It’s about the end of the year, and I know there will all sorts of lists of the best books published this year, so this is a different question: regardless of when published, which SF books that you personally read this year did you enjoy the most. I’m also asking which you enjoyed instead of which you thought were the best, so feel free to include fluff without shame.
I’ll go first. Of the 60+ books I read this year, here are the ones I liked most. No significant spoilers, not in any order.
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- A project to uplift monkeys on a terraformed world, at the peak of human civilization, is sabotaged by people who don’t think humans should play god. There follows a human civil war that nearly destroys civilization. A couple thousand years later, an ark ship of human remnants leaving an uninhabitable earth is heading towards that terraformed planet. This is a great book, with lots to say on intelligence, the nature of people, and both the fragility and heartiness of life.
Kiln People, David Brin
- Set a couple hundred years in the future, technology is ubiquitous that lets people make a living clay duplicate of themselves that has their memory and thoughts to the point they were created, lasts about a day, and whose memories can be reintegrated with the real person if desired. The duplicates are property, have no rights, and are used to do almost all work and to take any risks without risking the humans. A private detective and some of his duplicates gets pulled into an increasingly complex plot that could reshape society. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with lots of twists, and an interesting narrative as we follow copies who may or may not reintegrate with our detective.
Sleeping Giants, Sylvain Neuvel
- A little girl falls down a deep hole in the woods and lands on a gigantic, glowing, metal hand that’s thousands of years old. This is a wonderful alien artifact story with some interesting twists. I really enjoyed this book. Not exactly hard SF, but checks a lot of the boxes for me, including the wonder of discovery.
The Peripheral, William Gibson
- A computer server links the late 2020s to a time 70 years later, allowing communication and telepresence between the two times. A young woman in the earlier time witnesses a murder in the later time and gets sucked into a battle between powerful people in both times. This is a great book; I think I could have recognized it as Gibson’s writing even if I hadn’t known it in advance. Very interesting premise, engaging characters, and fun without feeling like fluff.
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
- A coalition of human planets has sent the first envoy to an icy world where the people are gender neutral and sterile most of the time, but once a month become male or female (essentially randomly) and fertile. This is a classic, written in 1969, and my second reading - the first being in the late 80s. Le Guin creates an amazingly rich world, even with its harsh, frozen landscape. The characters grow to understand how gender impacts their cultures, and the biases they didn’t know they had. It’s also aged remarkably well for an SF book written 55 years ago. There’s nothing about it that feels outdated.
A couple notes:
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If I hadn’t stuck to my own “enjoyed” constraint, the list might have looked different. For instance, Perdido Street Station, by Meiville, is a really great book, but there’s so much misery and sadness that it’s hard to say I “enjoyed” it.
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I hesitated to put The Left Hand Of Darkness on the list, simply because Le Guin is so widely recognized as a great master, and the book one of her greatest, that it seemed unfair. In the end, it seemed unfair to exclude it for such an artificial reason.
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Leviathan’s Wake
Oh boy, you’re in for a treat if you’re just entering The Expanse for the first time. Enjoy!
Book one of The Expanse series - really good. Had you watched the show?
I watched the first episode, but it didn’t hit like the book. I didn’t really care for it. The book was very good though.
I thought the show was a great companion to the books. I would watch in tandem while reading switching up where i was a bit further ahead in the book. Of course i didnt realize the show was cramming different stories from multiple books all together. It also gave me a better look at the characters and it helped get to know them in a way by comparing tv and book characters. Very good series! Ive read up to book 8 in the past few months.
Ended up binging season 1. It’s good, just a little different.
Thats good to hear! It is a bit different but they are trying to capture the magic of the books. Once you pick up the second book you’ll already be aware of background info you wouldn’t be other wise
Yeah, definitely gonna be starting book 2 soon, then season 2.
Maybe I’ll give it another shot.
Stop what you’re doing right now and get in the Bobiverse. Now.
Okay, I finished We Are Legion (Bobiverse book one). It was fun, and I’ll probably read the next. Nothing especially deep, but amusing. A few things bugged me a little:
Minor spoilers
- They spent all that time and energy trying to figure out how to feed the people on earth while they built ships, then put them in stasis for a multi-year trip. Why didn’t they start by building the stasis chambers and not having to worry about feeding them?
- He has a rationale for life in the galaxy being compatible with earth life, but it doesn’t explain why the animals are so similar (e.g., birds with feathers). That’s not super unusual, but it seemed odd that the first intelligent beings they found were psychologically so human. Strains credibility.
- I liked all the different story threads as we follow the different Bobs, but the sacrifice was that we didn’t go very deep into any of them and the ending felt kind of abrupt.
And if that’s your jam, The Murderbot Diaries pairs well!
Micky 7 works on similar lines. a bit longer with a bit more to say, but basically a fun read
I’ve read all of those - quick, fun reads.
