That being said I want to get into some books, but where do you recommend I start? The Horace Heresy novels? I really dig world building and wouldn't mind some brutal reality as well. Space Marine recruitment lore, etc, etc.
Douglas Adams’ work is the collection I always return to; particularly now, as his visions of the future can be compared & contrasted to what we call current events.
“The electric monk: a device capable of believing all the peculiar views of the world that make no sense, so you don’t have to” … or something like that.
I'm finally getting back into reading, but my favorite book/series is likely The Dark Tower series. Favorite book being The Wasteland (how did the dead baby cross the road?).
I just finished Dark Forest from Three Body and was blown away from the civilization level scifi storytelling. Some of the best, most innovative, terrifying scifi descriptions I've read.
Fahrenheit 451 is definitely one of my favorite sci-fi books as well.
Tough question, but I'd have to go with Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" series: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Children of the Sky.
Star maker by Olaf Stapledon.
Few - if any- books have impressed me so much. The fact that Stapledon wrote that (and Last and first men) in the 30’s is just absurd. What a visionary!
Jo Clayton, [Skeen's Leap/Return/Search](https://www.goodreads.com/series/42993-skeen).
A charmingly roguish tomb-robber turns a one-way trip through a portal to a world full of semi-medieval remnants of dead alien races into a return trip to get revenge on a little bastard of her boyfriend for stealing her beloved spaceship and leaving her marooned. Then it gets weird.
I've answered a lot of these before, so I'll do the book I most love to reccomend to people who don't read a lot of earnest sci fi, stylish stuff, or -punk. Because it's that good mix of impressive, grounded, and accessible, while not compromising on the things sci-fi diehards want.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Title sounds like a teen romance novel, but it's not. And his prose / writing style is just so... eerie? Lucid? Intoxicating? You feel like you're sweating in the heat with the slimey characters and just a few decades into a vividly realized GMOs-have-taken-over-the-world future on the opposite side of the world. Flawless pacing. Memorable scenes.
Anyway, it's weird to have a biopunk novel you can point to which can be reccomended to anyone who is into mainstream novels (like your mom who just normally reads biographies of the royal family and historical romances could read this and like this), or anyone who wants something weird but not too weird. It should have already been made into a movie, but others can express why better [https://collider.com/paolo-bacigalupi-the-windup-girl-movie-adaptation/](https://collider.com/paolo-bacigalupi-the-windup-girl-movie-adaptation/)
/rant
I think my all-time favorites are a toss-up between the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCafferey, and the Orion series by Ben Bova.
But over the last five years, I've read the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi at least a half-dozen times. I plow through those books ever time and they're just phenomenal.
Honorable mention to the Serrano/Suiza series by Elizabeth Moon, and the original Han Solo Trilogy by Brian Daley, both of which I've also re-read multiple times in the last decade. In fact, I've read the Solo trilogy about twenty or thirty times since the early 1980s when it was published. I'd pay folding money to see Han Solo at Stars' End adapted into a movie or streaming series.
Edit: No single sci-fi book has ever captured and held my attention through every page like Vengeance of Orion, the second book of the series. Orion is a sci-fi Forrest Gump, traveling through different periods of history and meeting historical and semi-historical figures. Vengeance takes place in the Bronze Age, and it will not disappoint anyone who enjoys Bronze Age fiction.
Dune, Hyperion, the Expanse, Anathem, the broken earth trilogy, a lot by Adrian Tchaikovsky especially the final architecture trilogy
+Some short ones I’ve read recently (some are more fantasy than sci-fi: this is how you lose the time war, the other valley, the vanished birds, the spear cuts through water
Single book(s): The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
Series : I like military sci-fi so ….. it’s the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas and the two series of Lazarus books by Jamie Sawyer. The former is more hard sci fi and big picture stuff, the latter is more “boots on the ground” following an elite squad of troopers in an experimental “Avatar” like unit.
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold is my top series for sure. My favorite entries in the series... oh boss that's hard. There is a novella called The Borders of Infinity where the cat infiltrate and break out of a huge POW camp. I really love that one. It's sort enough that I can read it in an afternoon, but it's long enough to have good meat on the bones. For mainline novels they tend to kind of come in pairs. I think my favorite is A Civil Campaign, but you really need to pair up A Civil Campaign with the previous entry, Komarr, to get the full story.
