Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read | Hacker News Reader

Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read

shepherd.com

315 pointsbwb314 comments

Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?

Gene Wolfe. Book of the new Sun. Wolfe's unique value prop is, create an interesting sci fi or fantastical setting, and tell it through special narrators (unreliable, liar, child, amnesiac, etc) with wonderful skill, producing a puzzle with a lovely solution (that you will only partially solve).

> Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?

Egan must be one of the most intelligent people alive… or if not, is at least the highest level I am personally capable of recognizing. I am genuinely curious which is the case. Anyways, I haven’t read Diaspora yet so will do so, thanks!

Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct. It's possible someone could make a fully logically consistent version of string theory including future gravitational predictions.

They say "doesn't describe this universe", but that really just means it's wrong.

Edit: replying to pavel_lishin:

Yes, I'm sure Egan knows that, I'm partially replying to the statement "Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?"

Nobody here is claiming everything in Egans books is literally true… but part of the fun is thinking about the possibility that it could be

Almost but not quite literally zero? It probably is zero, because he made mistakes, but maybe you could brush that off as a narrator error or something.

Like any book you have to bring an open mind, creativity, and some benefit of the doubt to enjoy it, or to learn anything of value… you seem to be coming from a perspective that would make that impossible.

His books for the most part explore intentionally unlikely but interesting possible implications of legitimate, yet mostly unproven modern math and physics research. Some of it even comes from his own research.

A case in point, I think some of the ideas in his books can help, e.g. a physics student realize where their assumptions about the nature of time and space may be cultural assumptions, not necessarily grounded in scientific evidence. Simply exploring alternate possibilities- even if untrue, is a powerful tool to break through other unfounded perspectives you never thought to question.

I was at one point on the path to become a mathematical physicist but lost interest and pivoted to something else. I do believe if I had found Egans books sooner, I would have been inspired to continue.

> Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct.

Amusingly, this is a major plot point in one of his novels.

It's a philosophic question. Some believe physics is mathematics. Roger Penrose believes the Mandelbrot set exists, because it's logically consistent and reproducible.

Huh? Like one of the Tegmark levels? Even then, a whole lot is not true anywhere near here.

Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.

I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.)

I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals.

I greatly enjoyed Zelazny's Amber series and have tried to get into some of his sci-fi, but failed. Perhaps it's time to give Lord of Light a third try.

Besides Amber, I found Jack of Shadows to be an accessible road into Zelazny.

I highly recommend the novella "home is the hangman"

Lord of Light is worth it if you can manage. I remember I bounced off a few times too.

It's rather hard to believe it's the same author as Amber sometimes, those books took me like 12 seconds to get hooked on, LoL is great it's just _quite_ different in feel.

I also recommend two of his shorter works: A Rose for Ecclesiastes and For a Breath I Tarry.

Egan is quite active on Mastodon. Toots about science and maths among other things and I gotta say, some of the math stuff he works on seems quite impressive (to me at least).

If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book.

https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html

Do you know any other hard sci-fi books like this? I loved the Delta-V series, and have been looking for hard sci-fi like it ever since.

the mars trilogy by kim Stanley Robison

Rich man's sky series, Wil McCarthy.

Delta-V is also described as a "Technothriller" - i.e. in the grey area between action thriller and sci-fi, where the tech is current and cutting-edge, or possibly an inch beyond. I liked the first book, will try the second some time soon.

I really enjoyed his Daemon novel, and I think it would appeal to the HN crowd. Interesting intersection of code and the real world, and it is set more-or-less in the current time.

Daemon is the first of a trilogy. The remaining two books are good, but not quite as good IMO.

It's strange to start a list of "books that you may never have heard of" with a novel which is a nominee to the 2020 Hugo Awards. I suppose that most of the regular readers of sci-fi haver heard of it.

A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.

If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".

Yeah, Project Hail Mary was the only one of the three I'd ever heard of. Still, it was a great book (especially since I read it right on the heels of reading Artemis, which was only "okay").

I heard there might be a movie adaptation of Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling.

oh wow, that could be cool! I love seeing more sci-fi come to the screen. I really liked The Expanse and wish they had kept that going...

Nah, that was just news coverage...You Inners really think it was just a show?

This is really a reddit moment but I can't resist, username truly checks out.

To add something to the conversation I am reading the expanse right now and I really like it. It's the mix of goofy and dark that gets me.

It's hard for me to picture Ryan Gosling in the role of Ryland Grace.

maybe he's the alien, then!

That I would be on board with.

It just completed filming, coming out in 2026.

I didn't read Project Hail Mary because I read Artemis. Maybe I'll have to check it out. :)

You should - it's significantly better.

I loved The Martian, actively disliked Artemis, and thought Project Hail Mary was all right. I liked it overall, but it never really clicked for me like The Martian did. Definitely worth a read, though! Most seem to have liked it more than I did.

I just finished Hail Mary this past week. Not as big a fan of it as most seem to be. I found the narrative style to get tedious about half way through the book. A few issues too with events late in the story. 7.5-8/10 by me, above average but not elite.

The Bobiverse series is one of my favorites, sense of humor meets Bob the von Neumann probe. Well written and plenty of theory explanations of technology. They even pull in Expeditionary Force's AI Skippy as a faction group, which is another good series if you like technical theory in detail explained mostly by the asshole AI.

Murderbot has become a must listen at bedtime, the self deprecating, funny and lovey dovey killing machine. He loves his solitude and media, and has an emotion from time to time.

I read murderbot a few years ago and fell in love with it. It's funny, short, has good characters and they develop overtime. The world building is interesting enough but not drowning out the narrative<3

GraphicAudio's adaptations of the Murderbot series are too good! I suggest anyone interested in the series to check that out.

Most definitely, Ray Porter's performances are a masterclass in first-person sci-fi adventure narration.

His Project Hail Mary audiobook is unparalleled.

I agree. The Bobiverse was really great. And Ray Porter’s narration was a perfect fit.

Bobiverse is fun to read but it’s just pulp nerd fantasy. Not exactly great literature that will stand the test of time.

One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.

Seconded. One of those books that gives you a crisp metaphor for something powerful you might not have noticed we all do, thereby letting you observe yourself do it and describe it to others. Best read tabula rasa.

Good book and one with a solid BBC adaption into a four part mini series (2018)

https://thetvdb.com/series/345091-show

It's remarkable that they decided to adopt it for TV, because it's one of those novels that's very hard to imagine to put onto a screen. The whole book felt, to me, like I'm in a dream.

Wow, must try to watch it. I remember reading The City & the City and thinking about how visually it would be... different clothes, overlapping murals?

