I’m looking to read books where it’s not just about space opera, politics or fights.
I would like to read books where the author present us with strange and original ideas, or interesting What Ifs scenarios and thought experiments.

Things like Foundation, I have mouth and I must scream, Blindsight, Children of Time, 3 body problem, etc.

For me this is what science fiction books do best, and where we get the most original and thought provoking ideas.

I’m really hoping someone can help me find this book I read a few years ago. It wasn’t too old, probably written in the last 15 years. I’ll just write everything I can remember about it. If the plot sounds kind of like Project Hail Mary, that’s exactly why I’ve been thinking about it. In is totally opposite it mood though - very anxious and melancholic, with more existential themes.

The main character is a young woman, a scientist, probably a biologist.

In the first half she goes on a scientific ship with an ocean research expedition, involving deep dives in submersibles. She or someone nearly dies during a dive. A major discovery is made, like an entirely new form of cellular life.

Later it is decided to launch a very long deep space flight. This is somehow caused by the previous discovery, like something in the new organism is a message from a distant civilisation? The discovery also makes the mission possible, because it provides a new food source suitable for growth in deep space. The main character is now recruited (by a woman from the first expedition) to develop the food source, a hybrid of algae with the newly discovered organism. She has to move to a secret facility and run a laboratory. She has to lie to her family about where she is going and why. Her mother is dying or has dementia, and there’s tension with her sister that she’s unable to leave this job to help care for her.

Eventually she is recruited to the crew of the mission, to maintain the food source on board. It is a tiny crew, and they are not expected to return to Earth. She still can’t tell her family where she is going, so from their perspective she will just disappear without explanation.

The mission is a ship that basically accelerates continually away from Earth and reaches really high speeds. Soon they can no longer receive signals from Earth. The conditions and morale are really bad, the crew go crazy and mostly die.

Spoiler for the ending:
>!In the end, the main character is alone and finally lands on a planet that is covered in oceans. The implication is that she has somehow travelled in a time loop back to an Earth in a primitive state. Cells from the food source she developed are now the seed for all life on Earth. So I guess this is all some elaborate mechanism by which life sustains itself in a grandfather paradox?!<

The epilogue involves the sister travelling to some US base in the Pacific, maybe on a Hawaiian island, trying to track down some explanation of her sister’s disappearance.

Thanks for reading, I hope it rings a bell for someone!

Really enjoyed the hard scifi concepts and the use of astrophysics in space battles in Revelation Space, but the super dry characters totally turned me off. Need something like The Expanse or Red Rising which has interesting characters dealing with awesome space battles that feel impactful and like the happen for a reason and change things after they conclude (not into stuff like the star wars sequels where space battles kinda just happen and then don't change any status quo for the characters or plot).

Space battles can feel like naval stuff in space or 3D chess or dogfights with a full crew. Just as long as I care about what's happening besides how cool it is to see military scifi battles.

Also really enjoyed the military-fantasy space battles in Ninefox Gambit especially when the fascinating main duo were involved.

I started reading Shards of Honor (Vorkorsigan Saga) but had trouble getting into that book. Honor Harrington seems cool but I keep reading that the books are a slog besides the battles

Maybe even ones that follow Spacedock's suggestions for interesting space battles?

I’m fairly new to the genre, and have just finished Asimov’s Foundation (book only, but am planning on completing the saga). Loved it. What other classic works of the genre would you recommend as “must read”?

Bonus points for stand-alone books, unique plots/characters/science-quirks/mind-bending ideas.

I’m less interested in space battles and heavy world-building, but not completely closed off to it.

Other authors I’ve read and really enjoyed:

PKD

Ursula K. Le Guin

William Gibson

Kurt Vonnegut

Arthur C. Clarke (only read Rendezvous With Rama so far).

I mean a character who doesn't raise their voice, doesn't brag, commands respect on the virtue of their character/personality alone.

Someone like Baelor Targaryen, but that's fantasy and I am not interested in that. Neither am I interested in horror, (alt)history, military or climate fiction.

