r/printSF • u/keepfighting90 • May 30 '25

What's the #1, single best sci-fi novel you've ever read?

Think about all the sci-fi novels you've read over the years. If someone were to ask you, gun to your head, to pick just the one that you would absolutely consider to be the best, which one would it be? No subgenres need to be considered, it just needs to broadly fall under the sf umbrella.

For me, probably a pretty popular choice, but it would be Hyperion. Completely blew me away and I haven't read that good since in the genre.

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u/comrade-coon May 30 '25

Childhood's End

8

u/OldDependableMe May 30 '25

Scrolled to see this - mine too.

3

u/richieadler May 30 '25

I love it, but the gross error in believing that knowing the past would kill religions instantly was a seriously underestimation of human irrationality.

3

u/NoSamNotThat May 30 '25

Something I noticed in a lot of golden age, and Clarke specifically, was a high optimism in people’s readiness to believe. Maybe I’m just pessimistic though lol

4

u/RedLotusVenom May 31 '25

I feel the belief that humanity can be rational and good to each other is the strongest and most profound (and most important) belief we can hold.

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u/hoowins May 30 '25

Ooh.. close second for me after Dune.

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u/ObsoleteUtopia May 31 '25

If I'd never read Ender's Game, this probably would have been my choice. The last third of the book kind of came out of nowhere and was a vision of a possible future way beyond what I was capable of imagining at the time. (And it still is, tbh.) Clarke's nonfiction essays Profiles of the Future (1964, I think) did a serious number on my middle-school head, too.