Ask HN: What is the best sci-fi you read this year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best sci-fi you read this year?

28 pointsmudil43 comments

Please share with us the best books or series you read this year.

The Worm Web Serial[1]. I've heard it is longer than all of the Harry Potter books combined.

It starts as modern day slightly alternate universe super heroes, and ends up in some pretty heavy sci fi concepts towards the middle and end.

By far and away my favorite part is how it dives deep into not just the origins of many characters (and the universe has a LOT of characters), but also their powers. Specifically, it walks through how characters learn how to use their powers in new and creative ways, and explores what it feels like to use the powers from the users' pov. This gets interesting with things like perception, control, tinkering and entropy type powers, and the author does a great job at exploring these in a way where you can almost picture using them yourself.

Another cool part is that while I referenced it as a superhero story, it is probably more accurately described as a super villain story as the main character goes down that path. However you soon learn that it really isn't that black and white and that gray spectrum becomes a key element of the story.

[1]https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

The final red rising book was published this year: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Rising-Trilogy-Book/dp/B0159URANK

I really enjoyed the first 15 lives of Harry August (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECE9OD4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...) I only found it in 2016 although it was published in 2014.

I second the First 15 lives of Harry August. Great book, well written

Touch by the same author, Claire North is a great book too.

Books 2 & 3 of Liu Cixin's Dark Forest series were translated this year. One of them will get the Hugo (book 1, the Three Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo).

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (admittedly end 2015)

Very good closing of the Hugo&Nebula Award series (Justice, Sword, Mercy) exploring the questions of identity and consciousness of individuals, androids and hive minds on the background of a galaxy spanning social, political and military struggle.

Yeah and I second the 3 Body Series by Liu Cixin - that is one for the ages too.

Three books I enjoyed this year:

this census taker, China Mieville

To Say Nothing Of The Dog, Connie Willis

The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq

If you enjoy science-fiction, it is quite possible that you wouldn't enjoy any of the books above or even classify them as science-fiction (I would though) -- so definitely look them up or try the kindle sample to see if they appeal to you.

Also, I see Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy mentioned elsewhere, I second that recommendation.

[Also, honourable mention to the TV show Westworld -- if it were a book I would have included.]

To Say Nothing of the Dog won the Hugo for best novel in 1999. That probably makes it science fiction.

It is a really great book, and I highly recommend it, but IIRC you could tear out about 20 pages and it would become historical fiction.

The Wayfarers books The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit were quite good. Fantastic world building and characters, although the plots seem to meander about with not too much purpose.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/170872-wayfarers

Recently ploughed through The Expanse series.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/56399-the-expanse

Dark Matter was a good read if you like parallel universes.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833670-dark-matter

The Rho Agenda series was a surprisingly good read.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/61746-the-rho-agenda

Quantum Night was something a bit different from Robert Sawyer.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25734179-quantum-night

And Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard would probably have to be rated my favourite for the year.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25667916-barsk

Seconding Barsk, and just about anything by Robert Sawyer; I would recommend his Neanderthal Parallax series, which begins with Hominids: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids

The Culture Series by Iain Banks. Love his style, love the setting, and love the stories. Really fascinating look at a post-scarcity galaxy spanning anarchist society facilitated by extra dimensional artificial intelligences.

I've been reading the "Expanse" series. I liked the earlier books a bit more. The latest one drops today.

Anyone watched the show they made from it?

I watched season 1 on Netflix and liked it pretty much. I didn't know it was based on a book, thanks for the info.

I'm working my way through the show after having just finished the first book. I found the crew of the Rocinante to be fairly generic characters in the book, but at least they were likeable. In the screen adaptation, I find the constant conflict among the crew a little grating at times – Amos and Holden aren't particularly likeable. Miller seems like a much more interesting character, and I think he is played well in the series (I will have to look up the actor who plays his part...).

The dialogue seems quite hard to understand – it falls victim to the typical mumbled, gravely voices that seem to be present in many American shows and films.

The show was good, a bit like Firefly without the humor or actor chemistry. Replicating Firefly is a tall order though, so comparing it to that is a bit unfair.

More than a year ago, I picked up William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." I wasn't sure what I thought of it, at first, but it became increasingly interesting and I finished it. This year, I picked up the third novel in the series that "Pattern Recognition" started.

It's a different world than that of "Neuromancer" et al., but I've come to find Gibson's portrayal of and thinking about it quite interesting.

This year, I also helped someone out for a while who is considerably into fashions of some sorts (make up, running shoes and attire, other stuff more by just doing it than by talking about it).

I'm finding Gibson's latest trilogy giving me new eyes on all this. And, in today's world of "image", it's not just and interesting but a valuable perspective. Treatise. Extrapolation...

Not the most in your face of sci fi titles, but subtly compelling, for me.

Perhaps partially sub-consciously. Just like the world he's describing.