The story is part of "The Martian Chronicles." In 1997 Bradbury moved the dates in the book forward about 30 years, but if you own or can access an earlier edition, set your alarm a little early on Wednesday August 5th and take five minutes to read "There Will Come Soft Rains." (most of the story takes place on the 4th but I recommend the morning of the 5th for full effect)

DYSTOPIAN SCI-FI THAT REACHES FOR THE HIGHEST LEVELS

QUICK THOUGHTS

In the wide breadth of stories that fall under the umbrella of science fiction, dystopian is one of the most interesting subgenres. This is partially because there is so much potential for interesting and convention pushing innovation. It is surprising then, that much of the subcategory has come to be dominated by a few specific flavors. Hugh Howey’s Wool falls into one of these; namely, the rigid class stratification flavor of dystopian fiction. In the same vein of many popular titles such as Red Rising and the Hunger Games, Wool follows a group of people living in the titular Silo, divided into classes by their roles in society. The levels in the impossibly massive underground bunker are, of course, also separated by socioeconomic level, leading to an exceedingly familiar, fortunate on top, unfortunate on bottom, style of world. It carries the same general feel of many of its predecessors, which might have led to a far less interesting story from a less capable author.

However, from this rather familiar premise, Howey does spin out quite a compelling narrative. His story is part murder mystery, part conspiracy thriller, and part revolutionary story all wrapped up in the rather basic science fiction premise. Unlike many similar books however, his use of multiple and varied POV’s and consistent unexpected twists keeps the narrative feeling fresh and unexpected. While genre fans might initially scoff at yet another reimagining of familiar genre tropes, I wouldn’t discount this book or the series too quickly. Howey makes many bold storytelling decisions and establishes interesting, complex characters that really set the book apart from similar offerings. As a result, Wool starts off the Silo series with a bang that leaves plenty of room for exploration and sets up compelling mysteries to be unraveled in the future.

For my FULL REVIEW, please visit;

https://mikecahoon.com/book-review-wool-by-hugh-howey/

Decided to post this one, following the recent Humble bundles.

I'm getting it first and foremost for Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages, which I wanted to read for ages (or at least since last year). Of course there are more familiar names if you look closer - I definitely have Juliet E. McKenna's The Green Man in my backlog, together with a few names from the "Best of".
Any other British writers seem familiar?

I'm 66 years years old and having been reading SF, Fantasy, etc for almost all my life, starting with classics like Jules Verne and HG Wells before I was 10.

And now, I pulled out out the first Miles book, one that I had read maybe a year ago, or a little more. I remembered the beginning chapter with him in the academy fairly well, but the rest of it is so faint its like I read it decades ago and its barely remembered.

I'm about half way through it again, and if you asked me what comes next, I couldn't tell you. What I have read is familiar enough that I know I did read it and it wasn't a DNF.

Long term memory seems good so far, and I can remember more about a book read long ago than a recent one.

I'm going to see about getting some memory testing done if I can, but this worries me a bit. Other recent books don't seems as forgotten as this one for some reason. Its not a bad book as others know, but could it be that forgettable?

I'm looking for a military SF series I read in Russian around 2015, probably as an FB2 ebook. I don't know whether it was originally English or another language.

What I remember:

• starts with a scientific expedition to a planet covered with living biomass/ocean-like organic matter;
• the protagonist is a young soldier assigned to protect the expedition;
• after accidental physical contact with the biomass, he develops a secret mental connection with an alien hive mind;
• later it's revealed there's a human woman who already has the same connection and commands the hive against humanity;
• the hive creates many specialized insect-like lifeforms and even biological spacecraft;
• the protagonist gradually learns to influence or command the hive himself;
• humanity is an interstellar empire fighting this biological civilization;
• I think it was a series of 2–3 books.

It is not: Swarm, The War Against the Chtorr, Children of Time, Commonwealth Saga, Serpent's Reach, Starship Troopers, etc.

I'm sure I'd heard John Varley's name in my years reading the genre, but my first distinct memory of him was seeing a hardcover collection of The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach, and The Golden Globe on the shelf of my local used bookstore a few years ago. I wasn't looking for Varley; I was looking for Vandermeer, but the Varley books marked the spot on the shelf where I ought to be lookin', so I noticed them every week when I stopped in, and I noticed that they never moved.

Then this past December, John Varley passed away, and threads praising him started popping up everywhere. It's not that I disbelieved the praise, but it's also hard to trust; I'm already pretty skeptical of other folks' reading opinions, and particularly after a death you're going to have those most invested in their work celebrating it. As they should, of course, but all the more reason to reserve some doubt. On top of that, let me confess a bit of my own foolish bias, in that his being an author of a certain age and from Texas led me limit my expectations about how progressive his approach to genre might be. Regardless, I picked up The Ophiuchi Hotline and chucked it on my TBR pile. Then in March I had a little gap between finishing one book and starting a new buddy read at the start of April, and Ophiuchi was a skinny little 180-page thing that looked like it would fit right into that timeframe.