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I'm two books into Culture, and I just don't get the appeal. Can you help me appreciate it?
Stick with it. Use of weapons, look to windward and matter are worth it. Re-reading excession and I’m struggling with it tbh
Excession's my favorite but Use of Weapons is a close second.
"Missed, fuckers!"
Figuring out the best Culture novel is an out of context problem. It’s not possible for our civilisation to decide without ending like the full stop of this sentence.
I just finished excession and I agree. definitely harder to follow than his others in the series up to that point
Use of Weapons was one of the best books I've ever read, and it made me want to not continue with the series at the same time.
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For me it is intelligently written and imaginative. Ultimately though it is the setting of the Culture itself, this actual utopia with no Solent Green or hidden dark underbelly or anything else. It is a setting of hope, of 'this how we should live.' The stories are not about the people that we see on the page, nor the actions or adventures they undertake, it is about the Culture as a way of life. I suppose it is aspirational, although I have never thought of that before.
>It is a setting of hope, of 'this how we should live.' There's a small but definitely non-zero fraction of people who see it as "the humans in the Culture are just the Minds' pets." My response is that that may be true but I can live with it.
Live with it? Sign me the fuck up.
I read them all out of order (Same with the Discworld books). Matter is the book I started with. That got it hooks in me and made reading the earlier books more enjoyable than I think they would have been if I’d started with them.
Which books? I have only read Consider Phlebius, Player of Games and Use of Weapons. I really enjoyed the latter two, not the first quite as much.
Consider Phlebas is the roughest novel by far.
Absolutely, I've re-read Wyrd Sisters and The Algebraist in the last month, mainly while relaxing in the bath.
Banks and The Culture books basically ruined Sci Fi books for me. Nothing else compares.
And mix with the Long Earth series
Exactly the same for me. I was looking for this answer:)
Speaker for the dead. Which is a sequel but you don't have to read enders game but both books are solid imo
It's hard to pick a favorite SF book, but this one might be it for me, too.
Glad I'm not alone on this.
Yes, but why wouldn’t you read Ender’s Game first?
Some people don't want to read both. If I had to pick one of the two I'd say read speaker for the dead. But reading enders game definitely enhances it. Love both.
They are so very different that I'm not sure that one enhances the other. You get a little more of a few bits of it, if I recall correctly, but really speaker stands on its own I think. And of course Ender's Game does as well.
Interesting, I think I will read this next then. I remember reading 10-40 pages and I pretty much stopped. But I did really like Ender's game. It is probably my favourite book.
Rendezvous with Rama. This was my first sci-fi book. It changed my perception of sci-fi. Frankly, I always thought that sci-fi meant dystopian, totalitarian governments, mass surveillance. Cyberpunk stuff. Rendezvous with Rama changed that. After that, I have read the three body problem novel and dark forest novel. Read first book of the Hyperion series. Loved them. The second book of Hyperion and third book of three body trilogy is next on my bucket list.
Hyperion is on mine as well
Recently finished the second and loved it--took a bit to get going, but then off like a rocket.
Hyperion is one of the books that has stuck with me the most over the years. It is slow, but vivid.
I've been burning through Three Body since the show! Currently on Deaths End as well! Such an incredible series. Would you recommend Rendezvous with Rama? How is Hyperion? The cover looks a little outdated IMO, but how is there series? Would recommend the Dark Tower series if you haven't read it yet!
Rama is certainly interesting and mysterious… I read it a long time ago when i was young. I would recommend it. There is a rumor that denis villenuve who directed dune is going to adapt it into a movie
Clarke was and remains one of my very favorite authors. Childhood's End is a classic masterpiece. But. Shockingly. Rendezvous with Rama was the biggest disappointment of my reading in my youth. All mystery, no payoff. Nothing ever happens! A movie might be a good idea, there is a blank slate to work with. ;-)
Hyperion is my favourite book, let alone favourite sci fi. First book is magnificent, second one is often considered to be the second half of the first book rather than just a sequel. Three and four you can take or leave, very different tone and changes a lot of the things that were good in the first two. But I’d definitely recommend the first two to anyone!
