A friend of mine asked for recommendations for Sci Fi to read, and I’ve mainly been reading fantasy and alternate history recently, so I figured I’d forward this on to the dope for suggestions.
So… what recent Science Fiction books are worth a read? Thanks!
Infomocracy by Malka Older is quite good.
A YA novel by Sophia McDougall called Mars Evacuees. It’s a lot of fun, and came out last year. https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Evacuees-Sophia-McDougall/dp/0062294008
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is quite good, especially seeing SF from a Chinese perspective.
It’s a novella, but Binti by Nnedi Okorafor is very good.
If you haven’t read any Jack McDevitt, check him out – first-class hard SF.
Connie Willis is always worth checking out, and her two-volume novel Blackout/All Clear is excellent. It’s her usual time travel in the London Blitz theme, but done very well (even the annoying characters turn out to be justified).
Charles E. Gannon write some excellent military SF. (If you’d like to meet him, he’ll be at Albacon this April 1 weekend).
The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey (pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). The first novel is Leviathan Wakes, and the sixth was just published last month. Realistic sci fi that is (mostly) accurate with its science.
Ancillary Justice is fun to read and gets a lot of love around here. It got a lot of hate from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies crowd for its nontraditional view of gender, among other things. It’s the first of a trilogy.
Just a word of warning: body horror ahoy.
If you don’t mind… that sort thing, go ahead and read it. (Me, my reaction after reading Leviathan Wakes was, “Welp, there’s my nightmare quotient filled for the week.”)
I cannot recommend The Fractal Prince highly enough. The whole series is great (3 books) but that first one really got into my head.
Isn’t that the second one? The Quantum Thief is book one, according to Amazon.
:smack:
Yes; The Quantum Thief is the book I meant. Sorry. I’m at work and in the middle of a show, so I’m trying to do like 4 things at once. Mea culpa.
Alan Steele and Robert J. Sawyer both have new books out. “Arkwright” and “Quantum Nights”, respectively.
I’d recommend mine, but only 10 of the planned 17 chapters are complete.
(Here, if you’re curious: The Pentagon War, chapter 1 )
The first in the trilogy was OK, although I had to roll my eyes because
after years of chasing the Macguffin weapon at great cost and risk, the protagonist’s whole plan amounted to not much more than “shoot somebody as a futile gesture to let them know I’m pissed”. (The person being shot has thousands of bodies, so it’s not going to be a big deal for them.)
Also, I too found the gender gimmick to be annoying and pointless. Even if the actual plumbing varies, contextual clues about who wants to or might want to sleep with who are fairly important in any work concerning human interactions.
One of the best books, period, that I read last year was The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers.
Extremely intelligent writing yet fun–it reminded me of Firefly at times.