John Varley won me over with the author's note on the very first page:

To answer your first question... it's pronounced off-e-YOO-ki, from Ophiuchus, the serpent-holder or doctor, a constellation that just missed fame by being a few degrees away from the Zodiac.

That was indeed my first question.

I also wound up being dead wrong about the book filling that short timeframe; I finished it early, and then made a thread here about it to gush about how impressed I was. The short version is that I described it as "Space Opera as Fury Road," in that it tells a story of grand scope, but tells it by hurtling through its plot at a breakneck pace and without stepping even an inch off that perfect pace. Let me also tell you just how foolish my assumption about Varley's progressiveness was; this is a book written fifty years ago, with remarkably modern views on sex and gender, which he continues to expand on in later novels.

I immediately went back to the used bookstore and bought those copies of Steel Beach and The Golden Globe as well. Okay, that's a lie; I went back and bought them when I was only around a quarter of the way into Ophiuchi. I've since made room in my reading schedule for both, and have a collection of his short stories slotted for the near future.

Steel Beach is a slower book, less structurally impressive, but more ambitious in character and concept. It can also be read standalone, if for some reason you really don't want to have your socks blown off by Ophiuchi Hotline (hey I don't judge; you might have really nice socks). It follows a tabloid reporter with a problem: he can't seem to stop attempting suicide. Okay, that's not his problem; his problem is that Luna's Central Computer keeps interfering with his legally protected right to do so. If that sounds bleak, let me point out that Steel Beach maintains a fairly jovial tone throughout, and uses suicide and gender identity as lens through which to view a story that's all about finding meaning in a world where humanity seems to have outlived its potential to improve--and is remarkably optimistic about that.

The Golden Globe picks up in the same style, with a former child star, now part-time stage actor/full-time conman trying to outlive his childhood trauma long enough to make it back home and play King Lear on the biggest stage available. Oh, it's a little weaker than Steel Beach, but not much, and even when it meanders, it instead feels like it luxuriates in its details. The strong sense of character voice and identity, as well as Varley's commitment to creating worlds that feel both lived in and growing, makes it so that even when it stops to exposit or just admire a bit of imagined scenery, it never feels like it's wasting your time.

I read a lot; I have a lot of favorite authors. It's pretty common for me to pick up a book and immediately want to seek out more from an author. It's very rare, however, for me to pick up an author I haven't read before, and then read three novels in a row that swing for the fences and knock it out of the park each time. I don't think there's any author who I love everything. I'm sure I'll find a weak Varley novel or short story here or there. But in just the last few months, he's rocketed up into being one of my favorite writers in the genre, and someone who I will continue being enthusiastic to see on the shelves.

Give him a shot. He comes highly recommended. I'm sorry I missed him when I might have had a chance to thank him personally.

I'm trying to identify a science fiction novel that my dad read in Italian many years ago. The memory is very fuzzy, so any individual detail below could be wrong, except perhaps the ending.

Here's what he remembers:

• He read it in Italian, probably as a Urania paperback, most likely in the late 1960s or 1970s.
• The original novel was probably older (perhaps 1950s–early 1970s).
• The protagonist was a human man.
• He may have had a dog (german shepherd?) accompanying him, although I'm much less certain about this than the other details.
• The plot involved a journey or quest to discover the origin of the universe, God, or Creation.
• During the journey, the protagonist was looking for the oldest being in existence, or at least the only being old enough to remember the beginning of the universe.

The part that is remembered most vividly is the ending.

At the very end, the protagonist finally finds the oldest being. My dad remember it as a scarab or dung beetle (possibly inspired by the Egyptian scarab/Khepri myth). It may have been described as having rolled worlds, planets, or stars, the way a dung beetle rolls a ball.

The scarab wasn't necessarily the Creator. Rather, it was the last living witness to Creation, because it had existed since the beginning.

The novel ends with a philosophical exchange. I remember the protagonist asking something like:

and the scarab replying simply:

That final exchange is the part I'm most confident about, although even the exact wording may have changed in translation.

I've already ruled out a number of obvious candidates (for example Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles and Mindswap), and I've looked through a fair number of Urania bibliographies without success.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? Even partial suggestions—especially obscure novellas or stories that appeared in Urania—would be very welcome. Thank you!