I’ll give it a try
The bobiverse books ended up being what I enjoyed most in 2024. Really looking forward to more of those.
See this comment
Pretty sure the paper/ebook of 5 should be released early Jan. He always does a thing with Kindle for audiobook only for 6 months so they cover the narrator costs
Yeah, I did all of these twice this year. They’re a lot of fun.
I’ll give it a try.
Been enjoying the “murderbot” series by Martha Wells. The audiobook versions narrated by Kevin Free are particularly well done. He’s a good narrator.
They’re supposedly making a TV series out of it. Not sure how that’s going to work since a lot of the action takes place inside the bot’s brain. They’ve also cast Alexander Skarsgård which seems like a misstep already.
I’ve only listened to a handful of audiobooks. I have a short work commute, and there’s rarely a time when I want to engage with a story that I can’t just read it, which I prefer. But I looked him up and he sure has done a lot of them, so he’s clearly popular.
Murderbot is a really fun read, I picked the series up a year or two ago and thoroughly enjoyed it
Definitely the Bobiverse books. Engineer in the 21st century dies, but paid to have himself cryogenically frozen. 200 years in the future, Christian fundamentalist seized control of the government and made it illegal to revive people like him. The world is on the brink of nuclear apocolypse so they used new technology to upload his consciousness into a spaceship computer to search the galaxy for a habitat planet for humanity. Spaceship has auto-factories onboard that let him replicate more ships and digital clones of himself. It has some serious parts, but it is written in a lighthearted manner with some technical explanation for future technology.
See this comment
The audiobook narrator for these is fantastic, too. I’ve listened to them multiple times. I love the exploration of the personality drift and eventual entire society of replicants. Judging by the typical comments I see, I’m in the minority for loving the parts with Archimedes as much as the rest. I get why some people want to get back to the more sci fi stuff though.
That’s where I’m stuck in the audio books. The Archimedes story is fine but drags on too damn long.
So many recommendations that I’ve started reading it already. 20% in. Seems entertaining.
Travis Starnes: Imperium
A six novel long story about a space pilot testing a new drive - and ending up in an alternative version of Rome.
Murderbot Diaries was my top this year by far. Probably top series since I first read hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. It’s so fun and well paced and the audiobook is well made.
Translation State by Ann Leckie, and Fall, or Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson.
I loved them both: the Leckie because the cultures of her characters are so varied and interesting; and Fall despite me not being into computer games at all. It’s fascinating though, having a main character become digital and see how that would play out.
I’ve read both of those and agree they’re both excellent. Really good books. Very different from each other.
That’s what I’ve always loved about sci-fi - the variety, the wild imaginations of the best writers, there’s something for everyone.
@MrsDoyle @AFKBRBChocolate
My book ‘A Suggestion in Space’ https://mybook.to/asuggestioninspace is an interstellar adventure with romance, coming of age, secrets and surprises, tragedy and joy.
To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars - one of the most action-packed books I’ve read, even with a few lengthy “hibernation” space travel sections. Felt like an entire trilogy happening in a single book. Seems prime for a movie treatment, but would also be next to impossible to do in a single movie without completely butchering.
Well we know what happened the last time someone tried to make a Christopher Paolini book into a movie …
I actually didn’t know about that! This was the first book of his I’ve read. Now I’m curious to experience just how bad Eragon was…
Oh man just read the inheritance series first. It’s an excellent fantasy story that also has lots of travel sections so if you like that in sea of stars you’ll like it here too. Then watch the movie and weep lol
Just grabbed it! Thanks!
I have that on my list and I’m sure it will be read soon.
Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Dear god I love that series.
So good.
the Culture series by Iain Banks sucked me in completely! it starts with Consider Phlebas for anyone looking to jump in.
They are fantastic books.
I tried so hard to like it but it was such a slog with the most annoying sci-fi trope ending. The next book in the “series” also did nothing for me.
Yes, and it’s a good place to start but it isn’t the strongest book of the series.
hydrogen sonata was my introduction
Oh, that’s the last one, right? Definitively, since he died after writing it? How did you like it?
Children of Time is probably the only book I’ve read in two or three years, and it was phenomenal. I’d love to read the sequels next, it’s just so hard to get my brain in the right headspace to read!
I loved all the exploration of (arguably) non-human perspectives and cultures and all the friction from the virus. And that ending was pretty wild, I sorta saw some of it coming but not like quite like that
Yeah, I agree, it’s really good. The sequels are both excellent, too.
One of my reading times is before bed, and I find that the routine of it helps me sleep, plus the escapism helps me stop thinking of everything else in my brain, which is a barrier to sleeping for me.
I worked through both the Sprawl trilogy and the Three Body Problem trilogy and they were both fantastic. Almost ruined the rest of my reading for weeks after that. The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest might be the most original science fiction since Neuromancer
While Cixian Liu coined the words “dark forest” to describe this particular solution to the fermi paradox, he did not invent it.