I have zero idea how healthy these are .. but .. try https://ext.to/the-city-and-the-city-s9177/

Best bet looks like: https://ext.to/the-city-and-the-city-season-1-complete-720p-...

If you're in the UK you can watch d/load from the BBC hone site via iPlayer when they rotate available again (currently not on iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061bd5l

Embassytown, also by China Miéville, is traditional sci-fi and really good as well.

Weirdly, The City & the City reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith's books like Gorky Park set in the Soviet Union (or more recently post-Soviet countries) in that it is a police procedural set in a culture the reader presumably doesn't understand and so the reader is interested in learning how this society functions as much as they are interested in seeing the mystery solved. The difference of course is the societies in The City & the City are of course fictional.

What aspects of the culture in The City & the City stood out to you the most?

Mostly just the explanations of how the two cities could function as separate entities while physically occupying the same land through the use of legally mandated "useeing". The author goes into detail how this works -- obviously at one level people see the people, vehicles, etc. from the other city or they'd run into them, but on a conscious level they act as if they don't exist.

I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.

Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.

As someone who hated The City and The City to the point of never reading Mieville again, I appreciate the warning for Embassytown. I sometimes consider reading his stuff again but I was genuinely offended by the trick in City. Like... I paid money for this? No. It felt like contempt for his audience.

What in particular made you feel this way about The City and The City? Like what were you expecting prior to the reveal?

I hated PSS, and enjoyed Embassytown. I don't understand what's misleading about it.

What's the Embassytown mislead? I read that recently and felt it was pretty direct.

I hated it because it felt like a smug trick. Like, I know you ordered steak and paid for steak, but I'm serving you a salad because it's healthier for you, and if you complain it's just your lack of taste.

My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up

iirc all the books you mentioned have action throughout and most of Stephenson is the same

True. But the action seemed to drive forward a big picture message, the action was the means to deliver a message, until the end. Then it was just shooting and explosions without putting a bow on whatever philosophy had been introduced. That's the way I remember these books (and diamond age, snow crash, et al)

A book that was even made into a TV miniseries does not fit my definition of "you may never heard of".

tbf the BBC does a lot of mid tv miniseries. I don't feel many people will know this adaptation outside of fans of the book.

I too adore that one - when describing it to people I've found the term "headfuck police procedural" is the most fitting.

I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.

In some sense I think it does have quite a bit to do with (speculative) social science, especially once you see (spoilers) that there really is nothing supernatural going on at all.

C.J. Cherryh's 1981 novel Wave Without a Shore has something vaguely similar, where the human inhabitants of a planet refuse to notice the non-human natives sharing their cities.

No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight? That book changed all sorts of notions of first contact and consciousness for me. I'm still thinking about it to this day. Absolute must read for anyone concerned with such things

And evolutionary vampires!

I loved that about this book. For the first like 75% of the book you're thinking, "Okay, these vampires must just be a metaphor or a name they've given to something else." Nope, just actual vampires.

With a novel and not-implausible explanation for why crosses incapacitate them.

Yeah it's implausible. I mean, I don't think his genetics is right. So it's probably physically possible in some sense, but I don't it makes sense that it's that stable of a trait.

I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature so the trait didn't get selected out.

I watched the video and that's what the fictional presenter says. I don't think it really makes sense though, but maybe you can get passed that because the species coming into existence at all is so contrived and unlikely?

The vampires appeared to have less of a gene pool and more of a gene cleanroom. Knife edge stuff there.

>I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature

Which is weird, because they do.

My initial reaction to this was, only in approximation. But the cross would also only approximately be a right angle. So good point.

Lots of minerals break at right angles.

I remember reading this, and looking out my office window where the branches of neighboring tree (denuded of leaves because it was winter) made three or four near-perfect right angles in projection (along with intersections at other angles).

It used the Chinese Room better than Searle ever managed to do.

B. F. Skinner got there first.

> No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight?

It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.

>probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"

That's most of the ones being mentioned in this thread. I think maybe they are scifi books you haven't heard of...if you also don't normally read scifi.

You can read the whole thing on his website (that's where I stumbled upon it so many years ago):

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Likewise, this is one I'll never get out of my head. Fair warning to would-be readers: anticipate the rest of your day becoming unproductive.

Blindsight is great. Along with Project Hail Mary the best of the sci-fi I've read the past few years.

Greg Egan's Permutation City is #1 for me. It's not only a good read, it may be the most important work of late 20th century philosophy. (Among other things, it completely anticipated Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and totally obviates Bostrom's latest work.)

I am surprised there was no Egan book in the list. He's in the top 5 of hard sci fi authors you should definitely read

The list starts with Project Hail Mary, which is as far from Egan as I can imagine on the science fiction spectrum.

We've got 10 lists with him as well: https://shepherd.com/search/author/1445

You can see how they connected to him there too.

I think Egan is much better known than most (if not all) of the authors in the list. I've heard of Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, but not the particular books listed by them. Conversely I've heard about Permutation City quite often.

Many 'you should read these lists' are just that lists. Usually by the author of the list and things they have read and think you should too. That they missed something is not surprising. Lists like this have an air of authority when they usually boil down to 'things I have seen/read and like/hate'. I use them as interesting things to go thru to see if there is anything I missed.

Reading Egan's works elevated my standard for what constitutes a truly great novel: "If you don't change as a person after having it read it, it wasn't that great."

Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.

Wow, I also thought of the work as deeply philosophical. I also read a bunch of other philosophy, and found that Egan's hypothesis overlaps significantly with both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist concept of soul (pali: puggala). Did anybody else think the same?

That's a great pick! Permutation City is definitely a thought-provoking read. Egan's exploration of consciousness and reality challenges so many assumptions we take for granted.

What's the Bostrom work it obviates? I'd be kind of surprised if he never read the Egan -- it was part of the background to extropian culture back then.

"Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World"

A book about what to do with life in the face of boundless possibilities, and when just about everything important has been figured out. I recall that this was a significant plot point in Permutation City -- and Egan answered the question more elegantly than Bostrom did.

Thanks. Could be, I haven't read that one.

I'm also interested in that remark about Bostrom. What is the relation?

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4711854-the-machine-stop...

35 page short story and eerily reminiscent of today's world.

It was written in 1909.

I keep on meaning to get around to a E. M. Forster Short Fiction compilation for Standard Ebooks. Maybe this will tip me over the edge.

Forester’s longer fiction is well worth it too. It’s been years since I read Howard’s End and Leonard Bast still haunts me.

