If you’re a child of the 80s, reading Ready Player One is like mainlining heroin-strength nostalgia. It’s so ridiculously fun that I frequently imagined author Ernest Cline giggling and saying to himself, “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this!”
15 Best Mysterious Alien Megastructure Books
One of my favorite moments in any science fiction book or movie is when someone in a spaceship stands up, points at the viewscreen, and says, “What the hell is that?!”
I’m an absolute sucker for stories where hapless humans stumble across mysterious alien megastructures cruising their way through space.
Review: The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards in 1975, The Mote in God’s Eye has not aged particularly well. There are some clever twists and exciting sequences in this far-future first-contact tale, and the alien Motes are, in some ways, truly alien.
19 Best Young Adult Science Fiction Books
Most young adult science fiction books are set in weird dystopias and involve awkward, doomed romances. Based on what I remember from high school, this is completely appropriate.
Review: Artemis by Andy Weir
Artemis isn’t as good as The Martian, but it’s pretty close. Author Andy Weir kept what was great about The Martian: hard science, humor, and a charmingly sarcastic protagonist.
2018 Science Fiction Summer Reading List
Alien Beach by axiom-concepts
Review: The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
A ship, powered by a tame black hole, is on a multi-million year mission to place wormholes throughout the galaxy, allowing humans to travel interstellar distances. The people on this ship are awoken by an AI for a couple days every ten thousand years or so to create these wormholes.
The people on board the ship discover something’s not right. But how do you solve anything when you’re in cryosleep for thousands of years at a stretch?
Continue reading
19 Best Science Fiction Horror Books
By Jerad Marantz. Check out his site for lots of cool aliens.
Horror seems like a strange thing to enjoy reading: why would you want to be terrified while mental images of grotesque bloodshed are burned into your head? What’s wrong with you?
Of course, nothing’s wrong with you. One of the jobs of fiction is to give us clues on how to survive, and seeing how characters defeat horrific beasts gives us hope in fighting our own monsters.
21 Best Science Fiction Graphic Novels
From Sketching from the Imagination: Sci-fi by 3dtotal Publishing
At their best, comics (and their thicker brethren, graphic novels) combine deep, thoughtful storytelling with real works of art. I’m glad to see that great comics are still being written and drawn (and inked and colored) and that science fiction is really well represented in the comics world.
Review: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Tom Barren in All Our Wrong Todays is from an ideal version of our present time. No war, no poverty, jet packs for all, and pretty much every starry-eyed prediction made in the 1950’s has come true. It’s awesome. But then Tom loses the love of his life and in his iffy mental state, does something stupid with a time machine. He screws everything up so badly that his amazing 2016 turns into a crap 2016: that is, our 2016. Now he’s got to fix it. Except that the love of his life is alive in our 2016…