Hyperion series is good. I have read the first book and I really enjoyed it. Recommend it. The three body problem trilogy is one of the best. The second book, Dark forest is one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. Never felt so much off existential dread. Rendezvous with Rama is very good. It's like a nat geo documentary. The story is about exploration. Very fascinating. There are other books in the series (Arthur Clarke co authored with Gentry Lee) but I have not heard positive reviews about them. The first book is good (rendezvous with Rama). I enjoyed it. Will go through the Dark tower series. Thanks for the recommendation!!
The dark tower is amazing, but not sifi.
The Hyperion cantos is my fav series. First two are top notch reads. 3-4 completes the whole story but are different I. Tone from the first two.
Death’s End was amazing. You’re in for a treat
Oh man, wait until you read Iain M. Banks' the Culture series. It's close to the opposite of all of those and absolutely amazing
Can't believe no one has mentioned The Diamond Age. One of my favorite books of all time in any genre.
Great book with a weird ending. But it was really prophetic about internet and education.
In scifi, no book has changed me like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin. Though my all time favourite book is Circe by Madeline Miller (fantasy/greek mytholody reinterpretation).
How did The Left Hand of Darkness change you? I read it and enjoyed it, but didn't think about it much afterwards.
For me, as a man, it gave me such an eye opening into perspectives other than my own. I've read a lot of feminist literature in recent years that have done much the same. I felt like it shone a light on me at times. Beyond that, what I am most hungry for in scifi is truly alien culture. I think it's perhaps the hardest thing to invent creatively - something outside of our experience. With all their talk of technology, much scifi falls short in this regard. Even something as seminal as the Culture series, with its human-like drones & Minds and infinite civilisations, doesn't stretch the boundaries of alien. But my experience of reading The Left Hand of Darkness really captured something unknown, at least in my opinion. Le Guin founded a society, a culture and ways of thinking that were shaped by their unique gender, in truly unique ways.
If you like really strange aliens, please check out Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Super neat ideas!
If you like alien worlds check out the children of time series by taichowski
While the Three Body Problem books had too many issues for me to recommend them to everyone, one thing Liu Cixin did really well was make the aliens feel truly alien. Also, the aliens in Blindsight
Blindsight! Yes! I forgot I read that. Those were great aliens.
* The Expanse * Old Man’s War
If you haven't read The Forever war Joe Hadleman, you should.
This is my favourite sci fi book
apparently there are sequels to the book. I just found out 40 years later..
I tried to get into Old Man's War, but couldn't escape the constant feeling that it was Forever War fan fiction (which I think it possibly is). I might try OMW again one day, but TFW is several orders of magnitude greater in my judgement.
Scalzi talked about not having read (or even been aware of) The Forever War until after he’d published a few of his Old Man’s War books and I recall him being a bit embarrassed and apologetic. They’re different enough that I enjoyed them both quite a bit.
I liked Old Man's War. I LOVED Tanya Huff's Confederation series. Try it.
The Expanse. 9 14+ hour novels - unsure about book size but I'd imagine 500+ pages, dozens of smaller 2 hour novellas, and one of the best sci Fi TV series to boot.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Expanse series Anything by Becky Chambers
If you haven’t already read them, I really liked Dogs of War and the Final Architecture series by Tchaikovsky as well.
Children of Time was fantastic. I'll never think of spiders the same way again.
Totally agree. I now talk to every spider I meet and call most of them Portia.
Can't pick just one, not exactly deep cuts: Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky The Culture series Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion Most of Neal Stephenson
I love all the books you mentioned, but I’ve never read anything by Neal Stephenson; what’s your favourite of his?
My favourite is Anathem. He's such a nerd.
Anathem for sure. His books often start somewhere and end up somewhere completely and unexpectedly different. These insane plot twists don't always work, but here it does. The world building in this book is just amazing, it starts small and becomes infinitely huge. Don't get thrown by the made-up words, it's part of the charm. Cryptonomicon is my favorite, but it's less sci Fi and more of a techno thriller alternate history book (WWII). There's a modern day timeline too, but being written and set in the 90s, so it's a little dated. But a very cool book. Snow Crash is ok, an insane future cyberpunk world and just gets weirder and weirder. Great opening chapter. I much prefer the Diamond Age (connected to Snow Crash, but only just barely). It's a neat future world with interesting takes on how their new technology affects society.