We’ve already got several of his longer works,[1] but none of his shorter pieces, so I’ve started work on producing a public domain compilation. Hopefully will be up in a couple of weeks; all in it comes in at under 70k words.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

I recommend The Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher. As a kid I read The White Mountains blind and the story unfolded in a fantastic way for me. It is YA sci-fi and a lot of the themes are well-trodden at this point, but the story is strong and clear, kind of a coming-of-age-amongst-aliens.

I read the Tripod Trilogy to my little brother and we both loved the story. It's one of my favorites to this day. Going further back, I also liked Wells's "The First Men in the Moon".

There was a TV series back in the 80s which I really enjoyed - I actually checked out the books from the local library after having seen the show at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods_(TV_series)

The audiobook is excellent.

Roadside picnic is a favourite of mine. I’m currently learning Russian to reread it in the original Russian. But the translation is very good and done by the authors themselves.

I didn't know they've translated the book themselves! I often feel like translations done by other people are missing something fundamental of the spirit of the original. I'm wondering if there is a list of books "translated into language X by the author" somewhere.

The same thing occured to me a while back. There is this wikipedia page about it but I didn't get much further than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-translation

The problem is that translation isn't just about "capturing the spirit of the original" but realizing where to keep idioms and like from the original and where things need to be changed to make the translation less clunky. This isn't something just anyone can do. That's why people like Umberto Eco, who was more or less fluent in English, still preferred professional translators like William Weaver to translate his Italian books into English.

It's really one of the most haunting books I've ever read. "Hard to be a God" is also very poignant.

The Dead Mountaineer's Inn is also good. A classic whodunnit with a twist.

I found it not as good, and somewhat predictable. Its quirky humour didn't work on me, that's probably why I didn't like it as much.

Fair enough! It was my intro to the Strugatsky brothers and I was hooked.

On the other hand it's not as soul crushing as the other two mentioned :)

It inspired Darker than Black which is quite good though not a book.

If you're learning to read it, I recommend listening as well. A quick Kagi search turned up a fantastic production read by Левашёв В. (1).

I can't go without mentioning my favorite reader in Russian. Listening to Peter Markin read is unforgettable; his performance of Stanislav's "The Invincible" brought the massive machinery and energies to life before my eyes (2); Markin also read Hyperion by Dan Simmons and Frank Herbert's Dune (3).

1: https://youtu.be/IAD-ANTvs9Y

2: https://youtu.be/Ad32oH6Cg4Q

3: I've nearly memorized Dune in Russian because I love his narration so much. He also read The Lord of the Rings - as close as we'll get to a Russian Rob Englis, I expect.

I'm trying to find a legal copy of the original Russian book, but still could not find. Where did you get yours?

That and the original Russian copies of the Metro series..

https://www.litres.ru/, but i'm not sure that you can pay with visa/mastercard there now.

I'm not interested in learning Russian at all, but if I ever was, I'd want to read Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a rare gem that I've come across lately, very unique, paces well and I couldn't put it down - https://www.goodreads.com/series/309211-dungeon-crawler-carl

The audiobook is also really well narrated.

You may also enjoy the Expeditionary Force series. Totally different story, but it has a similar vibe.

I was so skeptical when my recommended the series. It sounds so juvenile and low brow but is actually SO GOOD. Both funny and genuinely well written and structured. Love that it's doing as well as it is

You may also like Will Wight's Cradle series. It's an american style of Xianxia/Cultivation novels but very good. The audiobooks are also highly praised.

I love this genre, and there is such a plethora of interesting reads. I think one of the most interesting, in terms of presenting technology's role in varied societies, is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Great read if you are bored of the classic space opera.

> A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

It's a great book, but everyone has heard of it already.

I was talking to a fairly avid scifi reader who hadn't heard of the book before.

It's always someone's day to be one of 10,000.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I really like that, but I definitely thought A Deepness in the Sky was even better despite probably being considered "classic space opera".

And the prequel A Deepness in the Sky is even better with very alien aliens (and a neat way of hiding that alien-ness from readers) and some very nasty antagonists with truly terrifying technology in the form of "focus".

Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.

Vinge is one of my favorite authors, but the rape-y torture-y subplot of Deepness was difficult to endure.

Huh, I think that features one of the protagonists from Fast Times at Fairmont High. Set in the early singularity age.

The Wandering Inn [1], Stories of an alternate world somehow connected to a certain innkeeper of the said inn.

Features extensive world building, character building, Lots of fleshed out characters, contains humour as well as serious stuff, has dragons, fae, aliens, time travel, hiveminds, automatons, cute pets, cosmic horrors, history lessons, magic, alchemy and steampunk engineering.

It's a bit longish and not finished yet, 2/3 done as of this year.

[1]: https://wanderinginn.com/

I love the Wandering Inn but calling it “a bit longish” is quite an understatement.

Ok it's a bit longer, only a little bit.

See for yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/WanderingInn/comments/wil9pi/word_c...

OT, but I'm legitimately surprised that WoT is longer than the saga of recluse.

I'm also a very mildly annoyed that they included several era-spanning series on the list, but limited Dragonlance to the chronicles trillogy, despite that including followups by the original authors (Legends, Second generations).

I'm only on the second volume, but so far I wouldn't call it Sci-Fi; it's pretty much straight-up fantasy (specifically a portal-fantasy with string LitRPG elements) so far.

I suppose there could be a "It's all a VR game" or "It's alien mind control" twist that I haven't gotten to yet.

I learned about TWI and pirate aba some months ago, and binge-read the whole series non-stop.

The SF Masterworks series is a good source of forgotten classics in amongst the many super popular picks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks

Was about to say so many of these "you've never heard of" lists are books within the past decade but there are just so many older ones. Asimov alone wrote many book outside of the robot and foundation series.

One that only the older set may know is Cities in Flight by James Blish (technically a trilogy but primarily sold as the single combined novel).

Here are some which, though perhaps not the best, haunt my memory through unique nostalgia.

Glory Season, David Brin. Ok, this is one of the best. A heartrending saga of epic scale.

Carve the Sky, Alexander Jablokov. Scifi feudalism.

All of an Instant, Richard Garfinkle.

Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. Though very different, it somehow reminds me of Roadside Picnic.

Spin, Robert Charles Wilson.

Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling.

Interstellar Pig, William Sleator.

The Carpet Makers, Andreas Eschbach

The Threshold series (Peter Clines) doesn't really belong in this list, but it is excellent and from what I gather, commonly overlooked by fans of Lovecraft.

I'd also throw in The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russel, if it wasn't so well known already.

