
Ask HN: What sci-fi books are you reading? - ksowocki
I recently got a kindle and am looking to download some sci - fi books.  Here are some that have been recommended to me:<p>- Snow Crash<p>- Enders Game<p>- His Dark Materials<p>- Dune in Conquest<p>- Born<p>- Hyperion<p>- Daemon<p>- Tactics of Mistake<p>- The Realty Disfunction<p>- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep<p>What are your favorites? Any tips on where to start?
======
mhd
Snow Crash is great. Generally I'd recommend some "classics", just to see who
treaded some ground first, i.e. who gets copied by everyone.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation (and the rest of the trilogy)

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land / Starship Troopers / The Moon
is a Harsh Mistress

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man / The Stars My Destination

Jack Vance - The Dying Earth

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / The Man in the High
Castle

Larry Niven - Ringworld

etc. etc.

A list of Hugo Award winners[1] might come in helpful.

Another advantage of having read "the greats" is that if some critic says that
new author X writes "in the style of Y" you have a slightly better idea if you
might like it.

Tastes vary, of course. Personally I never got what's supposed to be so great
about Ender's Game. Teen Mary Sue geek power fantasy with questionable morals.
Then again, lots of people said similar things about Heinlein…

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel>

------
rst
Vernor Vinge --- A Fire Upon the Deep. (Also worth seeking out is the hugely
influential novella "True Names", but you'd probably have to dig it out of a
library someplace.)

Neal Stephenson --- Cryptonomicon. (Present day setting, but with an SF
sensibility; ties into his literally epic Baroque Cycle.)

Charles Stross --- Halting State. (Investigation of an MMORPG bank breakin
spills out into real-world skulduggery.)

And an oddball that folks here may not have encountered:

Mary Gentle --- Ash, A Secret History. (Starts off with interleaved narratives
of a Joan of Arc figure in a strangely different medieval Europe, and a
present-day Ph.D. researcher who's investigating her, and finding out that his
sources literally don't say the same thing day to day. Then it gets...
weirder. Quirky, brilliant, and kind of hard to find in the U.S.)

~~~
rst
Oh, a little more Stross: the Laundry books, starting with The Atrocity
Archives. The British Secret Service has a division which guards against
Lovecraftian occult horrors --- and your narrator is one of its I.T. grunts.

------
lukev
For mind-expanding, post-singularity hard sci-fi consider anything by Greg
Egan. I'd start with Permutation City, or one of his short story collections.

~~~
Adaptive
I really liked Egan's Diaspora, but I didn't find it available for Kindle,
unfortunately.

------
wildwood
The only book I ever force on people is "A Deepness in the Sky", by Vernor
Vinge. If you haven't read it, please do.

I've really been enjoying David Weber's Honor Harrington series, if you're
open to military sci-fi. It's not on the Amazon site, but it's easy to get
from the Baen Webscriptions site.

Iain M. Banks - "Algebraist" was a lot of fun, easily the best visualization
of a gas-giant alien society I've ever read. I read "Matter" a while ago, and
keep feeling pulled back to re-read it sometime soon.

For classic sci-fi, I would recommend Bester's "The Stars My Destination" and
Miller's "Canticle for Leibowitz".

Don't forget to check out all the free public domain books that are available
in the Kindle Store. All the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, etc that you can eat, at
no charge.

------
gnosis

      * Heretics of Dune
    
      * Chapterhouse: Dune
    
      * Lem's Cyberiad
    
      * PKD's Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and Martian Time-Slip
    
      * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    
      * The Illuminatus Trilogy

~~~
ksowocki
which is your favorite? do these come from any specific subset of sci-fi ?

~~~
gnosis
They are all equally excellent in their own way, and fall in to a variety of
scifi sub-genres. The HHGTTG, Cyberiad and the Illuminatus could be called
scifi parodies (though the Illuminatus is very difficult to categorize, as it
spans various genres). The Dune books are much more straight scifi. And the
PKD books are really mindbending, kind of nightmarish books.

------
wwortiz
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are good books, especially for just starting to
read again.

Ubik is my favorite PKD book followed closely by Electric Sheep.

The His Dark Materials isn't really sci-fi so much as fantasy but it is quite
a good read (though if you didn't have a kindle it might be embarrassing
buying them from the young adult section, they are quite adult though).

I think a huge thing missing from your list is the Foundation series from
Asimov (I recommend going in order of publishing, start with Foundation move
onto Foundation and Empire then Second Foundation and more if you are into
it).

My 2 cents.

------
solost
A few additional thoughts based on the comments here:

If you liked "In Conquest Born" - Friedman wrote These Alien Shores, which is
a true hacker sci fi, absolutely incredible.

The Book of Skaith by Leigh Bracket is a truely awesome compilation of the
three Skaith novels. Leigh helped write the initial Empire Strikes back!

Almost anything by Jack Vance will be good. If you've read The Dying Earth,
George RR Martin just produced a tribute called Songs of the Dying Earth with
some of the best Sci Fi writers contributing.

------
Anon84
Depends on what you like. The Dune and Foundation sagas are excellent
(although a bit dated). For a more modern feel checkout Alastair Reynolds and
Peter Hamilton.

~~~
ksowocki
Thanks Bruno. What are your favorites?

~~~
Anon84
I've just finished Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga and it's definitely one of the
best books I've read in a long time.

The first three Dune novels are particularly good. Dune has a tendency to get
more philosophical in the later volumes (plans within plans within plans).

If I had to choose an all time favorite I would probably go with Kim Stanley
Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Green/Blue Mars). An extremely well researched
view of how Mars colonization and terraforming might proceed in a realistic
way.

He also has a trilogy on the possible/likely consequences of runaway global
warming (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting)
but RGB Mars is definitely better.

Edit: "The content of Green Mars and the cover artwork for Red Mars are
included on the Phoenix DVD, carried onboard Phoenix, a NASA lander that
successfully touched down on Mars in May 2008. The First Interplanetary
Library is intended to be a sort of time capsule for future Mars explorers and
colonists."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy#On_Phoenix_spacecr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy#On_Phoenix_spacecraft)

------
SpikeGronim
Any of the The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. You can start with the first,
"Consider Phlebas". They're space opera with a lot of dark wit.

~~~
wildwood
"Player of Games" is also a good starting point, it has some of the clearest
narrative structure of any of the Culture novels. And from what I can
remember, it's a little less dark than Phlebas, to ease you into the depths of
Banks' mind.

------
ysopex
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_(novel_series)>

Seriously, I've read these about twice a year since they came out. His Chaos
series is very good too. More fantasy than sci-fi tho.

------
veb
Why has nobody mentioned the author Ben Bova? Especially the Astroid Wars
trilogy.

Anything by Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov is a must read!

------
PilotPirx
I don't read that much lately, but want to throw in a few names:

\- Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, The Cyberiad, His Masters Voice, Fiasco)

\- William Gibson - evrything worth reading)

\- Bruce Sterling

------
coffeenut
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell. Hands down one of the best sci-fi books I've
ever read.

Oh, and anything by Neil Stephenson (except Zodiac).

------
subelsky
Damon (plus the rest of that trilogy), Dune - those are two recent favorites
off the top of my head

