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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Embassytown, also by China Miéville, is traditional sci-fi and really good as well.
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).
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
> 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.
Blindsight was the only sci Fi book I ever read that had citations used non-ironically.
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...
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.
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.?
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.
Diaspora by Greg Egan.
Peter Watts really explores the concept of alien intelligence in a way that challenges our perceptions
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....
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
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.
The list starts with Project Hail Mary, which is as far from Egan as I can imagine on the science fiction spectrum.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
It's a great book, but everyone has heard of it already.
I really like that, but I definitely thought A Deepness in the Sky was even better despite probably being considered "classic space opera".
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
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley is a really great, and different read. Totally different world than a lot of sci-fi.
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.
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
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.
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. :(
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...
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. :(
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).
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.
Author Brian Guthrie shares some of his favorites and happy to see that I have only read one of these.
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.
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.
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...
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.