In a different vein, if you seek good-old action-packed, kick-ass never-ending fun, pick anything by Larry Correia. Even if it appears fantasy, it might turn out to be scifi...

Interstellar Pig, was an unexpected addition there. I remembered that book immediately from hearing the title!

(On that note I remember a book I read at a similar time, some kids took off in a hollow asteroid, for reasons, and there was a home-made aiming system for their weapon(s) which involved using a cat. I've no idea what it was called or who wrote it. But I guess similar young-adult fiction.)

> and there was a home-made aiming system for their weapon(s) which involved using a cat

Truth is, of course, sometimes stranger than fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

>Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

That's far from their best novel, but unfortunately most aren't translated into English - there're Polish and sometimes Deutsch translations only :(

>That's far from their best novel, but unfortunately most aren't translated into English

It's so good, if their others are better it's insane that they haven't been translated yet.

hi all, founder of Shepherd here :)

If you want to share your 3 fav reads of the year, you can do that here -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads

You get a cool page like this -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb

Plus, it goes into our "best books of 2024" voting -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024

I am slowly getting more into place on this website, I have been working on it for 3.5 years now.

> You get a cool page like this -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb

How do I get to my page? The profile section is very spartan. I'm not even sure whether my profile picture was submitted.

Yep go here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads

To submit your 3 favorites, and then we will email you once the page is ready.

Ya sorry, brand new and working on the profile to improve it and the image bit.

Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you need any help.

> then we will email you once the page is ready.

Ah, I completely missed this part. Long day.

> Ya sorry, brand new and working on the profile to improve it and the image bit.

Don't worry, so far I like the site quite a bit, especially since there is much more about ancient mesopotamia than I had thought!

Sweet thanks!

I am going to work a ton this winter to improve topic/genre accuracy, as I think we have more on Mesopotamia but the system is struggling to tag it correctly. We are using an older NLP/ML system that isn't working as well as newer ones. Update coming soon.

Great to hear. Also, a very interesting topic for me since this is close to my masters degree and current job. For a niche topic like ancient mesopotamia I was surprised. Is there a blog post or something about how the site works behind the scenes?

Very cool! What is your job?

I blog every 2 to 3 weeks here about building it: https://build.shepherd.com/

But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well)

Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-updated-topic... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-topic-pages-n... https://build.shepherd.com/p/sneak-peek-at-genre-and-age-gro...

It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.

Currently, I'm working as a Data Scientist on document retrieval/text matching, and I have a masters degree in a topic close to computer science and linguistics.

> Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane?

Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (invitation based).

> It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.

A solid choice, I think.

Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?

Nice!

That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.

> Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?

When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them. We created every book recommended in our system manually, as we needed to find high-quality cover images, and it was an easy way to start.

Eventually, we licensed data from the Nielsen API. It has not been a great experience, but it works "ok." I also looked at Ingram and Bokwer. Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.

I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features. I am going to look at Open Library again then, as it might work better for that limited functionality. I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)

> That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.

Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start with. I have no idea how much bureaucracy it takes to be able to take 5% of each transaction or so, so I'll probably leave mine completely free - if I ever get the time to implement it, that is.

> When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them.

> Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.

Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad data.

> I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features.

Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?

> I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)

Maybe, maybe not. It takes huge effort to go back and improve a system relying on bad data, especially if it's already a certain size. I know from experience, as my company just did that with a large internal catalogue. Not fun.

I chatted with someone who had a platform like this in the past, and they said it worked really well. They ended up shutting it down when a server lost data or something weird. They also made a fair amount of money from links to buy the book new if there were no used copies available to "order."

>Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest >into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad > data.

Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.

>Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?

Not a good one: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap

I promise I will update it this weekend. I am trying to find a better embed than this text list (behind the scenes, we have a much better system).

Basically, it is:

Roll out a better ad system for our Founding Author Members (as they are heavily funding the website).

Roll out book series pages (and test a notification system for users there)

Ship a massive update to our bookshelf collections of genres, age groups, and topics. This will visually navigate and break down the most loved books of all time, trending, new, and some other cool stuff.

Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.

Big improvement to book section UX.

Building a DB of all books to power features needing that going forward (going to try to see if I can use Open Library).

Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.

It is a rough list; still testing and thinking on a lot of these.

And waiting for a lot of data to come back on our personalized email list -> https://shepherd.com/my-book-dna

As I am trying to really do something cool with email and waiting to make sure engagement looks good with 1,000 subscribers before I start evolving and improving it.

Good point, I forgot about affiliate links.

> Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.

I think, UX wise I'd be in a similar position to you, since 1.) I'd need a short description of the book as well, and 2.) definitely in german, too. So, I'd probably have to create a lot of data myself.

> Not a good one: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap

> Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.

I think, that's a good focus. Good quality structured data is quite good to have.

> Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.

I'd definitely use this. Are you planning on adding a lot more interactivity/"blogging" features on the reader side?

It'll be interesting to see the development in the next year, big plans! I'll definitely keep an eye on the site.

Ah ya, I don't know about German, maybe there is a free source in Germany?

>I'd definitely use this. Are you planning on adding a lot more >interactivity/"blogging" features on the reader side?

Yep working that way in 2025 :)

Let me throw my hat in the ring. I'd recommend Grass by Sheri S Tepper. It felt fresh and original in a way few science fiction books are, the characters are really well done and it just stays with you. Despite being the first book of a trilogy, it works well on its own.

Yes!!! I would also recommend anything by Zenna Henderson.

Now there's a name I hear very rarely...

The best start is Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, especially suitable for a moody teen girl...

(And I wish I could know the story of the Bells of Couvron!)

I want to do book recommendations from the other direction. I need to know which books to avoid based on the books people like.

For example, if I hated The Three Body Problem and you loved it, then I'm probably going to hate the other books you love.

True. I hated the three body problem in fact but I loved the expanse (yes both franchises I know from TV). But I read all the expanse books. I gave up on the three body problem halfway the second book, I just found the story too boring and hardball.

Not saying the books are bad but preferences differ indeed.

That's a poor way to find good books?

I liked 3BP, and I also liked Permutation City and Cryptonomicon. Yet I met a lot of people who didn't like 3BP, but liked the latter ones.

Hah, and I liked 3BP but didn't care much for Egan's books (excellent ideas, poor writing IMO).

Just because someone liked a book you hate, doesn't mean you will hate the other books they like.

I hated "Sea of Tranquility". I can't stand stupid characters.

"Furtuna" was so bad I made a note to avoid any other books by Kristyn Merbeth. The main character is stupid, selfish, and short sighted to the detriment of everyone around her.