This is a little more Lovecraftian Horror than science fiction, but I loved Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country". Equal parts what you'd expect, with an exploration of how shitty America was for black people in the 1950s.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25109947-lovecraft-count...

Ted Chiang's "Stories of your Life" have been recommended here a bunch, since Arrival was based on one of the stories in the collection.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...

Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are both excellent explorations of the human mind and consciousness.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490708-echopraxia

Bonus: Echopraxia comes with an optional audiovisual component that stands alone quite well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30ED0756E00786E2

And don't let the mention of Vampires scare you off; this isn't a Twilight wannabe, and it's very likely not a take on Vampires you've seen before.

John C Wright's "eschaton sequence":

Count to a Trillion

The Hermetic Millennia

Judge of Ages

Architect of Aeons

The Vindication of Man

(and one more to come)

It's a combination of hard sci-fi and space opera, based around one essentially immortal character (and his rival, and his girl) carrying out a mission over tens of thousands of years. Mind-blowing scale and yet there's a romance to it.

Sweet so glad to hear this is continuing. When I finished Architect it seemed it could have been an end to the series.

It was a long wait, without the benefit of a cryo-chamber, but worth it. Vindication is far and away the best of the series for me. I suppose it'll be another year or so before the next is out.

If you are into AI, Crystal Society was a great 2016 release. You can read it for free online: http://crystal.raelifin.com/society/Prologue

Kill Process by William Hertling: http://www.williamhertling.com/books/#kill-process

It's near future and the technology isn't that far-out. Most of it is either very real already or at least very believable from today's point of view. So, maybe technically it doesn't count as sci-fi but it's a really great tech thriller anyway.

I thought for a second this was Daniel Suarez's Kill Decision, which deals with autonomous drones. It was a fun technothriller, but focused too much on one particular weird model that I thought wasn't too realistic.

Just read that myself - highly recommend.

n-thing ancillary mercy (and the whole series) - best sci-fi I've read in a long while. Just finished the fifth season, and liked it enough to get the rest of the trilogy. It straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy, but does it well and packs an emotional punch at the end as you come to identify with the main characters without even realizing it.

Connie Willis: The Doomsday Book, a winner of the 1993 Hugo for best novel. It's deep and wide and brilliant and there's a technical excellence to the storytelling that made the book as a whole satisfying. She leaves a few loose ends and they're just the right ones and in just the right quantity.

An old one, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. It can be fairly slow at times but it's such an inspiring read.

Besides Kill Process and Seveneves (mentioned elsewhere on this thread), I'm going through the Hyperion Cantos right now, and I can't recommend it enough. Apparently Bradley Cooper is heading up production of a series as well, so good times ahead for that IP.

How Great Science Fiction Works: The Great Courses. I'd say while not quite scifi itself, it's one of best audiobooks/lectures about scifi that teaches the history and techniques of science fiction.

Seveneves by Neil Stephenson

This is by far the most Stephenson book that he's written. Hopefully without giving away any spoilers, the Engineer-types are the most enlightened good guys, the Soft-Sciences folks are about as evil as it's possible to get, and the book ends very abruptly not once, but twice.

If you like Stephenson, read this, but if you've never read one of his books before, I would not recommend this as a first.

The first 2/3rds of the book is just too heavy duty and depressing to be much fun for me. I wish that were some kind of brief initial thing so that the rest of the book could be in the 'new world' part which is fun and interesting and barely explored.

> barely explored

That's what I hated about the second half. It's like inverse Ringworld - you know how the world was built, and why, but you don't know much about the inhabitants, and your tour guides aren't very interesting, either.

I liked the first half - it was interesting to read about them solving problems, even though the problems - and sometimes the solutions - were atrocious.

> the problems - and sometimes the solutions - were atrocious. reply

I find the real world has enough of that - I want my fiction to be more escapist and fun and uplifting.

I would have liked a bit more fleshing out in the "second" part as well, but it does seem to get the point across, and at that point he would have had to write two volumes if that book was going to get any bigger.

I read Seveneves this year as well but came away disappointed. Some of the science was good (orbital mechanics, genetic engineering) but the rest of the science and engineering was fairly poor[0]. Couple that with the questionable decisions routinely made by many characters and it's a very weak novel overall.

[0] In particular, they did not (and physically could not) have launched a broad enough manufacturing capability for the remnants of humanity to have had a realistic chance of long-term survival. The practicality of the Seveneves themselves did was also at best dubious from a biological and other standpoints.

That universe seemed to have a much more developed space industry than we have, indicated by the fact that they attached a whole asteroid to the ISS.

Stephenson does seem to have a history of fudging a bit of the realism to drive the plot, like anybody, but he seems to do it in a way that says "wink wink, I know this couldn't happen but work with me people ;)"

A book series called "Omega Force", currently re-reading it

Is an Omega Force a group of Omega Men? :-)

Nah, it is just a name of a group of people ;)

Definitely The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

To those unacquainted, imagine if Godel Escher Bach mated with The Lord of the Rings. It is a true masterpiece.

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