If you haven’t already read Project Hail Mary I can highly recommend the story and the audiobook.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Yes! I just could not stop reading this book. Stayed up way too late. Easily worth it
The expanse is truly amazing. Great story, great science explanation, characters and political depth.
For something lighter, the laundry files from charles Stross. Again great characters with real life emotions and thoughts.
The last really great sci-fi books I read were the Otherland series by Tad Williams. It's about a virtual reality world and how it's used by the the the rich elite to find immortality, but also by others to find a kind of enlightenment. There are a lot of great characters who all have depth and substance, the story does a great job comparing virtual reality with religion, and it even predicted Netflix way back in 1996 lol (they just spell it differently)
It's 4 pretty dense books, but once I got started I couldn't put them down
I thoroughly enjoyed A Gift of Time by Jerry Merritt.
Not an answer to your question, but I came across this lemmy instance focused on literature. Seems they're still new, so not many communities yet, but you might have some luck there too!
https://literature.cafe - seems !fiction@literature.cafe is the most relevant community, but they really should open up a separate sci-fi community!
Now onto an answer: I'm really into the soft sci-fi of the Strugatsky brothers. Definitely Maybe is such a great read. As for more popular works, I did enjoy Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir a few months ago.
I like the recommend The Quantum Magician because it doesn't seem as popular as I think it should be. It's got so many things going for it. Great world building, great characters, an interesting plot and detailed explanations of interesting fictional science. Everything from large scale political drama to interpersonal drama and thought provoking philosophical dilemmas.
So I'm going to throw in a pretty eclectic list:
If you enjoy tech noir, I always like to recommend Other Kind of Life by Shamus Young, because it's awesome and somewhat unknown. The tagline/blurb don't do it justice but I recently wrote up a rant about why people should read it here
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth is an awesome proto-cyberpunk science fiction story (it's got just about all the elements of a cyberpunk book, but the feel is much more that of a 1950s scifi story, it's kind of fascinating. The story is awesome.
Bolo! by David Weber is kind of fascinating because it's one of the only series I've read with a genuine partnership between humans and AIs, where neither one exploits or betrays the other, and it's in this military scifi book series about tanks the size of small towns. And the scope is huge, from postapoclyptic earth to the rise and fall of several interstellar empires, humans side by side with absurdly giant tanks - it's a trip. The sequel to this one is also good. The others in the series are fun but the ones by Webber have a surprising amount of heart.
By the way, if you like Baen books, you can get a ton of their stories (including Bolo!) in ebook form for free - they used to give them away for free on CDs, and fans collected those files onto websites, and the company has been surprisingly chill about just keeping those book available. This website hosts most of them http://baencd.freedoors.org/ but be warned, it's got graphic design to rival Baen's infamous covers.
Anything by Harry Harrison. A bunch of ebook versions of his stories are available on Project Gutenberg Especially Deathworld if you haven't read it
When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a cyberpunk story worth checking out.
Obviously anything by William Gibson, and Philip K Dick (personal favorite, A Scanner Darkly and especially the linked audiobook)
And the Murderbot books by Martha Wells are great.
It's not a bad series, but yeah it's a bit bubblegum. If you're looking for something a bit more deep, consider the "Starship's Mage" series by Glynn Stewart. If you want to go heavy then maybe "Leviathan Wakes" (The Expanse)by James SA Corey or "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
One of my favorites is an older book by John Brunner: The Crucible of Time. It's unusual because there are no humans anywhere. It's about a culture of very alien beings that periodically get decimated by something (not another species). It follows a movement to improve science to the point where they can understand what's going on, and prevent/escape from it. A really good book