>Just because someone liked a book you hate, doesn't mean you will hate the other books they like.

So much this, and it's why recommendation engines mostly don't work well, they really have no way to quantify why you liked or disliked something.

I think it depends on why someone disliked a book.

I liked the first novel in the Three Body Problem series, but mostly because it exposed me to a culture I wasn't really familiar with; there was a lot about China I didn't know, and it was interesting to read about characters who lived and breathed that history.

But the rest of the novel, and the sequels, mostly to me felt like re-treading ground that I'd already walked in other novels, which did a better job of exploring those ideas.

(To be more specific, because I'm sure folks will ask - I think Stephen Baxter does a better job of building interesting, mostly-consistent-to-my-eye universe-wide physics puzzles, although nearly all of his books are depressing as hell. The closest thing to a happy ending in most of his novels is "it's not a complete genocide!")

Ya I am working on this :)

Our new Book DNA review format has you pick why you disliked/loved/liked a book and I am going to use that data to help build a profile of similar types of readers.

You can try it here by sharing your 3 fav books of 2024 -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads

Next year I will roll it out for all books as we get more in place.

More modern / post cyberpunk maybe but would add Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan. I really liked the premise and the organic feel vs a lot of other science fiction.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374175412/infinitedetail

The Bobiverse Series by Dennis Taylor.

These books aren't anything that will change your life, but they're well written and a lot of fun.

This is one of my all-time favorite series. I laugh so much reading them, and the later books go heavy into really interesting alien species. Authors love them as well: https://shepherd.com/search/book/38814

Have you read any Peter Hamilton? He is another fav of mine.

I have not read Peter Hamilton, but always looking for new good books. Thanks for the recommendation!

I'd start with Pandora's Star, they are HUGE in scope, so its a big book but worth it IMO.

I'd start with the Night's Dawn trilogy, I've read most PFH except for his last few and those are my ATFs.

Night's Dawn was the first Hamilton I read...and I've read it once or twice since.

I've found the Mandel Trilogy to be entertaining, too. Could be thought of as some world-building for the much later ND? But not as epic. Just three normal paperbacks.

I listened to this series as an audiobook and I enjoyed it a lot. I prefer reading to listening but this one worked really well and has a great narrator. It's a good series too, simple fun with decent jokes and a well paced plot.

Seconded, Ray Porter is just too good of a narrator and whatever he does almost always tends to be entertaining.

I wonder how much "well written" is a matter of taste (I thought it wasn't that much). I found "We Are Legion" very poorly written although I loved the premise and really wanted to read it but couldn't go any further then maybe a quarter of it. It also happened to me with Murakami's Kafka On The Shore but I blame that on the translation or some cultural impedance mismatch.

"Too Like the Lightning" by Ada Palmer. (First of four books called the "Terra Ignota" series.)

It's one of the handful of books that genuinely changed my mind about serious questions -- in my case, relating to gender, politics, & religion. But it's definitely not coming from anywhere you'd expect.

I compare it loosely to Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed". The author paints a picture of a utopia, and gradually we see deep human flaws tear it apart. It starts off with investigation of a puzzling criminal tresspass, which slowly spirals upward into greater and greater consequences -- and it intensely rewards careful reading, or a second reading, as major reveals are subtly foreshadowed early and often.

Just because they're both books that are hard to stumble upon and are a bit out of the usual recommendations, and yet everyone I have recommended them to have /deeply/ enjoyed them:

"Constellation Games" by Leonard Richardson (also known for the Beautiful Soup Python library!) https://constellation.crummy.com/

"Happy Snak" by Nicole Kimberling https://www.nicolekimberling.com/happy-snak

After I finished the two Frank Kittridge novels from S.J. Morden I was surprised I haven't heard of him until now.

They start as a "The Martian" cribbed story, but the development arc takes in better places. It was less geek/efficiency porn and more character development and required less strain on my suspension of disbelief overall.

I read the petrovich stories (metrozone) and although fun, I recall my suspension of disbelief had to be turned all the way up. :)

Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy by Robert Thurston: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/488118.The_Legend_of_the...

Legend of Zero quadrilogy by Sara King: https://www.goodreads.com/series/103017-the-legend-of-zero

An old but excellent book (written in the 1920s in Soviet Russia) is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I also like Solaris though I suppose everyone has heard of that one.

Re-reading Stanislaw Lem (i.e. The Cyberiad) in the era of LLMs has been a joy for me.

I‘ll chime in and recommend The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Not really hard sci fi, but very entertaining and fun to read!

I read Solaris years ago and was unimpressed. The philosophy and science’ish elements were poorly described and it felt like a lit-fic attempt at trippy SF by someone ignorant of the genre.

Then, a year or two ago, I read about how bad the early translations were, so I picked up a new English translation. Wow, what a difference. Now it’s one of my favorites.

Do you recall the name of the good translator?

I'd throw in The Saga of Exiles by Julian May. Excellent exploration of psi power, set in Pliocene Europe (by way of time travel). Sounds mad, but May both grounds her characters and casts them archetypes, and it's fantastically dramatic.

One of the first books I read where the cumulative trauma and psychologies of the main characters inform their actions.

Actually I made a website that’s mostly sci-fi books I’ve read

https://mnky9800n.github.io/booklist/

It uses a google spreadsheet as a database so you just need to update the spreadsheet and it adds a book to the website.

I have a life goal to read every thing written by Phillip k dick as well as every book on David Pringle’s 100 best sci-fi list. Some of the books are hard to find though. Like I’ve been searching for years for the peoples republic of Antarctica.

I would suggest the following novels if you haven’t read them yet

Gene wolfe shadow of the torturer series aka book of the new sun

A scanner darkly by pkd, this, imo, is his best book even though all his books are compelling. But I think also, yes we can build him, its amazing because it really shows off pkd ability to come up with a wild premise but that’s simply the universe the characters live in and they don’t really care about that premise they have other problems.

Herovits world by malzburg, this book is hilarious and about how you must be a terrible narcissist to believe someone should read your fiction especially science fiction

The Brian Daley series about Han Solo, these are super interesting because they were written in 1979 so before empire strikes back came out. So Daley basically only had Star Wars to go on to create a whole trilogy of novels starring Han Solo. I think these are probably my favourite Star Wars novels because they have such little constraints.

Nice, I like the photos, classic covers are so beautiful :)

Added the Brian Daley series about Solo to my list, I'd never heard of those!

I should reread them. They are so much fun. I’m the only person I know who has ever read them. Although that’s not saying much I suppose haha.

