Imagine I could only choose 5 sci fi books for a brand new sci fi reader – what would they be?
Trying to diverge a bit from what’s already in here:
- Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Isaac Asimov - Caves of Steel
- Greg Bear - Blood Music
- Frank M. Robinson - The Dark Beyond the Stars
The latter is a bit of a dark horse, but I unabashedly love it. It has one of my favorite endings of any novel ever.
Honorable mentions to Ender’s Game, and Old Man’s War for sure.
Lots of great recommendations here. I haven’t seen anyone mention John Scalzi!
Both the Old Man’s War and Interdependency series are amazing!
I haven’t seen this author mentioned and as a bonus, he’s Canadian :)
A. E. van Vogt
Check out his Null-A trilogy !
Ok ok, I might not get a lot of support with this list, but SciFi is actually what turned me into an avid reader…now it’s not just SciFi but also non fiction (gasp!). So the list below is somewhat the path I followed, with some mods
- Ready Player One
- Project Hail Mary
- Murderbot
- Bobiverse
- Pandora’s Star
The list starts off with some quick, punchy brain candy then graduates into big ol’ operas :-)
Project Hail Mary is so good! It’s a great example of sci fi that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but has a lot of actual science involved. I was just getting the itch to re-read it the other day!
Pandora’s Star really is just part one of a two part book. That said, there’s a chapter in there where MLM is introduced that, if read alone without any context, might be the single best chapter ever written in sci fi. If that doesn’t hook a reader, I don’t know what will.
Agreed, that intro to MLM is pretty epic. I also found the prologue to the first book super memorable…basically an intro to the gateways. The whole series is around 7 books, but I had a tough time with the few Judas books. A friend and I were reading them at the same time, and he just skipped all Judas chapters, hehe.
Iain Banks. All of his sci-fi books.
I recently saw an article about him on The Guardian that will be more eloquent than I can be.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/29/where-to-start-with-iain-banks
Just be aware that he wrote both fiction and sci-fi. Iain M Banks is how he signed his sci-if ones.
