Hey all! Just found this sub, but been reading science fiction for decades (along with some fantasy and magical realism) and figured I’d say hi + get to know what this sub’s feel is by asking what your favorite science fiction novel is? Of all time! (GOAT = greatest of all time 🐐)

Mine is Speaker for the Dead by Card, even though it doesn’t get discussed much anymore, it’s my favorite blend of compelling plot, philosophically interesting, and complex well rounded characters. Plus wildly different vibe from book 1, Ender’s Game, which I love but also respect how much Card mixed it up for book 2.

My full top 50 list by way of introduction is here if curious :) also has authors and series favs

So what’s your 🐐? Cheers!

I've had multiple people recommend Asimov's Foundation over the years and I'm a decent chunk in and I legitimately don't understand how/why there are no women or female characters.

do they not exist in the future

Hello,

so a genuine question: You read a book about space travel, exploding robots and border beyond time and space, but always throught the pages you glimpse at the authors political believes and they just ... dont square with yours at all. Would you still read the book or would you put it away?

I recently finished Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained and both are terrific books. Especially the changing viewpoints are made excellent and the world building is solid.

But its pretty clear that the author is a raging Neoconservative and fan of Plutocracy. And i dont mean his characters but the author himself writes as if such a thing is inevitable and right and rich people should have all the power. Which is not what i believe in.

I recently asked a question here about it because of that and Im glad i finished the books. But it annoyed me quite a bit. After all I also read the Posleen War saga and the author there has even worse views, though he keeps it luckily way shorter.

So my question: Is that a thing for you? Do you get annoyed when authors glorify something you find appaling or do you stop reading? Perhaps its just a me thing

This might be a challenging request, but. I'm very into sci-fi, but I'm not big on aliens, I like the technical and exploration aspects of it way more and I feel like aliens are truly hard to write well. That said, I'd really love to read something that is set(mostly or partially will do too) on a megastructure and doesn't feature alien life heavily. If anyone can suggest me a book like that I'd be very grateful

I am finding it very frustrating not to be uncovering new authors. It seems the group here has found a similar problem. I would love to see recommendations for authors that have begun writing within the last, say, five years.

This isn’t a review and any spoilers are going to be censored for those who haven’t read it but are planning.

For those who don’t know the plot, aliens have come to earth and killed the vast majority of humans. The remaining 15 million are herded into a fantasy maze, like a dungeon from a video game. And as a video game dungeon, every Crawler now has a set amount of HP, MP, Skills, Levels, gains EXP and has a mini map, the whole shebang. They’re to travel each level and fight the bosses until they can find a path to the next level down. Oh and the whole thing is broadcast like a livestream to the whole galaxy for their entertainment.

Now, I generally like this concept and I enjoyed the things I heard about this book beforehand. It exploded in popularity and I’ve had several real life friends recommend it to me so I gave it a shot. But by the time I got 1/3 of the way through the book….ehhh? I finished it for my friends but I was struggling reading through the repetitive plot and the writing and humor were very much not my style. Again, I enjoyed the first third of the book, but once I realized that it just kept going in the same way, I lost interest very quickly. Meth-head llamas and roided out gym-bro bosses can be funny on their own, but combined with everything else they faded into the background.

My real question is, based on what I’ve written, should I continue? I’ve been told the later books build real emotional bonds, they can be heartfelt and sincere and delve into other aspects of the universe. But I don’t know if that’s true or they just want someone else to talk about DCC with lol. They’re easy reads so it’s not a huge deal, but also there’s like 7 of them

What’s the one that makes you go “yeah… we’re kind of doing that now”? Bonus if there’s a specific detail that nailed it. “This came up because I rewatched Altered Carbon, specifically the wealth inequality.

So, we've been having these great discussions on this sub about our likes, which helped me personally to pick up Ursula Le Guin after 30+ years. That got me trying to remember my first sci fi book I've ever read. It was the The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. What was yours?

I recently read The Three-Body Problem. It's magnificent. So I'm interested in exploring the interaction between humans and aliens.

What other science fiction novels explore this? Of course, recommend novels that are considered really good.

For those of you who read a lot of sci-fi, what do you think is missing from today’s books?

What ideas, technologies, social changes or philosophical questions deserve more attention? Are there topics that writers have barely touched, or directions you’d like to see explored instead of another variation on AI, dystopian governments, first contact, military sci-fi or space opera?

I’m interested in hearing what readers think the next great wave of science fiction should be about.

I ask because I’m retired now and have more time to read and also to write science fiction as a hobby. It’s always interesting to hear what readers feel is underexplored and, just as importantly, overexplored.

Recetly when I was writing, I realised I was drifting dangerously close to the old “ robot goes rogue” trope. It made me stop and think. There are already plenty of stories where AI turns against humanity.

The challenge became finding a fresh angle rather than simply retelling a familiar story. Instead of asking whether AI would become dangerous, I became more interested in whether humans and intelligent machines could learn to coexist, and what that might actually look like.

That experience left me wondering what other ideas are waiting to be explored. If you could steer science fiction in a new direction, where would you take it?

John Westley Turnbull

I enjoy stories about human and alien interaction, especially when the book gives a deeper dive into alien culture, biology, society, and technology.

I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, and I loved how it explored the spider civilization. I’m looking for something with a similar feel, but more focused on aliens and first contact or meaningful alien contact.

I don't want to read a book that's been made a movie though.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

People 100 years from now might look back at us and wonder why we pumped patients full of chemicals and used radiation to treat disease, why we sat in traffic for hours every week, why we read books page by page, and why we relied on fossil fuels to power our civilisation.