One of my hopes for the website is I could help books that are lesser known get noticed and "pop." Working on getting more to help in that capacity as there are so many good books that don't get enough notice. Aiming to come out with some features this Winter to help around that.

Are you asking for help because I will help you. I love to read sci-fi novels as well as discuss them.

I'd love to talk! Do you know Python/Django :)

My email is ben@shepherd.com and I'd love to chat!

Sent you an email!

Sweet, responding shortly!

Though I wouldn’t say A Scanner Darkly is my favorite PKD novel, I’d have a harder time arguing it isn’t his best. I can see it; it was just too heavy for me to actually enjoy all that much.

Ubik is probably my favorite, or (to be cliche) Androids.

PKD says more in single paragraphs than many authors manage to say in entire books.

The most unusual book I read this year is Radiance by Catherynne Valente.

It's set in an Art-Deco "future" of our fully habitable Solar system (jungles and oceans on Venus, flowering fields on Pluto, etc), that started to be colonized in the 1860s. Of course, it is a play on early science fiction tropes, but somehow, it all fits together.

Amusingly, I have made three tries to read that book, and kept giving up (getting a little further each time). Partly it was the peculiar sense of aesthetics (e.g., the idea that of course audience would reject color movies) and partly it was the Looney Tunes solar system, which turned out to be something I could accept in a Daffy Duck cartoon but not in a novel.

(But then I'm an astronomer, so I'm primed to get annoyed by random mistakes and carelessness that other people wouldn't notice or care about. I mean, I could kind of momentarily accept the silliness of a habitable solid surface for Uranus, but when you describe the Sun as fainter than Jupiter seen from that location... and then we're told that wheat can't tolerate cold climates the way rice can, and I realize the botany is just as nonsensical as the astronomy...)

I've read most of one of her short-story collections and really liked it, so it's not a generic problem with her writing.

The problem with Project Hail Mary is that the audio book is good but the book is not. First read the book and then listen to the audio book and you know what I mean.

That's interesting. I found Project Hail Mary to be once of the most disappointing second novels ever written and am surprised at its reception. Is the audiobook meaningfully different?

Yeah I also didn't like the book at all, it read like a cash grab. However, just listen to a sample of the audio book, it's just hilarious how much effort Ray put into making the characters become alive. Certain significantly improving the lack of writing, of course it can't fix the writing.

Please be kind; being an author is an incredibly hard career, and people do it for the love of creating and sharing a story. It is not a cash grab, and if you don't like his writing style, just don't read his books. Books are deeply personal and no reason to make a personal attack because it isn't a match for your desired book style.

The great thing about opinions, as youve pointed out with books, is that you can disregard them. Personally, I agree that PHM was not particularly good compared with The Martian, but to each their own.

I thought PHM was a fairly well crafted nerdy action book, like a classic B-movie catered to a more educated audience. It's good at tuning itself to its target audience and maintaining interest with pacing and interesting, fun ideas.

What's frustrating is the number of people that list it as the best sci-fi of the last decade and try to elevate it as doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't really understand where that's coming from.

I liked it, he has his own style, and I love the "productivity porn" vibe of it. Sometimes I need that in this wild world.

For pedantry's sake, "Project Hail Mary" is not Weir's second novel. I think "Artemis" followed after The Martian. It's a story set on the Moon with a strong female character, but I can't remember much else about it. :D

I am curious, is the audio book abridged and the book far too long? Or what else could it be?

In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.

Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.

I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.

Audiobooks can do a lot to give _character_ to characters that are otherwise quite flat.

I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.

If you didn't like the 'painful detail' in The Martian, you will positively hate Project Hail Mary. Much more of the 'painful detail' as you call it with much less interesting characters. If you loved The Martian (like I did) and enjoy lots of random science-ish tangents and pseudo-engineering problem solving, you'll find stuff to like in this book. But it is a too long, worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist.

Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.

>worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist

That is actually impressive if true. Watney was by far the worst thing about the book.

Weir doesn’t write characters, or dialog to speak of, but he writes decent prose and well thought out engineering puzzles. I enjoy his books for the imaginative exercise.

>the audio book is good but the book is not

I don't know how that can possibly make sense.

It's difficult to explain without spoilers... one of the characters feels significantly more fleshed out and real because of some artistic choices in the voice acting.

I am not sure I'd go as far as GP and say that the book is not good, but this is one of the cases where the audiobook feels more like a "production" and not just a book in a different medium.

I found the audiobook to be a superior experience to reading the book as well. It think PHM is an excellent primer on that type of SF for someone who hasn’t read something like it before. My daughter, who never reads hard SF, loved the audiobook.

I once commented on Twitter that the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry was better than the book. Neil Gaiman responded, “I agree”.

The performance can make a big difference. There are books I like more as audiobooks and books I like more as visual books.

I read PHM and didn’t love it; my friends who listened to it all loved it. Maybe I should give it a try.

Not a "book", but a short story: The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.

I read that story when I was pretty young, and it's shaped my opinion on cold, uncaring bureaucracies in a way that I'm not sure anything else could.

Looks like it's available for free here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equation...

These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.)

If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).

> the alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother

You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth.

Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.

But Black Mirror is about us whereas the frustrating thing with depictions of aliens is that they're not us, that's their defining feature.

Stories about aliens aren't meant to describe aliens as theoretically correct as possible. Obviously.

Aliens are hardly ever more than a tool to get a perspective. To look at humans, societies, structures etc. They are also stories _about us_.

In a story like "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" sure, the purpose of the aliens (Martians in that case) is purely to tell us about us.

But you don't really need aliens for that, there are several Black Mirror stories which do roughly the same perspective trick, particularly "Men Against Fire". Aliens offer an opportunity to explore something quite different and it's always disappointing to see them used as something less interesting.

It's like FTL. FTL is actually exactly equivalent to time travel, and so it's disappointing, though commonplace to see SF which decides to do FTL but no time travel (or indeed vice versa though that's less common)..

I like Culture novels just fine, I like Greg Egan's Amalgam setting (with aliens who are basically just us again, although a bit less obviously so than a Star Trek alien) just fine, but, in both cases I'm a little disappointed. If your aliens aren't even as weird as the Octopus is (and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with an Octopus) then you're not really trying are you?

Beware, you'll also get Vampires in space, which is so silly, it kills the book.

They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far).

That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use!

Spoilers:

It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.

They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....

disagree, the vampires are mostly abstracted away with hand wavy "we couldn't possibly understand how they think", interesting concept, the aliens are more interesting though, and echopraxia was a bit of a dud.

