I have loved reading since I was very young, and would bring home an armful of books from the library. I first discovered the dystopian genre while in junior high, and it quickly became my favorite genre. My favorite aspect of dystopias is the new world created within each book. When I began writing my own stories, I spent several hours building the world within my book. Even today, nearly 20 years after I first began writing, I spend hours drawing and designing everything within each book, whether or not it’s dystopian. My hope is that my readers find my worlds as fascinating as I found the worlds of the stories on my list!
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a bold, futuristic epic that immediately sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go. Starting on the far-off world of Adrasteia, the story follows Kira across the galaxy after she mistakenly walks into an interstellar war. Paolini perfectly paints this fantastical story, leaving you desperate for more. Having read Eragonat a young age, I wasn’t expecting Paolini to write this genre, but I am so impressed by his work. While I’d recommend any of his books, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is my new favorite. His world-building is amazing and wildly entertaining!
Winner of Best Science Fiction in the 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards!
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a brand new epic novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eragon, Christopher Paolini.
Kira Navárez dreamed of life on new worlds.
Now she's awakened a nightmare.
During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she's delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move.
As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a…
I grew up a fan of all things sci-fi, Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and so on. But the older I got, the pickier I got, wanting more depth in character, creative stories and fun, but believable action. I read classic sci-fi like iRobot, Starship Troopers, and Enders Game, to name a few. I did find some contemporary authors I liked like Marco Kloos, Detmare Wehr, and Rebecca Branch, but they were needles in a haystack. So, instead of complaining that there were not enough good books out there, I started writing my own. A decade later I have 8 published titles and more on the way.
I first discovered this book as an audiobook several years ago. It was recommended as something similar to Starship Troopers, which I had recently finished. The beginning of the book didn’t grab me at first. As a matter of fact I started to think it was a rip-off of Starship Troopers. But there was something about the main character that made me want to stay to the next chapter. Andrew Grayson is a young man who is very bright, but because he lives in a welfare community in the not-so-distant future, his prospects are limited. One of the only ways he can get out of the PRCs (what the author refers to as the projects) is to join the military. What makes this book work so well is the fact that Andrew is not really special. He is smart and usually a little more capable than the people around him.…
"There is nobody who does [military SF] better than Marko Kloos. His Frontlines series is a worthy successor to such classics as Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and We All Died at Breakaway Station." -George R. R. Martin
The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world . . . or you can join the service.
There were 3.7 billion people on Earth when I was born. By November 2022, there will be 8 billion. I am fascinated and terrified by this growth. I love stories that address this issue head-on, be it colonisation of other planets, compulsory euthanasia, or uploading consciousness into machines. When I started writing, I didn’t realise how I was bringing these themes together—I was writing a book I’d love to read. Now I can see those influences, and I am grateful for the authors who have shaped my thinking and my work.
Coyote is a habitable moon orbiting Bear, a gas giant forty light years away. Earth’s first interstellar ship is hijacked by a group of engineers and scientists, usurping the post-US government loyalists who intend to make Coyote their home.
This book speaks to the aspirational me, the part that wants to evolve beyond Earth and build a new future, a better future, but inevitably the hubris of modern man threatens to destroy paradise. It’s a conceptually magnificent colonisation book built on plausible science, yet its success lies in the characters’ need to work together to conquer a seemingly benign world. I frequently revisit Coyote because it’s a great story, brilliantly told, and it makes me gaze at the stars.
Coyote marks a dramatic new turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth’s first interstellar colonists—and the mysterious planet that becomes their home…
I am the author of more than sixty published novels, most of which are military science fiction, or near-future alternative history fiction, so I have an abiding interest in the subgenre, and the authors who helped to shape it.
As with my other recommendations, I am making this one based on the impact the book had on me. From this novel, as well as the others that Jerry wrote, I learned how important it is to build a comprehensive world-universe when planning a book. And, when I sat down to pen the first book in what would become the Legion of the Damned series, I attempted to build a reality as fully realized as the CoDominium universe is.
In a future universe in which prisoner colonists are shipped to strange worlds for a corrupt alliance of Earth nations, John Christian Falkenberg gives up a brilliant military career and makes a monumental sacrifice
As an author of young adult fantasy and science fiction, I’ve read many books that fall within that rubric. This list captures the most exciting young adult novels I’ve read over the past few years. All have aspects of storytelling and themes I strive to capture in my writing. One thing I love about the young adult genre is the characters go on an adventure full of excitement and danger. The adventure is a metaphor for growing up. So if reads chock-full of death-defying odds, mystery, wonder, and a sprinkling of romance are your jam, the books in this list are for you.
Scalzi transports us to his ever-exciting Old Man's War universe for a retelling of the novel The Last Colony from a teen's perspective. Aliens, adventure, and young love abound in Zoe's Tale, a story sure to delight Scalzi fans and is an excellent entry point for young adult readers interested in his brand of witty sci-fi.
With Zoe's Tale, Scalzi demonstrates one key to a compelling story is a fantastic protagonist. Zoe is just that. She is engaging, stubborn, snarky, a true friend, an angsty teen, and brave. Readers who enjoy Scalzi's clever prose will find the fact Zoe's Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony immaterial. That's how captivating a character Zoe is.
Hard-core, fast paced science fiction, John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale is the fourth in The Old Man's War series.
She won't go down without a fight.
It's not every day you up sticks and move to another world. But then, Zoe Boutin-Perry's life has never been ordinary. She's the adopted teenage daughter of two former super-soldiers. She's also a holy icon to a race of alien warriors who track her every move. So she's used to the quirks of being a human in space.