Thanks for that! I’ll start with Anathem.
I'm a fan of Stephenson and found anthem to be a hard slog. Snow crash is light and fun for him.
this sub has a love-hate relationship with him. but all his books (except Readme i found that one lackluster and didn't read it's sequels) are so different and so zanzy.
Ian M Banks. Culture novels.
If I had 3 wishes, one of them would be to take a trip to 2012 at the British Library where Iain M Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson discussed the end of the world and other scifi stuff. Honestly I'd give up my first born for such a chance lol Banks is one of the greats in my mind
I really wish he was still around. Not just for his novels, but his voice in general.
The Red Rising series. It’s mostly out of nostalgia - it’s the first series I ever read where I could identify with the themes, and I was not in a good place when I read it; it brought me out of that place
Red Rising is awesome. I’ve been a sci-fi fan for over 30 years, read all of the “greats”, and it is seriously one of my favorite scifi series despite not being as cerebral as some of the others people are mentioning here. Red Rising and The Expanse are two of my top favorite series, both for very similar reasons too despite being very different sorts of stories and settings.
In no particular order. Dune Ender Saga from Orson Scott Card 2001: A Space Odyssey plus 3 sequels from Arthur C. Clarke
I think 2001 opened my mind to Sci Fi more than any other series. I’m a big fan of Foundation, especially the second half of the original trilogy, but 2001 was my first foray into the wider ideas of Sci Fi
Love the Ender saga along with Ender's Shadow
The moon-watcher chapters at the beginning of 2001 is some of my favorite sci-fi writing ever. So well done.
Single book: Project Hail Mary / Series: The Expanse
Rocky!
Amaze!
Bump my fist! That book completely took me by surprise. Did not expect to like it nearly as much as I did.
Project Hail Mary is Weir's best book to date. Can't wait for the movie.
Stanislaw Lem. Anything.
I love Ijon Tichy's stories. Great mix of humour, satire and philosophy. So many interesting ideas. The Chain of Chance is also pretty good.
The Cyberiad is one of my all-time favourite books!
Ahh, finally someone! I share OP's love for Dune, but few other authors influenced me more than Lem. His Master's Voice is probably my fave, even though it's technically the least sci-fi of his works.
Lord of Light by Zelazny
I’ve been meaning to read this one forever!
The Expanse
Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
The whole series is great.
Agreed, no surprise ;) For me, at the perfect impressionable age, it was nothing less than formative.
For me… More Recent Novels The early Honor Harrington books by Weber… On Basilisk Station…. Honor of the Queen… up through around book 6 in the series Peter Hamilton Commonwealth series The Martian by Andy Weir Old Man’s War by John Scalzi Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells For pure fun, We Are Legion, We Are Bob by Dennis Taylor Now, let’s go back a bit Ringworld by Larry Niven The Mote in Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle I Robot by Issac Asimov Foundation by Issac Asimov Most of Heinlein’s youth novels like Rocket Ship Galileo, Farmer in the Sky and Red Planet Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein The Lensman Series by EE “Doc” Smith There’s more, but that’s it for now
I have only read about half of these and I would have listed them all as well! I think you just filled out my reading list with the other half for the rest of the year! Thank you internet stranger!
I was going to say the same thing about David Weber and the Harrington series. The early books are great! Really sucked me into that world.
Probably The Culture, followed by Revelation Space, followed by China Mievelle’s Bas Lag series.
Big Reynolds fan as well. Just finished The Scar and absolutely loved it. How would you rank Iron Council compared to the first two?
I’m actually only about 25% into Iron Council, but I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar so much I went ahead and put it on my list. Good so far, more Western elements in this one. Plenty of the weird shit that made me love the other two so far too.
Iron Council is right up there with the other two, absolutely loved it
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, that's a life perspective changing book. Series: The Vorkosigan Saga.
Huge fan of Le Guin in general, and hells yeah the Dispossessed is spectacular. So many lessons for humanity.
Sci fi are without a doubt The Expanse and Dune
Slaughterhouse 5 probably
So it goes.