I found suspension of disbelief very easy, just like most SF.

That was so good it convinced me that one correct way to make a good sci fi novel is to construct a world and then add one insane thing and make it fit.

FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his.

[edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.

I read both of those. Peter Watts is a bit of an acquired taste. Not for everyone. I actually enjoyed it but it's a weird one. Genetically modified people that are effectively vampires, a main protagonist with severe brain damage, etc. There's a sequel to this too if you enjoy this.

The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.

Peter Watts really explores the concept of alien intelligence in a way that challenges our perceptions

Thanks! I really like it when authors shock my neurons with ideas they never even came close to entertain.

Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet.

Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?

Diaspora by Greg Egan.

I vaguely remember The Gods Themselves by Asimov being a strong contender here, but it's been decades since I read it.

Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's.

Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.

The middle third of The Gods Themselves is so weird and different I thought it was a book printing error at first and I had to re-read some of it about six times to make it stick.

Check out Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

We’re going on an adventure!

The Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are pretty good example. (The aliens in A Deepness in the Sky are physically alien, but psychologically pretty close to humans.)

I've read the latest Weir book (Project Hail Mary) and the two prominent Watts books (Blindsight and Echopraxia) recently and they were all memorable but frustrating.

Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time.

Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements.

Watts Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...

Watts also gave a real-sounding lecture on vampirism, which is enjoyable if you liked that in his books: https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at

I also found Echopraxia extremely confusing and had to read that AMA to figure out what the hell I just read.

I loved both of those books and their depictions of 'alien', each for their own reasons.

Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...

Blindsight was the only sci Fi book I ever read that had citations used non-ironically.

It would be a stretch to call Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius science fiction, but like many of Borge's works is packed with references and footnotes.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is the most alien alien i have ever read. I read the old translation, but there is a new one now (2011 by Bill Johnston ) direct from polish rather than via french first

Golem XIV also gets at the fact that an artificial intelligence needn't be anything like us either. The titular Golem is capable of communicating with us but finds the experience very frustrating because we're so very stupid, while the perhaps even more intelligent Honest Annie doesn't communicate with humans and is postulated to treat them the same way we treat flies, a nuisance deserving no great thought.

If you're able to look past the "hard-sci-fi" vampires. I know I wasn't.

The depiction of the alien is something I really liked about that book - the concept of having to cooperate with an alien species rather than with being subjugated or subjugating, was refreshingly new (for me).

If you liked that, may I suggest the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, or, really, almost anything else by her. But especially the Foreigner series.

The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley is a really great, and different read. Totally different world than a lot of sci-fi.

It was a difficult book for me, but it was worth powering my way through it.

Credit for not assuming to know the reader by saying something like "Sci-fi books that you've never heard of!". I now routinely block youtube channels that do such things.

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith Hospital Station by James White

More recent read, you may have heard of it since it won an award - In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Shipwreck by Charles Logan.

Magnificent hard sci fi about an astronaut crashed on a distant world after their colony ship suffers a catastrophic accident as it reaches a distant star system.

https://www.amazon.com/Shipwreck-Panther-science-fiction-Cha...

You will never feel more bleak and alone.

The Nexus Trilogy is extremely entertaining fast paced sci fi you can't put down with very interesting ideas on upgrading humans.

I really like the shepherd.com way of curating the recommendation. Browsing trough books and picking something to read has become much easier this way.

One scifi book that was very impactful to me is the black cloud by Fred Hoyle. It's such a well thought out story and has held up remarkably well for a 50 year old novel.

Thanks so much, that is super motivating for me :)

I am working to really improve genre and topic accuracy this winter. Right now it is a mess. The data we pull in from publishers is so messy. They don't know how to use the BISAC classification system and they often mislabel sci-fi (among others). I have a big upgrade coming to improve both our systems (we use NLP/ML on the topic side).

Any recommendations for books with good made up technology/programming/cyberspace? I love alternate versions of the internet and ways to navigate it. I love hearing completely original but coherent technical babble with 0 connection to it's real world counterpart.

programming: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin is about game development.

I’m assuming you like this idea from having read Snow Crash, but if not that’s exactly what you’re looking for

But recommending Neal Stephenson on HN feels a bit like telling people to try Dennys as a restaurant recommendation… it seems everyone on here has read him before

Not zero connection, it sort of starts from when the stories were written about 20 years ago, but Accelerando maybe?

A good sci-fi book is Birds of Paradise by Rudolf Kremers, who was one of the developers for the PS3 game Eufloria back in the day:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8XVRQBC

The Stars are Legion and Alien Clay are the two best sci-fi books I've read in the last year and I don't think they've shown up on any lists, although the latter is another first contact book by the author of Children of Time which has gotten a lot of acclaim (although I didn't care for it).

FWIW Beacon 23 has an adaptation on Apple TV+ and Project Hail Mary has a film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling that's already finished shooting, so I don't know how long they'll stay in the category of "you may never have heard of"

For me:

- His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem

- Permutation City (and the whole trilogy) by Greg Egan

- Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Late to the list party but, "The First 15 lives of Harry August", by Claire North.

It's a wonderful exploration of reliving your life over and over and over again, but also finding out that there is a small number of others who do the same and communicate with each other across the centuries of past and future. She forms her character dialogue well too, which is always good.

Nunquam by Lawrence Durrell. Not generally heard of because you have to read Tunc first which is not science fiction. Both are great and stylistic masterpieces. Numquam is my favorite robot book along with Caves of Steel.

Red Rising is a pretty great one, I would have added it to my list.

Red Rising is often recommended in lists such as this, and that is how I discovered it too. Worth noting though that the 3/4 of the first book is Hunger Games on Mars, with barely any significance to the plot started in the first part of the book.

I'm surprised Greg Bear never came up here. I started with Blood Music, but I've enjoyed many of his books.

Samuel Delaney - Nova, Babel-17

Clifford Simak - City

Alan E Nourse - The Universe Between

I'd suggest The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

It's good stuff. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did.

Just finished a very good audiobook, Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini and started another, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by the same author.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is my favorite of the last few years.

I thought Fractal Noise was meh by comparison

I started with Fractal Noise, which was fairly short, it imparted a hunger to know more about that universe. Also, the audiobook, given the subject matter, was presented in an awesome manner IMO.

Hugh Howey is a tremendously talented author.

I didn't love Beacon 23, but his Wool series (apparently now a TV series, which I haven't watched yet) is very, very good. Sand is another great novel. Both feature humanity surviving in incredibly hostile environments, doomed to them by their predecessors.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence - Jack Womack. See https://reactormag.com/randomacts/ for a great review by Jo Walton (also a great scifi author who deserves more attention).