Having also read the series, I find myself always having to mention that while the books do some of the best exploration of more complex sci-fi concepts, they are WEIRD about gender.
The whole thing with men becoming “feminized” by an age of peace, reeks. The author goes out of his way to equate competence, decisiveness and conviction with the male gender, and tries to very akwardly make the point that without strife, these things become unnecessary, and even abhorred. To the point that “masculinity” as a social construct disappears from society. Then replaced entirely by “femininity” which the author VERY explicitly equates with “beauty”, naivete, indecision and weakness.
As if women choose to be with men only out of necessity, and if given a easy life and therefore the choice, they would pair off with other women. Which is effectively what happens because according to the author such a society would pressure men into becoming indistinguishable from women in order to remain appealing.
If I had to boil the trilogy down to a message about gender, it would be “men are ugly but useful, women are beautiful but useless”. That’s not exactly progressive…
A major female characters entire character is that she is the “perfect” woman, and she is literally given as payment to the main-character, by the government. And no-one in the story bats an eye at this! Including the woman herself!
I kept expecting her to be disingenuous. You know, because she was literally treated like an object, given as a prize. But then it time-skips to her having the dudes kid! So apparently shes’s fine with it?
Execept then when the government says so, she’s perfectly down with up and leaving the guy, this time to force him into action by withholding her. Again she’s a mere plot device, treated like a thing that can not only be given, by also taken. She barely exists as anything more than the concept “perfect woman”. But you can’t just have a human character without there being a person in there. Yet Liu goes ahead anyway.
The subtext about gender in the writing isn’t subtle, and it really fucking bothered me when reading the series. I tuned out a lot when listening to the audiobooks.
The sci-fi concepts are some of the best! Only one example is the way the books explained FTL travel, and it is some of the most compelling I’ve seen!
But I really can’t imagine recommending the series without a disclaimer about it containing some of the most sexist writing I’ve ever come across.
Interesting take. I read her part as more of a discourse on power disparity. The man had all the power in the world and used it to find his idea of the perfect woman. I don’t remember it digging too deeply into her character or even at all into her motivations, but from the power dynamic it wouldn’t have mattered to him anyway. I read it more as uncomfortable subservience to male domineering. The plot in this arc was driven by his fantasy, and his fantasy alone.
Also, Haldeman did the same gender changes with The Forever War as an exaggeration of his return from Vietnam. I saw the gender arc as more of a “hard times make soft men, soft men make hard times” thing and an exploration of complacency and opulence. But I see your point, there could be other ways to make a similar point
The plot in this arc was driven by his fantasy, and his fantasy alone.
Her appearance and then disappearance was engineered by the government. Because they wanted him to save a world he didn’t feel like fighting for. Both times.
Ok fine. The government can find a perfect woman, who also loves him for real.
It cannot then just take her back. You can’t tell me she’s fine with just up and leaving the love of HER life, cuz some government dude said so.
She is treated like a non-person, by the author. Not just the people in the story. The personality that would have to exist in her head for her to be the way she was in the story, is not possible.
Maybe it works for people who are less intuitive about people, but psychologically she’s a gaping plot hole. The same way physics or math errors can be.
I fundamentally disagree here. Her choices are to stay where she is in whatever kind of life that is and know her species is doomed, or sleep until he secures her child’s future. Those are heavy stakes and the world in the story could support either decision. I’m certainly not in the position to guess what a parent would do with that choice.
However, I do agree that the author did not give her enough agency for us to know how this decision happened. It definitely could have been explored more. The greater tragedy is that her husband treats her like a non-person, like she’s his imagination incarnate, and that is never explored in any detail.
Why would she not stick around for that? Why is her first way to drive her partner to fulfill a wish of hers what should be a last resort in any sane relationship?
And by hibernating into the future, she is taking the child towards the danger, not away from it.
Why is saving the world his (and hers) responsibility at all? There is no guarantee he’ll succeed. In fact the earth IS destroyed in the end.
If the decision was hers, it’s pretty objectively the wrong one. Even moreso within the framework of what is known about her. She doesn’t make sense.
I was never comfortable with that relationship. She was essentially coerced into it because the global government gave him the power to do anything he wanted as long as he said it would help protect humanity. I’m honestly surprised she stayed that long at all. We also only see her through her husband’s perspective, which leaves an awful lot about the relationship unsaid and likely misinterpreted.
I think we’re just going to disagree on this point, but I do see your point with the other examples earlier
Maybe if you could see each plot device in isolation, you might be able to excuse the stuff. But the sexism is an ever-present background noise in the whole series.
The plot doesn’t put a woman in charge except when it wants bad things to happen. Contacting trisolaris. Surrendering to trisolaris.