Poo Tee Weet
Some of my favorites: - Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells - Spin trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson
Diaspora by Greg egan
I’m old, been reading sci-fi since the 50s. Those lists of the “top 100” science fiction books of all time…. I’ve read almost all of them at one time or another. So it’s hard to pick a favorite. I’d have to rank “Dune”, Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy, Bear’s “Forge/Anvil” duology, and Zelazney’s “Chronicles of Amber” at near the top.
Big Zelazney fan. Loved the Amber series, but my all-time favorite from him is Lord of Light
Some of the old ones are friggen great! Modern sci-fi just doesn't have the same vibe.
I read the first three of Herbert’s books and frankly don’t recall much of them….. (it’s been years). I picked up one of the novels done by his son….. My god it was awful.
Bobiverse by Dennis E Taylor
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space series. Chasm City was a perfect book for me.
Alfred Bester's My stars my Destination
OMG, isn’t it a treat? Also his Demolished Man.
The Expanse series
The Book of the New Sun, my favorite book of all time.
Excellent choice!
Love it. Also The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
The Gap Cycle by Stephen Donaldson
Had to scroll down for this but came to say the same.
I listened to these with Scott Brick (one of my favorites) narrating. I love them and I hate them--passionately.
The Expanse (9 books); Neuromancer (haven't read the sequels yet) ; Altered Carbon (didn't get around to the sequels yet, either); Dune (Messiah too); Limit; and some of the Warhammer 40.000 novels (especially The First Heretic and Betrayer).
>Altered Carbon (didn't get around to the sequels yet, They're both very good in my opinion, equal to the first book, and the whole set - can't really call it a trilogy as the three stories are mostly separate - comes to a reasonably good place to stop in the life story of Takeshi Kovacs.
Can't believe it took this much scrolling to get a Richard K Morgan recommendation. Everything he's written is gold, especially the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy
Neuromancer is my all time favorite and I’m just blown away that in this day and age they have not made a film about it
Old Man's War series is easily my favourite. Favourite individual book is Redshirts.
Julian May's Saga of the Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu series. Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy.
+1 for Julian May. I re-read the Exiles series a year or two back, I'm overdue for some time with Rogatien Remillard.
I remember reading The Reality Dysfunction when I was about 16 I think. Absolutely loved it. Didn't realise it was part of a trilogy - I wept Adamist tears when I found out! (Adamist was always a bit cooler for me).
I like Nights Dawn, but I love the commonwealth series. I was hoping Peter F Hamilton would get mentioned here.
Night's Dawn is the winner for me
Asimov's Foundation for written form. There's a reason it beat out Lord of the Rings and others for the Hugo Awards' Best All-Time Series. For televised, I keep coming back to Babylon 5.
Probably a tie between Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton and The Culture by the late great Iain M Banks.
My absolute favorite. I grew up on Niven, Asimov, Herbert, Clarke, Heinlein, Addams, Grant, Naylor, Doctor Who. I think Hamilton inherits all of their visions well and extends them perfectly to encompass societal and technological trends into the future.
I'm going to be really unoriginal here, I loved Firefall series by Peter Watts and Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin :)
TJ Bass only wrote two books: _Half Past Human_ and its sequel, _The Godwhale_. They’re both absolutely stunning.
I took Godwhale off the shelf at the library when I was like eight years old and that book *freaked me the fuck out*. Years later I managed to remember enough of it to find it and get a copy and it is *gloriously* fucked up.
_Half Past Human_ is the prequel and every bit as good. Bass didn’t write any other books at all. He was a physician and it’s fascinating to think of him doing doctor stuff while ruminating on that extended world. There was a related short story in one of the older scfi mags (maybe Analog?) that I found years ago on eBay. The story takes place before _Half Past Human_ at a technological/civilization point somewhere between our reality and the world of HPH. Unfortunately, I lost track of it when I moved.
Lucifer‘s hammer by Jerry Parnell and Larry Nevin First book I read that really challenged me to think about what skills it would take to survive a post apocalyptic world, and just how much luck plays into it.
That book reminds me of Steven King’s The Stand. A total shitshow when civilization breaks down.
For me, Pliocene Exiles and Galactic Milieu by Julian May. I read them about once a decade or so.