Then there are all of the sci-fi books you have -not- heard of, and that's a good thing.

Anyway, there are a few missing in this list. Today, I'll pimp for Farmer's Riverworld series. The first got a Hugo Award, and that's a list worth mining.

> Ever since reading Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), I’ve been fascinated by science fiction stories with amazing characters and intriguing concepts.

Did an LLM write this? "Amazing characters" and "intriguing concepts"? This sentence says nothing.

It's a stealth ad for the author's book. If you think the advertising copy was written by an llm, I'm pretty sure that says you won't like his book :-)

It's a way for new or unknown authors to authentically connect with readers by sharing five books they love on a topic, theme, or mood they are passionate about or experts in. Readers get fantastic personalized picks by super readers, and authors get to bump into some readers who might be more interested in them and their books.

Authors face an immense battle to get noticed, and unless something is done, we will only have big brand-name authors who can afford to write full-time. The internet has really consolidated books into a winner-takes-all market, and I want to do what I can to help widen that so new authors have a chance.

If you are curious, here are my goals for readers: https://build.shepherd.com/p/what-is-shepherds-mission-for-r...

Here are my goals for authors: https://support.shepherd.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406508361617...

And here is why I am building Shepherd for myself and others: https://build.shepherd.com/p/why-am-i-building-shepherd-ie-w...

Hope that helps; happy to answer questions :)

I respect and appreciate what you're doing here, my flippant remark was critical of the author's writing style, not of your app or its structure.

Gotcha, and no worries :)

I work with authors daily and know how hard they work to create a story for us. Most will never earn back the time they put into creating that book. Some books and writing are not a match for what we personally like. I just hope we can say, "It wasn't a match for what I like," rather than accusing an author of using an LLM. I loose my cool sometimes as well, and trying to remind myself to stick to this code (as I know I create plenty of bad writing that I inflict on readers of my blogs).

Gosh, no, we have a strict anti-AI policy, and every author we work with agrees to an honor statement that they will always write everything themselves.

I've caught a few dishonest authors, and they get banned from the website forever.

Is Beacon 23 the book better than the show? I thought I was a general fan of sci-fi, but I realized that I was generally bored all through the first season and had begun hate watching it in season 2 before I stopped all together.

Project Hail Mary is soon to be a movie...

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12042730/

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

This guy figured out the meaning of life back in 1937.

Can't really take the recommendation for Beacon 23 seriously after seeing the 1/2 half of the first tv episode. That was utter crap and nonsensical. :(

I didn't know there was a tv series for this one. I read the book ages ago; pretty OK. I wouldn't judge it by any failed attempt to put it out on TV.

The same author also wrote the silo series. He tends to push his books out in small portions but it's effectively a trilogy. The series on Apple TV for that is actually pretty good. I reread the books after completing season 1 a few months ago.

Thanks. Tried to get into the series too, but end up just reading the summary of things and the whole series just sounds depressing. :(

It is. One of the sequels was one of the times that a scene in a book actually made me cry.

If you don't like depressing novels, also stay away from Stephen Baxter; I love his novels, but most of them are wildly depressing.

> Stephen Baxter

Oh. I don't remember those being depressing though it's been years since I read any.

Which ones do you remember being that way?

Nearly all of the ones featuring Reid Malenfant are a bummer; in many of the Xeelee sequence stories, the future of humanity is only marginally better than living in the Warhammer40k universe, and the "happy ending" ones are ones in which humanity is merely mostly extinct.

Ya TV adaptations can fail for so many reasons that a book succeeds at. I've read so many books that when translated to a visual medium fail because of the people involved, see Wheel of Time as that one was so bad...

Eric Nylund: Signal to Noise, A Signal Shattered

I remember reading and liking his books, but ... did they not make it to ebooks?

I emailed the author, trying to encourage him to write a third book, and make it a trilogy. As enthusiastic as I was, I couldn't convince him. At the time, I think he was busy writing Halo books and a YA series. I did ask him why there weren't ebook versions of the Signal duo, he said it was a rights issue.

I find it disappointing how A.E. van Vogt has been almost completely forgotten. And to a lesser extent, Poul Anderson.

Another set is CS Lewis' Space Trilogy

Out of the Silent Planet Perelandra That Hideous Strength

Note that like a lot of CS Lewis, there is a very heavy Christian view.

We've had 5 authors actually pick that one as a favorite, and they connected it to some really interesting book lists: https://shepherd.com/book/that-hideous-strength/book-lists

I love seeing something like this as it is awesome where their minds go for what other books they connect it with...

While not Sci-Fi, I found that The Screwtape Letters could actually be enjoyed even from a fairly agnostic perspective, as an allegorical dive into human cognitive foibles.

Though I suspect Lewis would be unhappy to hear that, especially since he wrote a fourth-wall-adjacent bit about devils preferring that humans don't believe in them.

Lewis was clearly intelligent and well educated in the humanities, but I don't think he ever cared much about science. IMO, the Space Trilogy is good writing but bad sci-fi.

In "Of Other Worlds", in a conversation with Brian Aldiss and Kinsley Amis (or Martin Amis? Don't remember), he says that he had a rocket take Ransom to Mars, but he knew better by the time he wrote the second book, and had angels take Ransom to Venus. That is, he wasn't trying to write hard science fiction; he was trying to write stuff where you were confronted with "the unknown". Fantasy and science fiction were both aimed at that, but fantasy was better, because you didn't have to worry about the rules of actual science.

He also said (quoting from memory): "If I were briefed to attack my own books, I would say that though the scientist has to be a physicist for the plot, his concern seems to be almost exclusively biological. I would also ask whether it was credible that such a gas-bag could invent a mousetrap, let alone a spaceship. But then, I wanted comedy as well as adventure."

Of the three, I always loved That Hideous Strength the most. The first two, which I think are good, were too much like travelogs, but the third had a pretty decent story.

Project Hail Mary was good, but I thought Artemis (also by Weir) was amazing. I wish he'd make a sequel.

Author Brian Guthrie shares some of his favorites and happy to see that I have only read one of these.

Planetside by Michael Mammay

I love this series, just about to read the newest entry!

>Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read

HN thread is full of books I've heard of and that get recommended literally anytime books are mentioned.

It's my pet peeve too. I'm gonna throw in Void Star by Zachary Mason as one recommendation that a lot of people likely haven't heard of. Great prose writer, very Gibson-like, got way too little attention when it was published a few years ago.

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