It doesn’t have a single woman charachter that isn’t a caricature of personhood. Even the female perspective lead is written like her head is empty, and she’s making decisions based on essentially nothing. Stuff just happens to her. And the one decision she makes, dooms earth.
The story literally makes a point of the fact that even a woman from hard times, is always the wrong person to put in charge. And that what is needed is a man, and a “real one”, at that. (The other candidates)
The whole damn series ends on a man absolving the woman that doomed earth by explaining that her being a woman isn’t her fault. That she was elected because she was “fairest of them all” by a humanity that was “at its fairest”. As if beauty and femininity goes hand in hand with weakness and incompetence.
As if humanity’s beauty comes at the expense of its drive for survival.
I found the sci-fi cool as hell, but as far is can tell, the message of the story is outright disgusting.
It tries to uplift women as the “fairer half” of man. And completely infantilizes them as it does so.
As if beauty and strength, sensitivity and intelligence, innocence and ferocity, etc. are different mutually exclusive sides of the coin that is humanity. And as if man and woman can only ever represent one or the other.
I kept hoping for a plot point or charachter that would break that mold. There were so, so many chances.
It doesn’t happen.
I can see that. I might have to go through the series again and see how I notice it now.
But in the context of the story the first woman was abused by a draconian regime and hated humanity. And the second woman didn’t really have a choice. Humanity was doomed either way, from the trisolarans or any other sufficiently advanced species, and she chose to stop fighting. In the end, it was all the same and the absolution she receives is to address her guilt about a lose-lose situation.
Also how do I tag spoilers? I’ll go back and edit
And the second woman didn’t really have a choice
That’s something the books suffer from in general. Stuff happens in very convenient sequence with very little agency for the reader to live through.
She was the only woman considered, and only due to popular demand. The other candidates were all men, from an age when “real” ones existed.
They were chosen specifically due to being suitable for the task at hand, she was not.
The button needed to be pressed. She didn’t do it. According to the story, no person from the age of peace would have either, nor would ANY woman, because apparently no female candidates aside from her were even considered.
Eventually, a man somewhere else, presses it for her.
That in isolation these plot points can be excused, doesn’t change the fact that every aspect of a fictional story is deliberate to at least some extent. The series consistently makes events and the people who are in them men and women, depending on what needs to be felt, said, or done.
When women do stuff, things go wrong. Men then step in to fix it, until a woman ruins things further. It happens several times in the series.
And when you combine that with what characters say to each about what humanity and its genders represent, I don’t approve.
Characters don’t just say stuff. That’s especially deliberate, and from the author. She could have come to terms with her guilt entirely on her own, without a man, or another person at all. And she could have come to terms with it through some completely different logic, that didn’t need to make it about her gender.
The author barely lets her think for herself to begin with. In fairly harsh contrast to the male perspective characters.
I know I’m an outlier, but I didn’t really care for The Three Body Problem. Characters did too many things that just didn’t seem like likely responses, and some of the premise felt unrealistic to me. But I know I’m in the minority.
The Sprawl trilogy is great. I read it when it was out originally, and reread Neuromancer more recently. Oh, but if you’re ever tempted, don’t listen to the Neuromancer audiobook narrated by Gibson. Wonderful writer, atrocious reader.
You might be less of an outlier than you think, just read the replies to this comment
Thanks. The book was hugely popular, but good to know I’m not all by myself in thinking it wasn’t great.
I don’t get the TBP fanboi-ism, it reads like it was written by a teenager that’s never encountered SF before. It’s certainly not in the same class as Neuromancer, for crying out loud.
I’m sure there’s an odd element caused by the fact that it was translated from Chinese (which involved tweaks for a western audience), but it certainly didn’t come close to living up to the hype for me.
I know what you mean about not living up to the hype; I read all that Hugo fanfare and thought, I’ll just buy the whole series. I got one and a half books in and thought to myself, what a waste of money, I can’t make myself finish this book, let alone the series.
I remember reading a thread a few years back on reddit that someone who was a native speaker said it was even worse in the original Chinese.
That last bit is interesting and funny. It was really popular in China, too, right?
If you liked the Three Body Problem, might I recommend The Killing Star by Pellegrino, Charles R? It’s another slant on some similar themes.
The most memorable reads from this year were:
The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. While at first, the setting appears to be a fairly standard fantasy, there is a sci-fi depth to the world, its climate, cataclysms, history, and orogeny (“magic power” of the world).
And, if you are a fan of heavy-handed dystopian satire, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. It takes place in a not-too-distant future where a somewhat-apathetic researcher and a corporate scammer are trying to find the last living Venomous Lumpsucker, a highly intelligent fish species. There is climate change, corporate greed, half-baked international agreements, hackers, horrible AI, and, of course, delusional megalomaniac billionaires.
I read the first Jemisin book, but not the others. I did enjoy it though.
