I’ll give you two that kind of have a theme:
Improbabilities by Dan Gollub is a terrific quirky little novel. It’s only SF in the most generous sense of the word, and is a book that can generate a lot of thought, interpretation and conversation.
Improbable by Adam Fowler is also just barely a SF novel; it’s really a thriller. It’s also a fun read and touches on such subjects as fate, the nature of time and medical ethics.
Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers. Just read and really enjoyed it. It’s a stretch to call it sci-fi though, probably falls more under the general speculative fiction category.
I’d also second Never Let Me Go.
Sort of qualifies: The Sparrow. It’s undeniably SF–there’s a big freakin’ spaceship in it–but it doesn’t read like Starship Troopers or anything (which I definitely wouldn’t do, but that’s because I hate that book a lot). Characters are front and center.
If you want to go difficult, there’s Le Guin’s (IMO) masterpiece, Always Coming Home. It’s much more stealth-SF, being an anthropologist’s collection of stories and recollections from a culture that existed in northern coastal California some 200,000 years in the future. Because of its structure, it’s not an easy read, but it’s very beautiful.
Then there are two modern fictional city books that are tremendously good. Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union is about the Jewish state established in Sitka, Alaska in 1941. China Mieville’s amazing The City and the City is set in the fictional eastern European twin cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel. Both are murder mysteries. Mieville’s work is much more SF in flavor, in a very Kafka fashion, and the less you know about it going in, the better. Chabon’s name carries a lot of literary cachet, since he won the Pulitzer.
I’d highly recommend all the novels I mentioned.
Aha! I read the book jacket for Fuzzy Nation, and while I was certain I’d never read that book by Scalzi before, I was equally certain I read that book as a teenager. Thank you for the clarification!
“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand?
You have to get Fuzzy Nation, then. There are some of the same names, but they aren’t Piper’s characters at all. Holloway (sp?) is still a sunstone miner, for instance…but he used to be a hotshot lawyer. And he seems to solve his biggest problems by punching someone in the nose. Hey, it works for him!
You do know that Piper wrote three Fuzzy books, right? They found the third book long after his death…
totally book club, along with Kindred by Octavia Butler, per a post above. Both are deeply emotional and character driven within a Speculative sci-fi world. The other obvious one is A Handmaid’s Tale.
Roadside Picinic
The Man Who Fell To Earth
Never Let Me Go is a perfect sneaky sci-fi, speculative-fic book club read.
It’s also depressing as hell. Those two things seem to go together.
If you want something less depressing and less sneaky, China Meiville is a good choice. *Embassytown *was very interesting, and gets into a lot of decently sci-fi elements from interesting angles. If you want to go literary, you could try Railsea, which is sci-fi post-apoc retelling of Moby Dick. (I haven’t read it myself.)
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – by Kate Wilhelm. Hugo Award winner, Nebula Award nominee, but the title is reaaaaally stealthy.
If your friends are really environmentally conscious – Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach.
Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net is soon to be contemporary (set in the 2020s). The book is all about relationships, but since Sterling is the best idea man in SF there are amazing ideas just thrown in for background. The novel is also very political. One reviewer said it’s “not just politically aware, it’s politically mature.” Every side gets a great speech that makes you cheer - even the guys with loose nukes! :eek: the SF is not stealthy, but the characters and situations are well-drawn.
I’m reading Railsea now. I wouldn’t recommend it or Embassytown for SF novices, even though Railsea is quite good and Embassytown is among my favorite SF books of the last decade.
Mieville has this goal (I think he’s been explicit about it) of writing a book in every genre, and when he jumps into a genre he does so with both feet. Embassytown is his hard-science-fiction novel, with the hard science being linguistics :).
Science fiction often has a lot of neologisms, and China Mieville often has a lot of neologisms, and linguistics just naturally lends itself to neologisms, so the tech-babble can get kind of thick on the ground. I loved that aspect of it, but I suspect it’d be pretty opaque to someone who’s unaccustomed to having to figure out a lot of made-up words just to read the book.
Seconding Mieville’s The City and the City. And you generally can’t go wrong with Haruki Murakami. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World should do.
I’ll second *Flowers for Algernon *by Daniel Keyes. It’s one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read.
I would think (hope) that a book club would be able to handle the slog, unless it’s too long. For some reason, I find KSR easy to read and hard to put down, but maybe that’s just me. I just like the way the guy writes. It’s well written in the way that so much print SF isn’t (and I say that as a huge fan of SF). KSR’s formal education was in literature and English leading to a PhD and I think it shows in his writing. I always feel like I’m in the hands of a master.
Rice has plenty of themes/ideas to spark discussion which is perfect for a book club and it’s obscure enough that a non-SF book club is not likely to be familiar with it which is one of the reasons I suggested it.
If you like KSR, try Escape From Kathmandu. It’s a collection of short stories that put Himalayan myths in a modern setting. The title story is hilarious - a small group of American mountain climbing bums finds a Yeti and has to sneak him out of Kathmandu, accidentally climbing Mt. Everest along the way. The collection is also KSR’s shortest work, so people won’t be put off by the length.
Another somewhat stealthy story collection is John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. The title story is very good, even better once you realize what story it retells. Pride and Prometheus is a brilliant mashup of Austen and Mary Shelley. The four “Society of Cousins” stories kick ass! They will lead to much interesting discussion on the role of gender in society - even a feminist society. The Society of Cousins is nearly Utopia, but the difference between nearly and actually Utopia is fertile ground for stories.
The Baum Plan may still be available as a free download.
Other suggestions: Mike Resnik’s Kirinyaga is fantastic. For alternate history you can’t beat Harry Turtledove and I’d reccomend sneaking in In the Presence of Mine Enemies (hiden Jews in 1980s Berlin where the Nazis won WWII) or Ruled Brittania (Shakespeare is ensnared in a plot against the government, years after the Spanish Armada successfully conquered England. You get two “new” Shakespeare plays in the book!).
This is one of the varying mileage things. That book (and the Mars trilogy) have been discussed on the boards, and from what I remember, some (SF) fans loved the books, and some hated them.
Just because someone was educated in literature and English does not mean that he can write well. Even if someone can write well technically, that doesn’t guarantee that s/he is a good storyteller, either. There are writers who can write perfectly, in a technical sense, and then there are writers who can’t write their way out of a paper bag, but their storytelling will carry the reader along.
I read mostly for entertainment. I’m out of school, and while I prefer a writer who is competent at writing, if the writer cannot engage me, if I am not carried away by the story, then I’m going to quit reading the book. I no longer have to give a book report, I can read what I want without consequences. I enjoy discussing books, but I don’t belong to any book clubs and haven’t since high school. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought that the purpose of most book clubs was to get together and discuss enjoyable books…and KSR’s books (or at least the two I’ve tried to read) are slogs, for me. Robinson’s characters are interesting…his stories are not. Or that’s been my experience.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=653586&highlight=Robinson