Martha Wells' Murderbot series is a fun holiday read. It's about an autonomous humanoid bot that does security work for expeditions on distant worlds in a corporate-dystopian future and is going through an adolescent emotional crisis
Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#32The Ted Chiang books are great. Short stories. 'Arrival' the movie is based on one of them.
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#33Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is a great one
The rare book that I've read three times. That and his Anathem, IMHO, are superlative and make up for his habit of droning on. BTW stay away from REAMDE. His action scenes are awkward and stumbling, without tension or grace.
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#34Becky Chalmers books are worth a read
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#35Ken Liu has some excellent short stories. His collection The Paper Menagerie from a few years ago was particularly great. (The titular short story won a Hugo.) He also translated the first and third books in the Three-Body Problem series.
Ted Chiang is another great SF short story writer.
Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky brother is excellent – though it was published in the 70s so maybe not "modern."
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#36The one really first rate recent SF novel I can recall is: "This is how you lose the time war" [0] by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It's far from being Hard SF if you like that (I do) but the humour and poetry of it won me over very fast. I bought it purely on the basis of the delicious title! The "Lady Astronaut" series [1] by Mary Robinette Kowal is not first rate, but it is reliably entertaining and a fairly H…
This is how you lose the time war is unlike any other book I've read! I thought it was super disorienting – and I loved that.
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#37Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is a great one
The rare book that I've read three times. That and his Anathem, IMHO, are superlative and make up for his habit of droning on. BTW stay away from REAMDE. His action scenes are awkward and stumbling, without tension or grace.
Thanks for the tip on REAMDE - it and Dodo are the ones I haven't read.
I'll add Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. It's Stephenson's most recent book, and has nice scifi and (HN-crowd-relevant) societal concepts. Beware of a very slow opening.
Also: Project Hail Mary. Similar to The Martian in the right ways. More ambitious, with all its benefits and plausibility traps.
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#38SciFi The Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor The Singularity Trap and Outland, also by Dennis E. Taylor The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi SciFi + Comedy Expeditionary Force Series by Craig Alanson Military SciFi The Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell The Palladium Wars Series by Marko Kloos A bit of all of the above Murderbot Diaries Series by Martha Wells SciFi/SciFantasy + Comedy Magic 2.0 by Scott Mayer
Bobiverse was good from a ‘new concepts’ point of view, at least the first book. Really fun read.
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#39I really enjoyed “XX” by Rian Hughes — a completely new kind of sci fi. Like my other fav sci-fi book Three Body Problem, it all starts with a signal from space, but then... very boldly imagined book and deserves much more praise than it seems to have gotten.
Amazon.com: XX (9781419750694): Hughes, Rian: Books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419750690
Re: Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?
#40SciFi The Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor The Singularity Trap and Outland, also by Dennis E. Taylor The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi SciFi + Comedy Expeditionary Force Series by Craig Alanson Military SciFi The Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell The Palladium Wars Series by Marko Kloos A bit of all of the above Murderbot Diaries Series by Martha Wells SciFi/SciFantasy + Comedy Magic 2.0 by Scott Mayer
Bobiverse was good from a ‘new concepts’ point of view, at least the first book. Really fun read.
The concepts where novel in all books by Denis E. Taylor so far, or at least I find the way he presents them in a new or unique way. The Singularity Trap sticks out to me as a rather unique way to tell the first contact story but I found the story itself less enjoyable than his other works.
I liked the first 3 books of the Bobiverse series but book 4 wasn’t as enjoyable as the rest for me.
By favorite book by Denis E. Taylor was Outland, it reminded me of some of the better works of Michael Crichton. To bad he has writer's block when it comes to continuing the story.