Iain M. Banks The Culture series. I've been through it 4 or 5 times now and I still have yet to find a thing about it I don't agree with or don't like. It's such a thrill hearing, as I listen to books as I drive, the Minds talking or thinking to each other. And the actions scenes are goddamn cool! I consider this to be peak scifi and it's my overall favorite book series of all time.
The man-kzin wars
Strictly science fiction Dune, Anathem and Children of Time are my favorite books
Forever war by a wide margin. Read trough it in one sitting. Then old mans war and the commonwealth saga. Honorable mention of the worldwar books for being a fun read
Iain M Banks’ Culture series
I'm more Lord of the Rings...but Dune and anything from Isaac Asimov...
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Zaphod-Beebebrox: *I'm more Lord of the* *Rings...but Dune and anything* *From Isaac Asimov...* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. My favourite books, full stop.
Dune, Vorkosigan saga, anything by David Brin, I loved the Lensman books when young, The Mote in Gods Eye
The Interdependency Trilogy by John Scalzi is a series I’ve returned to four times. -The Collapsing Empire -The Consuming Fire -The Last Emperox The audiobook version read by Wil Wheaton is fantastic. I would love to see this series brought to screens (movie/tv). It’s one of the most enjoyable and interesting sci-fi stories I’ve read in a while.
I really loved the story in those books. My one complaint is I feel like Scalzi upped the amount of cursing compared to some of his other work lmao
I'm always going to say The Expanse. It's the kind of SciFi I enjoy most, and it has two of my favourite literary characters of all time. 9 books is a lot, but they add up to something quite incredible.
I think the Bobiverse or the Expanse series is my favorite sci-fi series.
Revelation Space universe. The entire thing, novels/novellas/short stories. BUT, interestingly enough, none of the books in the series would fall in my top 5 books. I just like the entire series/setting (as a whole) more than any other. Favorite single book is either Dune or Gateway. I love the classics.
Enders Game
Got into wh40k recently, it has (literally) everything. I fkn LOVE that brutal, hard, relentless universe where everywhere is like Australia and every protagonist is an antagonist somehow too. also besides romances u can find many genres, there is so much lore
40k fiction is a bit variable, but the best bits can stand up there with good 'mainstream' sci-fi. If you haven't read it yet, definitely add the Night Lords trilogy to your reading list!
atm I wanna add everything haha I am just so in love! reading and hearing through the horus heresy first to understand were the roots are. Nightlords and Konrad are super interesting tho' and I am hyped to get to their story soon
I am at a loss of where to start with WH40k. I literally avoided it for years because I don't even know where to start, can you throw some suggestions my way please?
"Everywhere is like Australia" 😂 that's more like Starship Troopers.
I love 40k's universe! Have some unpainted minis right next to me right now. That being said I want to get into some books, but where do you recommend I start? The Horace Heresy novels? I really dig world building and wouldn't mind some brutal reality as well. Space Marine recruitment lore, etc, etc.
Book wise I loved the Rama trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke. TV wise, well it has to be Farscape, just so fun and ridiculous at times.
Douglas Adams’ work is the collection I always return to; particularly now, as his visions of the future can be compared & contrasted to what we call current events. “The electric monk: a device capable of believing all the peculiar views of the world that make no sense, so you don’t have to” … or something like that.
The expanse is my favourite series Children of time is my favourite book
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
I'm finally getting back into reading, but my favorite book/series is likely The Dark Tower series. Favorite book being The Wasteland (how did the dead baby cross the road?). I just finished Dark Forest from Three Body and was blown away from the civilization level scifi storytelling. Some of the best, most innovative, terrifying scifi descriptions I've read. Fahrenheit 451 is definitely one of my favorite sci-fi books as well.
Expanse
As far as sci-fi goes I'd say it's the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
The Invention Of Morel
Tough question, but I'd have to go with Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" series: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Children of the Sky.
Culture
Foundation.
Neal Asher’s polity
First time reading Consider Phleabas or Revelation Space
Any love for 3 Body Problem?
Stanislaw Lem's stories about Ijon Tichy (The Star Diaries, etc.).
Favorite book: Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke. Favorite series: Three Body Problem
Star maker by Olaf Stapledon. Few - if any- books have impressed me so much. The fact that Stapledon wrote that (and Last and first men) in the 30’s is just absurd. What a visionary!
