Recommended Science Fiction

29 Dec 2007 18:47

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These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books. A raw ranking of them would be of little use to others, unless I explained why I gave them the ranks I did, and anyway I'd probably give different rankings by the time your read this. (When I know of an on-line review about a book which I agree with --- e.g., because I wrote it --- I've included a link; also some exceedingly short remarks about interesting cases.)

See also Fantasy and Horror Recommendations; Science Fiction

• Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Spring [I don't include the other two books of the trilogy --- Helliconia Summer and Winter --- simply because I haven't read them yet...]
• Isaac Asimov
  • Foundation Trilogy [not the much-later sequels]
    • Foundation
    • Foundation and Empire
    • Second Foundation
  • I, Robot [Stories]
• Iain M. Banks
  • Inversions
  • Look to Windward
• Greg Bear
  • Forge of God [One of the scariest books I've ever read; the sequel, Anvil of Stars, didn't work anywhere near as well]
  • Heads
  • Queen of Angels and / [Review: De nos fabula]
  • Tangents [Stories]
  • The Wind from a Burning Woman [Stories]
  • Vitals [Thanks, Cris!]
• Cherly Benard, Turning on the Girls [Not very imaginative as SF, but very funny]
• Alfred Bester
  • The Demolished Man
  • The Stars My Destination
• James Blish, A Case of Conscience [Theologically inaccurate Catholic first-contact story]
• Ray Bradbury
  • I Sing the Body Electric [Stories]
  • The Martian Chronicles [Linked stories]
  • R Is for Rocket [Stories]
• David Brin
  • The Uplift books [space-opera, but good space opera, except for the highly unfortunate last book in the series, which I shan't list]
    • Sundiver
    • Startide Rising
    • The Uplift War
    • Brightness Reef
    • Infinity's Shore
• Damien Broderick, The Black Grail
• John Brunner
  • The Atlantic Abomination [Lovecraftian monsters vs. early '60s technological optimism; not great but fun.]
  • Double, Double
  • The Shockwave Rider
  • The Squares of the City [Perhaps the best novel ever written about urban planning]
  • Stand on Zanzibar
• Lois McMaster Bujold [Normally, I have a special place in my heart for military SF, and it's run by the ghost of Felix Dzherzhinsky; but these are such well-written books (just think of the scene in Warrior's Apprentice where Miles ad libs the Dendarii into existence) that one hardly notices one's reading about utter monsters --- and the shock is all the greater when the realization does penetrate, which always happens. I literally read all I could lay hands upon in a week, have now gone through all of them, and wait impatiently for more.]
  • Shards of Honor
  • Barrayar
  • Cordelia's Honor [=the first two collected]
  • The Warrior's Apprentice
  • The Vor Game
  • Young Miles [=Warrior's Apprentice plus Vor Game plus a story from Borders of Infinity which falls between them]
  • Cetaganda
  • Borders of Infinity
  • Brothers in Arms
  • Mirror Dance
  • Memory
  • Komarr
  • A Civil Campaign
  • Diplomatic Immunity
• Karel Capek, War with the Newts
• Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry [A superb vampire novel, rigorously thought through and entirely naturalistic]
• C. J. Cherryh
  • Cyteen
  • Downbelow Station
  • Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor [There is a notable downward gradient in these books, and I do not recommend the further sequels]
  • Heavytime and Hellburner
• Arthur Clarke
  • 2001 and 2010
  • The City and the Stars
  • Imperial Earth
  • Tales from the White Hart
  • The Other Side of the Sky
  • Rendezvous with Rama [emphatically not any of the sequels]
  • Fountains of Paradise
  • The Nine Billion Names of God
• Helen Collins, Mutagenesis
• Brian Daley [Comic space opera]
  • Reqiuem for a Ruler of Worlds
  • Jinx on a Terran Inheritance
  • The Fall of the White Ship Avatar
• Avram Davidson, The Avram Davidson Treasury [Davidson was mainly a short-story writer of genius; this is the only collection of his stories still in print, but it's very recent and very good. Review: Avram Davidson's Afterlife]
• L. Sprague de Camp
• George Alec Effinger
  1. When Gravity Fails
  2. Fire in the Sun
  3. The Exile Kiss
  • Schrödinger's Kitten
• Greg Egan
  • Permutation City [Review: Simulated Leibniz]
  • Distress [Review: "And the Truth Shall Make You --- "]
• Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan [Yes, they're comic books. They're also brilliant: imagine Hunter Thompson and John Brunner collaborating on the script for a movie to be filmed by Fritz Lang, Capra and John Carpenter, rendered by a Hogarth who has seen the future and loathes it.]
  1. Back on the Street
  2. Lust for Life
  3. Year of the Bastard
  4. The New Scum
  5. Lonely City
  6. Gouge Away
  7. Spider's Trash
  8. Dirge
  9. The Cure
  10. One Last time
• Harlan "I Am Not a Science Fiction Writer" Ellison [Note: many of these short-story collections overlap. I suggest starting with The Essential Ellison. Website: Ellison Webderland]
  • Angry Candy
  • Deathbird Stories
  • An Edge in My Voice [essay collection]
  • The Essential Ellison
  • Paingod and Other Delusions
  • Shatterday
  • Strange Wine
• John M. Ford
  • Growing Up Weightless
  • How Much Just for the Planet?