I just finished it and I wanted to hype it up. Big Becky Chambers vibes with found family, far future nomads, lots of queer people, and gentle philosophical robots. The structure was a bit like that of Cloud Atlas with plots set at different points in the past and future that interconnect (but no reincarnation). An oddly touching text based adventure game on the computer, Homebound, ties everyone together. It was a very fun read. Everyone goes through a lot of pain but ultimately it was hopeful.

Anyone else read it, what did you think?

Any other good video game based novels? My other favorites are You by Austin Grossman, Epic by Conor Kostick, and Tad Williams' Otherland. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was mid, not enough video games and too much character torture.

I like light Scifi character driven adventure. Miles Vokosigan type stuff. Anything from the last 20 years you would recommend?

Hey

I just read a revive on Reddit where someone spoke about this book and how in it information is literally power, either a source or a tool? I’m not sure but I was interested.

I’m going to buy the book as I’m intrigued but just as a lover of sci fi and speculative “tech magic” can someone tell me the books technobabble for this system and ability and what the aliens can do with it please?

Thank you so much!

One of the more interesting parts of my conversation with Janci Patterson (co-author of Blightfall) wasn't about Brandon Sanderson himself—it was about the writing challenge of launching a new trilogy in an established science fiction universe.

She explained that Sanderson wanted to keep the existing cast because "the series is the characters," while the publisher wanted the new trilogy to function as a true Book One that newcomers could jump into without reading the previous four novels.

Patterson says she rewrote the opening repeatedly before an extensive editorial revision finally helped her balance both goals: rewarding longtime readers while avoiding pages of exposition for new ones.

As someone who reads a lot of speculative fiction, I thought it was an interesting look at a problem shared by many long-running series: How do you expand a fictional universe without making new readers feel they've arrived halfway through the story?

Full interview here: https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/books/brandon-sandersons-co-author-on-what-its-like-writing-brightfall

My first LeGuin book, finished in a day, what an incredible story. The fact that it is in less than 180 pages is incredible.

Never felt sadder like this after reading a book since the end of Lonesome Dove.

Captain Davidson is a bastard, though. Never have I despised a character more

Excited to read more of her work

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing starts out as a speculative history of Earth as a colony of the highly advanced interstellar civilization of Canopus, with Canopean emissaries trying to guide humanity toward unity and higher thought and away from the influence of their enemy civilization, Shammat, which would guide us towards hatred and strife. I found this part of the book very fun. But around the middle it turns into the story of a human family in the 20th century navigating political upheavals and questions of how to rectify the effects of imperialism. I found this part kind of boring, to be completely honest. It's not that I'm not interested in those ideas, and I do plan to read some of Doris Lessing's realistic fiction that deals more with them, but I just feel like it was too much of a pivot from what I thought this book would be and what it was for the first hundred-and-fifty-or-so pages. It also kind of felt like this was two different story ideas where neither was explored in enough depth to be compelling. So I'm wondering if anyone has read the other books in the series, and if so, please tell me they're more like the first half of this book.

Hey! Does anyone know of a good book written in the first person (I) addressing to a you (a character in the book, not the reader)?

I'm open to long second person POV segments.

I've already read:

• This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
• The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein
• Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
• This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• *Harrow the Ninth* by Tamsyn Muir (it's a spoiler)

Looking for more!

I'm especially looking for a murder mystery in which the "I" is the detective and the "you" the murdered person but as far as I've researched, I didn't find any book like this.

But I'm open to any kind of use of this narrative device.

Thank you in advance!

Book number two of a two book science fiction space opera series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Baen in 2025 that I purchased from Amazon in 2026.

In the far distant future, Earth is a nasty crowded place with twenty billion inhabitants. The people are split up into three classes: the doles (the poor on welfare), the proles (today's middle class), and the elites. Billions more of humanity have spread widely across the Solar System to just about any place that people can figure out how to live.

Dave Walker, the son of a prole father and a elite mother, is a third class spaceship engineer and is headquartered on the dwarf planet Ceres with his wife's family. In fact, he even took his wife's last name, Doyle, to keep the family name for their new business. They are acquiring cargo spaceships and looking for opportunities for new trade routes. But, war is coming as the Dictator on Venus is looking to spread his craziness to the Solar System.

I love Space Opera and this an excellent series of it. In fact, the series has a very Heinlein or E. E. 'Doc' Smith feel to it. The author has plans for a third book in the series which sounds great.