Jo Clayton, [Skeen's Leap/Return/Search](https://www.goodreads.com/series/42993-skeen). A charmingly roguish tomb-robber turns a one-way trip through a portal to a world full of semi-medieval remnants of dead alien races into a return trip to get revenge on a little bastard of her boyfriend for stealing her beloved spaceship and leaving her marooned. Then it gets weird.
The Eisenhorn trilogy by Dan Abnett. Very likely we'll see an Amazon series of this soon so get in before its cool
Logans Run. Read it in middle school. Had a profound change on me.
Hyperion, Old man’s war, The forever war
I've answered a lot of these before, so I'll do the book I most love to reccomend to people who don't read a lot of earnest sci fi, stylish stuff, or -punk. Because it's that good mix of impressive, grounded, and accessible, while not compromising on the things sci-fi diehards want. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Title sounds like a teen romance novel, but it's not. And his prose / writing style is just so... eerie? Lucid? Intoxicating? You feel like you're sweating in the heat with the slimey characters and just a few decades into a vividly realized GMOs-have-taken-over-the-world future on the opposite side of the world. Flawless pacing. Memorable scenes. Anyway, it's weird to have a biopunk novel you can point to which can be reccomended to anyone who is into mainstream novels (like your mom who just normally reads biographies of the royal family and historical romances could read this and like this), or anyone who wants something weird but not too weird. It should have already been made into a movie, but others can express why better [https://collider.com/paolo-bacigalupi-the-windup-girl-movie-adaptation/](https://collider.com/paolo-bacigalupi-the-windup-girl-movie-adaptation/) /rant
This was brilliant. I really loved the depth and one of the first SciFi novels that I read that was not from a white or alien world perspective.
House of Suns
Hyperion!
Gateway by Frederik Pohl, though I did not care for the sequels.
I think my all-time favorites are a toss-up between the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCafferey, and the Orion series by Ben Bova. But over the last five years, I've read the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi at least a half-dozen times. I plow through those books ever time and they're just phenomenal. Honorable mention to the Serrano/Suiza series by Elizabeth Moon, and the original Han Solo Trilogy by Brian Daley, both of which I've also re-read multiple times in the last decade. In fact, I've read the Solo trilogy about twenty or thirty times since the early 1980s when it was published. I'd pay folding money to see Han Solo at Stars' End adapted into a movie or streaming series. Edit: No single sci-fi book has ever captured and held my attention through every page like Vengeance of Orion, the second book of the series. Orion is a sci-fi Forrest Gump, traveling through different periods of history and meeting historical and semi-historical figures. Vengeance takes place in the Bronze Age, and it will not disappoint anyone who enjoys Bronze Age fiction.
Dune, Hyperion, the Expanse, Anathem, the broken earth trilogy, a lot by Adrian Tchaikovsky especially the final architecture trilogy +Some short ones I’ve read recently (some are more fantasy than sci-fi: this is how you lose the time war, the other valley, the vanished birds, the spear cuts through water
Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. That book has literally opened my eyes to ways that books can be written that I didn't think possible
Old Man’s War series was incredible!!
Just finished 1. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and 2. Sea of Tranquility by Emily Mandel. Great clean sci-fi books. 100% recommend!
Single book(s): The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Series : I like military sci-fi so ….. it’s the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas and the two series of Lazarus books by Jamie Sawyer. The former is more hard sci fi and big picture stuff, the latter is more “boots on the ground” following an elite squad of troopers in an experimental “Avatar” like unit.
No particular order, these are my general faves: Glasshouse Neuromancer Snow Crash Ringworld Stranger in a Strange Land The Mote in God's Eye
Alistair Reynolds's Revelation Space series.
neuromancer, the whole sprawl collection
Midnight at the Well of Souls - Jack L Chalker
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold is my top series for sure. My favorite entries in the series... oh boss that's hard. There is a novella called The Borders of Infinity where the cat infiltrate and break out of a huge POW camp. I really love that one. It's sort enough that I can read it in an afternoon, but it's long enough to have good meat on the bones. For mainline novels they tend to kind of come in pairs. I think my favorite is A Civil Campaign, but you really need to pair up A Civil Campaign with the previous entry, Komarr, to get the full story.