  • The Princes of the Air
  • Web of Angels
• Karen Joy Fowler, Artificial Things
• R. García y Robertson, The Virgin and the Dinosaur
• Randall Garrett
• Alexis A. Gilliland, The Revolution from Rosinante
• Phylis Gotlieb, Flesh and Gold
• Thomas Harlan, Wasteland of Flint [Archaeological space opera. Sort of a "lite" version of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space, substituting a rationalized mixture of H. P. Lovecraft and Carlos Castaneda, dissolved in Aztec-themed alternate history, for Revelation's 190-proof hard-science future shock.]
• Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
• Frank Herbert, Dune [I think I've read all the fiction he ever published; I cannot now imagine why]
• Theodore Judson, Fitzpatrick's War [A re-telling of the story of Alexander the Great, making him out to be the psychopathic catatstrophe in human form he really was]
• Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees [Parallel, distributed robotic artificial intelligence, as seen by an immensely cultivated, immensely reactionary German novelist and cavalry officer around 1957. Which sounds like it should be in a science fiction novel.]
• Janet Kagan, Mirabile
• Sharon Lee and Steven Miller, Partners in Necessity [= omnibus edition of A Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change and Carpe Diem. Light entertainments, which owe more than I'd usually like to romance novels, but fun reads.]
• Ursula Le Guin
  • The Dispossessed
  • Four Ways to Forgiveness
  • Three Hainish Novels
• Fritz Leiber
  • Gather, Darkness
  • A Sepcter Is Haunting Texas
• Stanislaw Lem [Lem was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. People didn't realize this, because he put his social philosophy and epistemology in science fiction, but it's there all the same.]
  • The Cyberiad
  • The Futurological Congress [Review by Danny Yee]
  • His Master's Voice [The Great Information Theory Novel]
  • Imaginary Magnitude [Introductions to imaginary books]
  • The Invincible
  • Peace on Earth
  • A Perfect Vacuum [Reviews of imaginary books, including a harsh take on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum. Brilliant and funny; includes what I think is an entirely new probabilistic fallacy, and several weird cosmologies, all hard to refute and utterly incompatible.]
  • Solaris
• Paul J. McAuley
  • Confluence [A mutant member of the Dying Earth sub-genre.]
    1. Child of the River
    2. Ancients of Days
    3. Shrine of Stars
  • Fairyland
  • Pasquale's Angel [Alternate history where Leonardo started the industrial revolution during the Renaissance]
• Wil McCarthy
  • Bloom [Review: The Mildew That Ate New Guinea]
  • Murder in the Solid State
• Ian McDonald
  • Out on Blue Six
  • Scissor Cut Paper Wrap Stone
• Maureen McHugh
  • China Mountain Zhang
  • Half the Day Is Night
• Patricia McKillip, Fool's Run
• Ken MacLeod
  • The Star Fraction
  • The Cassini Division [Review: The True Knowledge versus the Rapture for Nerds]
  • The Sky Road
  • The Engines of Light
    1. Cosmonaut Keep
    2. Dark Light
    3. Engine City
  • Learning the World
• George R. R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging
• Elizabeth Moon
  ["Familias Regnant" books. The first three are fine entertainment, even if you don't care at all about horses. The others are, with Bujold, the only military SF I've seen which is actually good.]
  • Hunting Party
  • Sporting Chance
  • Winning Colors
  • Once a Hero
  • Rules of Engagement
  • Change of Command
  • Against the Odds
  [A different series, in a different universe]
  • Trading in Danger
  • Marque and Reprisal
• Larry Niven [All from back when Niven was good. Narrative order, though it's not necessary to read them that way]
  • The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton [Stories]
  • World of Ptaavs
  • A Gift from Earth
  • Neutron Star [Stories]
  • Ringworld
• Alexei Panshin
  • Rite of Passage
  • Starwell
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye
• Frederik Pohl [Pohl has written a few excellent books, a very large number of good ones, and none (that I've read) which wasn't worth the time. At the moment, I'd say his three best are Gateway, The Space Merchants and the Eschaton Sequence (taken as a whole), but I'm open to persuasion.]
  • Black Star Rising
  • The Eschaton Sequence [Series premised on Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory, only correcting a serious defect in Tipler's formulation, viz., realizing that there's no reason why Omega should be benevolent.]
    1. The Other End of Time
    2. The Siege of Eternity
    3. The Far Shore of Time
  • Gateway [The sequels are OK]
  • Homegoing
  • Mining the Oort
  • Narabedla Ltd.
  • O Pioneer!
  • Outnumbering the Dead
  • The World at the End of Time
  • and C. M. Kornblith, The Space Merchants
• Alastair Reynolds [Narrative order. Extremely hard science space opera.]
