The best Sci-Fi mindbenders that will have you questioning everything

Personally, it cemented my idea that I wasn’t the crazy one. Society was doing insane things. Many things in our times made little sense when examined. Take the twenty years of wars in the Middle East. We gave weapons to the Afghanis, then we attacked them. We gave arms to the Iraqis; then we fought them twice!

Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

And to top it off, the Department of Defense was once called the Department of War! Man-made institutions in our society deliver the opposite of their stated goal. Mass surveillance, memory hole, thought crimes, doublethink. This novel is full of things we see in our lifetime. Also, the recent invention of ChatGPT is literally ‘averaging’ the language into Newspeak. Read it again with fresh eyes!

In a list of brain benders, PKD had to be on the list. Though he has written better ones, I felt like this was as tight of a novel as you will get from Phillip K. Dick. It details the unfortunate madness we all suffer internally, of a mind trying to do what is ‘right’ even though the system (and another part of themselves) are rigged against them. Of the good and virtuous person getting dragged into the mud by chaos.

I liked this one mainly for the ending, which was dark but still made so much sense. Also, the surreal humor, descriptions, and internal dialog. Oh, and the bugs.

This book is my favorite indie sci-fi novel. It starts with a broken and jumpy storyline that coalesces inwardly as the characters fight a cataclysmic horror. The premise is there are ideas, like those randomly generated passwords, that are simply very hard for a person to remember.

I read this during the COVID craziness. It was precisely why I write, as an escape from the media trying to drag you down with infinite worry. Rest, relax, and enjoy a fun story of someone else’s trials.

This is indie sci-fi at its best. It was a major inspiration and may have gotten a nod in my novel (I can’t remember.) What is great is that the second read-through differed from the first but was still just as enjoyable. 

For a novel on the list, I have only read once, and a long time ago, I still keep thinking about this. It asks: Can we learn about the universe without first learning about ourselves?

It also goes into the limits of science. There are simply things science cannot tell us. The planet’s colloid sea is nonlinear, the math unsolvable, and the alien is potentially hostile. I choose to believe the planet is attempting to heal some deep-forgotten hurt of the narrator. What is the purpose of bringing up a disastrous relationship? To heal or learn? Or perhaps the alien is simply toying with them?

I read it soon after changing my life's trajectory and attempting to be more peaceful, creative, contemplative, and less frantic or consumptive. I need to read this again.

I loved this book for its wild story. It has three main sections, and each of them has its own delight. It covers so many transhuman topics. From orphanogensis, the creation of a new mind in a digital world, to multiple nested universes, each section amazed me.

Not as mindbending as the others, in the sense of not being able to trust your own data, this book scratched the itch I had after The Three-Body Problem. Virtual Realities, interstellar topics, the future of man, and the possibilities for which consciousness expands into the universe and those who do not are left in peace (mostly.)

The author inspired me to keep writing simply because I know there is a market for high-concept hard science fiction.