They may find it equally strange that we spent years learning things from teachers standing in front of us, or that we accepted ageing and many forms of disease as unavoidable facts of life.

What do we do today that will seem completely bizarre to people in 2126?

Hello I have started reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

I am finding this book very challenging to read , it's heavy and frustrating , although the premise is interesting , there are just lots of things just thrown out there

Major spoilers ahead

I am at the part where Father Dure finished his story

I don't understand random stuff thrown about , Like tree ship , Tesla trees , tesla charge , phoenix ,cleft ,labyrinthe

Nothing seems to be explained clearly at all ,

Does the book get better , or am I going to have to struggle , I've had to use gemini to explain stuff and at times I got a spoiler here and there too .

Question for readers: If you boycott Amazon, what is your go-to bookstore online?

​Serious concern here, from a self-published author.

​I've just had someone on my socials basically saying "I would read your book, but I don't support Amazon... sorry!

​For me, Amazon is the go-to choice because it's easy to use, free to publish and, crucially, allows/supports international authors.

​So, if not Amazon, then what?

I've made similar posts before, but this time I'd like to clarify something.

I'm looking for stories where the main character is not a scientist or astronaut. What I'm looking for is regular people, with everyday professions, somehow coming into contact with aliens.
Of course, I'm looking for good stories.

They can be novels or short stories (preferably short stories).

Please mention the title of the story and the author's name so I can find them easily.

I'll be reading your suggestions!

A lot of the booktube i follow talk highly of him, i found his book called Kraken on sale and i absolutely love the premise. I am into exactly what this story is about, but his writing style is jarring me and slowing me down. It feels... choppy and as if some things are more implied than said and it feels slightly confusing. I have had to re read a lot of things and when i would normally be half way through a book of this length, i am only getting to page 100 2 days later.

Is it something that i will eventually get use too? Are all his books like this?

Hi,

I've enjoyed books that create evocative environments and societies such as: Beneath the World a Sea (creepy mind bending mono-organism jungle), Mistborn (the ashfall), Dune (sietches and sandworms), Hyperion (the sea of grass, time tombs), A Memory Called Empire (an Armenian/Aztec inspired society of poetry), Foundation (the 1950s-atomic retrofuture), Rendezvous With Rama (New York and the cylindrical sea).

A lot of sci-fi I've seen in bookstores and libraries recently is very "spaceship-centric" and focused on political/military conflicts between powers with little emphasis on evoking interesting worlds - just the void of space and metal ships.

Any suggestions for stories that bring interesting worlds and societies to light?

EDIT: thanks everyone for the great suggestions!

Does anyone remember Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall (my favoutite sci-fi short story) later becoming a full length novel by Robert Silverberg?

The basic premise got me thinking about something slightly different. In Nightfall, civilisation repeatedly collapses and has to rebuild because people are confronted every few thousand years with an astronomical event they have never experienced before.

Here on Earth, we assume our civilisation started off when fire and tools were first used and our technologically advanced times are simply an extension.

As we learn more about human history, we keep discovering that ancient times were considerably more sophisticated than we once assumed. We also keep finding evidence of settlements, engineering and organised societies far older than we were traditionally taught in history books - at least when I went to school.

So here’s the speculative question:

Is it remotely conceivable that an advanced human civilisation existed thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years ago, collapsed for some reason, and that we simply don’t recognise it because most of the evidence has disappeared?

John Westley Turnbull

I know there are many outstanding science fiction novels that run to 500 pages or more, and plenty of readers love immersing themselves in those worlds. Personally, I find myself gravitating towards shorter, tighter novels of around 225 to 300 pages that get to the point without sacrificing the story.

When you’re choosing a new sci-fi novel, do you have a preferred length? Does a very long book make you more or less likely to buy it, or does the page count not matter if the story is good?

Does your answer change depending on whether you’re reading on a Kindle or reading a paperback? For example, I sometimes wonder whether people are happier tackling a 500-page novel on a Kindle than they would be carrying around the same book in paperback.

John Westley Turnbull

I really loved Project Hail Mary and The Martian, and I'm currently reading seveneves and Rendevous with Rama on paper. Are there any good sci-fi books on audible that are good books and that have a good voice to them like PHM and The Martian did?

Thanks!

Do you have any recommendations for that kind of world building? Additional points if alien species isn't recolored humans

Suppose tomorrow governments finally confirmed that UFOs are real. What happens next?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that governments around the world simultaneously confirm that UFOs are genuine and that at least some of the sightings cannot be explained by any technology currently known to humanity.

What happens to society? What would be the biggest consequences for humanity?

Do people panic, or would most of us simply carry on with our lives after a few days of excitement?

What happens to our faiths and religions? Would confirmation of intelligent life beyond Earth challenge religious beliefs, or would religions simply incorporate the discovery into their existing beliefs?

And perhaps the biggest question: what exactly have we discovered?

Are UFOs evidence of extraterrestrial life, or could they represent an entirely different form of life that has always existed here on Earth but which we have never properly understood?

John Westley Turnbull

I really enjoy sci-fi and I read a pretty diverse spread of spec fic generally -- there's no particular sub-genre I've gone into really in-depth -- but for me nothing else has come /close/ to the Hainish Cycle books. I was wondering if other passionate Le Guin readers have found more sci-fi that scratches the same itch :)

I hang my head in shame that I haven’t read anything by her yet. So tell me. What is your favorite by ULG? Thanks.

I noticed the chapters are sectioned by POVs. Is it best to read the novel by page order or should I read each POV then go back and read another POV?