  1. Revelation Space [Or, Some of My Best Friends Are Monstrous Chimeras of Tortured Flesh and Nanomechanical Viruses]
  2. Chasm City
  3. Redemption Ark
• Chris Roberson, Paragaea
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt [This is clearly the most probable path for world history to have taken; we are a very unlikely fluctuation.]
• Matt Ruff, Sewer Gas & Electric [Review: Again with the Madcap Behavior?]
• John Scalzi, Old Man's War
• James Schmitz
  • The Demon Breed
  • The Witches of Karres
• Robert Silverberg
  • Dying Inside
  • Nightwings
  • Thorns
  • Tower of Glass
• Dan Simmons
  • Children of the Night [A vampire story; but really SF]
  • The Hyperion series [Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are really a single novel, and that novel is one of the best I've read. It has all the virtues: plot, character, world-building, neat ideas, description, suspension of disbelief, prose style (at least eight, all handled expertly), nuance of language and allusion and construction. "The Scholar's Tale" in Hyperion reduced me to tears; "The Detective's Tale", immediately following, is a hilarous dead-pan satire of hardboiled detective stories. Simmons must have cackled while writing this book, thinking of what he was doing to the reader's mind. It deserved every award which was thrown at it and more.]
    1. Hyperion
    2. Fall of Hyperion
    3. Endymion
• John Sladek
• Kristine Smith, Code of Conduct
• Olaf Stapeldon
  • The Last and the First Men
  • A Last Man in London
• Neal Stephenson [Stephenson is funny, he tells a good story, he's a sucker for neat techy ideas which he does really well (when I teach theory of computation I'm going to use excerpts from the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), and he couldn't write a decent ending to save his life.]
  • The Big U [Monstrous campus architecture meets the bicameral mind. Very plainly a first novel, but very amusing to anyone who's attended an American college of over, say, 20,000 students. The new edition has a cover it is not embarrassing to be seen with.]
  • Cryptonomicon [No visible SF elements. I liked the historical part, during the Second World War, far better than the modern story about the descendants of those characters. Said characters are, principally, twerps and idiots. (Will somebody tell me why the cornflakes scene is supposed to be funny?) Plus, Stephenson rode various unruly hobby-horses with them, showing profound cluelessness about economics. And the ending was bizarre and pointless --- whereas normally his endings are strained, abrupt and unsatisfying. But the WWII story was brilliant.]
  • The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
  • Snowcrash
• Bruce Sterling
  • Crystal Express [Stories]
  • Distraction [Review: The Future Belongs to Buna]
  • A Good Old-Fashioned Future [Stories]
  • The Hacker Crackdown [Nonfiction, actually]
  • Heavy Weather
  • Holy Fire [Review: Rejuvenile Delinquent]
  • Islands in the Net
  • Schismatrix [Now available in Schismatrix Plus, the plus being a new introduction and about half the stories earlier collected in Crystal Express, which are set in the same universe]
  • Zeitgeist [Taking the social construction of reality seriously is so science fiction]
• S. M. Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time
• Charles Stross
  The Merchant Princes [This is so science fiction; who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes looking at the cover?]
  1. The Family Trade
  2. The Hidden Family
  3. The Clan Corporate
  • Singularity Sky
• Michael Swanwick
  • Stations of the Tide
  • Vacuum Flowers
• William Tenn, anything
• Maggy Thomas, Broken Time
• Jack Vance deserves his own page
• Kurt "I'm not a science fiction writer either" Vonnegut
  • Cat's Cradle
  • Palm Sunday [Not fiction]
  • Player Piano
  • Slaughterhouse Five
• Scott Westerfeld, The Risen Empire
• Walter Jon Williams
  • Ambassador of Progress
  • Aristoi
  • Day of Atonement
  • Dread Empire's Fall [Space opera, with ugly cover art and highly misleading blurbs; also really good novels. For instance, I don't think I've ever read a better portrayal of the special intoxication which comes when sexual love coincides with intellectual collaboration. And The Praxis, in particular, contains an embedded novella about identity, ambition, friendship and betrayal which is simply devastating.]
    1. The Praxis
    2. The Sundering
    3. Conventions of War
  • Facets [Stories]
  • Knight Moves
  • Voice of the Whirlwind
  • His interview (sort of) with Hot Wired is also worthwhile, if only for the bits where he discusses his suit against Wired Ventures Inc.
• Connie Willis
  • And Not Forgetting the Dog [Sequel to Doomsday Book, but can be enjoyed independently]
  • Impossible Things [Stories]
  • Doomsday Book [Prequel to the title story in Fire Watch, but can be enjoyed --- if that is the word --- independently]
  • Fire Watch [Stories]
  • Remake
• Gene Wolfe
• John Wyndham
  • Consider Her Ways [Stories]
  • Day of the Triffids
  • Gooseflesh and Laughter [Stories]
  • Kraken
  • The Midwich Cuckoos
• Roger Zelazny
  • Creatures of Light and Darkness
  • The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth [Stories]
  • Four for Tomorrow [Four novellas]
  • Lord of Light [Review by Danny Yee]
• Sarah Zettel, Fool's War