However, this time something's different. Betrayed by the authorities, Zoe - along with her parents and fellow…
Okay, so you’ve read Dune, you’ve read Starship Troopers, you’ve read 2001: A Space Odyssey, and maybe you’ve even read From Earth to the Moon and The First Men in the Moon. Seen the movies, too (or maybe you cheat and say you’ve read the books when you’ve only seen the flicks). Bet you think that makes you an expert on science fiction about space, right? Not even close! If you want to read more than just the well-known classics everyone else has, find these books. Some have become obscure and are now out of print, but they’re not hard to find; try ABE, eBay, and local second-hand bookstores. They’re worth searching for, and then you’ll really have something to talk about.
A near-future space thriller, about a revolution by an orbital space colony against the governments of Earth that seek to keep it under their control, is a fast-moving blend of action, politics, and speculation. Read this and see the sort of vision of humanity’s future in space that captivated people’s imaginations at the dawn of the Space Shuttle era.
I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a frustrated fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. Answering that fascination, I wrote Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), and I’ve written two books for the BFI Film Classics series on two great movies of the fantastic, Rosemary’s Baby (2020) and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I also edited three anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) and Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and now an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics.
Though I admire her classic work, The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s The Word For World Is Forest that most lingers in the mind.
Ursula Le Guin worried that the book was too simple and that its portrait of the mad colonialist soldier, Captain Davidson, was too unshaded a vision of militarist evil. Well, perhaps. However, men like Davidson can be found in equally brutal forms in accounts of the European invasion of the Americas or in Roger Casement’s report on the Belgians in the Congo.
But it is the otherworldly Selver who possesses my imagination, that archetypal ‘little green man,’ that strange new god of a person, poised between the innocent world he seeks to protect and the violence he must unleash to ensure its survival.
When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.
Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.
As a writer and independent game developer, I’ve always adored “families of choice:” motley crews of strangers drawn together by circumstance and whose bonds are strengthened to an indestructible degree by the trials they face together. This passion has manifested both in my favorite stories (The Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead, Mass Effect) as well as the ones I write myself! After teaching writing at Cornell University, where I also earned my MFA in Fiction, I turned my sights on my own creative projects, all of which invariably feature weird found families (a robot crew and the human misfits accompanying them; two assassins and an escaped mind-reading slave; et cetera).
I first read this book when I was a teenager, and it became my gold standard on how to write engaging, imaginative worlds and the unique histories, languages, and cultures that populate them.
More than the intricate space politics and incredibly innovative anthropology present in this massive series, however, I was most drawn to how the main character, Bren (a human diplomat trying to navigate his way through the court intrigue of an alien government) eventually finds a family unlike any other in his atevi bodyguards, Banichi and Jago.
Bren also gathers a wide collection of allies and companions on the strange world his space-faring ancestors crash-landed on 150 years ago…all while trying to avoid being assassinated or starting an interplanetary war.
Two hundred years ago, there was war. The humans lost and were exiled to the island of Mospheira, trading titbits of advanced technology for continued peace and a secluded refuge. Only one single human - the paidhi - is allowed off the island and into the dangerous society of their conquerors.
I’m fascinated with techno-utopian schemes. Decades ago, I had conversations with a friend who believed that humanity needed to evolve and leave the planet, just as early life once left the oceans. It was an intriguing idea that I have tried to follow up, critically, in Star Settlers. My book is a history not so much of the technology and nuts and bolts of space travel (although I do cover some of that), but of the rationale behind it—the idea that humanity’s ultimate destiny is in the stars. The idea is beguiling—but, likely, wrong-headed. To write the book, I spoke with physicists, science fiction writers, and space enthusiasts of all stripes.
This book has the ideal traits I appreciate in science fiction—as with H.G. Wells’s classic tales, it’s reasonably short and can be read as pure adventure or allegory. We meet the archetypal figure of the “Teacher” birthed by a bioprinting machine on a starship soon to terraform an exoplanet. The Teacher has to grapple with survival, his purpose, the ship’s mission, and his realization that everything is haywire in this high-tech Eden full of monsters. Hull Zero Three is a detective tale with philosophical undertones as the Teacher slowly makes sense of the chaos that surrounds him, contends with his earlier clones, and undergoes a quest. Anyone who has ever experienced the drudgery of actual teaching will appreciate Bear’s creation of the Teacher as a mythic archetype.
Trapped on a mysterious spaceship, the only way to escape is to survive. A thrilling novel from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning Greg Bear.
A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination - unknown. Its purpose? A mystery. Its history? Lost.
Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home, a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms, he finds himself wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger.
My love of reading was born on the day my 5th-grade teacher handed me a book of poetry; my “punishment” for throwing a spitball. I was to memorize “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and recite it publicly the next day. I was mesmerized by the poem, because it drew a picture in my mind, and filled me with great emotion. As an 8th grader, I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, for fun, then moved on to the great classics by Asimov and Heinlein. I wrote my first novel in 1988, but Time Chain is my first Sci-Fi novel, with more on the way.
I was moved from the opening lines of Old Man’s War. An ordinary man of 75 visits his wife’s grave, then joins the army. What? Oh yeah, now I understand. Mind uploading is integral to this book, first published in 2005, and it will soon be the rage in the real world of our near future. In Old Man’s War we experience mind uploading through the character, John Perry, and other new recruits. Then we fight. Perry becomes a war hero, and he crosses paths with his wife along the way. What? I thought she was dead? Oh yeah, now I understand. She was grown from Kathy Perry’s DNA, but she has no memory of John. Or does she? Military sci-fi adventure blooms into a love story? Wow, this could be a series. Oh, wait. It is!
Perfect for an entry-level sci-fi reader and the ideal addition to a veteran fan’s collection, John Scalzi's Old Man’s War will take audiences on a heart-stopping adventure into the far corners of the universe.
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.
The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.