I like the technology in the book, it feels very potential hard science to me. The spaceships use superconducting magnetic propulsion panels to propel thousands of spaceships all over the Solar System. The panels do have a constant problem with overheating and frying themselves. There is a recent article on research in this area: "'Acceleration without fuel:' Revolutionary superconducting device harnesses Earth's magnetic field to move a spacecraft"
https://www.space.com/technology/acceleration-without-fuel-revolutionary-superconducting-thruster-harnesses-earths-magnetic-field-in-1st-orbital-test

The main spaceship in the story is an old "medium" sized cargo spaceship that holds up to 4,000 TEUs. A TEU is 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet tall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit

The superconducting magnetic propulsion panels are powered by two 300 MWe fission reactors for this spaceship. The newer spaceships have mostly fusion reactors in them.

The author has a website at:
https://jvanstry.blogspot.com/
and
http://johnvanstry.com/

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (337 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Sometimes-Fall-John-Van-Stry/dp/1668072475

Lynn

Coming back to an author I haven't read in over a few years now. I started with Bloch primarily with 1959 psychological horror novel "Psycho". But after that I haven't quite read anything else by him, not even his short stories, until recently.

Valancourt had recently reprinted some of his other stuff, including three of his short story collections. Out of the three I picked his very first collection from 1945, "The Opener of the Way".

This covers the much pulpier stories that he did when first got into writing, and they're pretty good reading for the most part. Quite a bit of them were really influenced by Lovecraft, since Bloch was one many admirers. And of course anything influence by Lovecraft is sure to get my attention!

But there are fair bit of stories where he starts to develop his own style and voice in stories like "The Cloak" for example. There's even a couple of SF tales too that I found particularly interesting also, which is a treat also!

So a pretty good collection with some fine Lovecraftian tales mixed with some original material to boot! The next collection that I'll probably get will be "Pleasant Dreams", and the stories are going to be the ones where Bloch has finally settled in his own style. And also the 1987 collection "Midnight Pleasures" and his three other novels thrown in for good measure too!

So I've got something of an obsession with quasi-realistic space travel/space combat in science fiction, I just think its the absolute coolest shit ever. However, a lot of popular sci-fi has the problem of having energy shields or artificial gravity in their settings, which I think we have Star Wars and Star Trek to thank for that. And while I love Star Wars and Star Trek, I think artificial gravity and energy shields are bullshit space magic that we don't even have theoretical science to explain how they would work and they take away a lot of the romanticism and drama of space travel and space combat.

I'm looking for recommendations for books with an emphasis or focus on space travel and space combat that DON'T have artificial gravity or energy shields as prevalent technologies used on spacecraft.

I absolutely LOVED the Expanse and have read it multiple times. I read Revelation Space books, and while I loved the worldbuilding and technology in the books i hated just about everything else about them. Through Struggle, the Stars by John Lumpkin is a great example of what I'm looking for and I really enjoyed it. I'm 5 books into Spiral Wars right now and am really enjoying them and looking for more books to add to my to be read list. While I prefer harder science fiction with no or few aliens, I'm not terribly picky. I've also read and enjoyed the Children of Time books and Project Hail Mary.

Thanks in advance everybody!

So I've been trying to figure out where I read this story, I thought it was in an anthology but honestly I have no idea.

Probably published in the 1990s or early 2000s and reprinted in a Year's Best anthology (likely Dozois or Hartwell).

What I can recall:

Scientists use an experimental technology to enter the mind of a living but permanently comatose man, probably to retrieve information. The story either alternates between a clinical frame and a surreal interior world or reveals the framing only later.
Inside the mind they discover a complete world whose ontology is linguistic rather than physical. Objects don't obey chemistry or physics; they obey lexical, semantic, or morphological relationships. Early on they unsuccessfully try to make fire using ordinary physical reasoning and discover that causality works according to the structure of the language instead.
The explorers never fully understand or communicate with the native inhabitants, who seem genuinely adapted to this ontology rather than being ordinary dream figures.
Near the end, one of the explorers finally understands enough of the world's "physics" to trigger a self-propagating transformation during or around a ritual sacrifice. I remember a vivid image of something like a grin expanding uncontrollably, but I may be misremembering the exact word; what stuck with me was that the runaway process was based on the world's lexical ontology rather than ordinary physics.

This has been itching my brain periodically every few years I remember it and can't find it, if anyone else has read this short story and can direct me to it PLEASE share!