“One-hit wonder” has an insult buried in the compliment, but it’s hard enough to write a good science fiction novel, much less get it published and then have it become popular and enduring. So even having a one-hit wonder is an impressive achievement, and the books on this list should be appreciated for their merits, instead of their authors being lightly mocked for not doing more.
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Dieselpunk is science fiction that occurs between the two world wars, or takes place in a world where the 1940s never really ended. It’s often written deliberately pulpy and noirish, leaving character development in the dust of a wildly galloping plot. And fantasy elements are always welcome. For example, a gas-powered android could team up with a junkie psychic and a depressed vampire to solve the mystery of who’s sending all those severed limbs to the local police station.
Like steampunk, dieselpunk is often fan fiction for a specific era. It also tends to focuses on white Europeans and North Americans. Fortunately, there are small but growing movements called steamfunk and dieselfunk, which, in addition to having cool names, focus on non-whites actually having a place in the future and alternate histories.
For the world’s most thoughtful look at dieselpunk, check out Aja Romano’s Dieselpunk for Beginners.
Apparently, one of the biggest problems a lunar colony will have to face (in addition to air and food and water and temperature and cosmic radiation and not enough personal space and getting there and getting back home) is lunar dust, which is so fine that it gets everywhere, is really clingy, and can muck up equipment. Lunar dust feels like soft snow, but at the same time abrasive. It also smells like spent gunpowder.
And as far as moons go, ours is huge. It’s bigger than Pluto, which means that we’re actually orbited by a dwarf planet. But it’s a greedy satellite, sucking up our rotational energy, so that in about 45 billion years, the Earth and the Moon will be tidally locked (the moon will be in the same spot in the sky always) and the Earth day will be about 45 hours long.
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Creating robots that are stronger, faster, and can think millions of times faster than us seems to be a guaranteed way to manufacture our future overlords. But my time as a computer programmer makes me less worried: software, no matter how well written, always seemed to break at some point. The reality of the world is just too messy. So while the robot uprising might happen, there’s a chance they’ll end up tripping over their own feet and give us grungy humans a shot at regaining the world.
One of the biggest draws of science fiction is the exploration of space, and discovery of all the unpredictable craziness out there, whether it’s wondrous, deadly, or both.
Shield World Construction by Adam Burn
While all of the books in this list feature a galactic empire, the empire itself doesn’t always play a major part in the story.
Art by Jarosław Jaśnikowski
In 2018, a lot of science fiction writers got weird. They gave us happiness machines, time-traveling detectives, dragons, deadly intergalactic singing contests, a superhero whose power is math, and disappearing shadows. Good stuff.
LGBTQ people will pilot spaceships, colonize planets, battle aliens, invent warp engines, and discover all sorts of intergalactic weirdness. So of course there should be great science fiction stories about them.
In the list below, some books focus on sexual identities as a major theme, while others just have a gay character or two. I won’t usually spell out which books are which, because that has the chance of spoiling a plot point, and I’d hate for that to happen.
If any technology has the best chance of making the world unrecognizable in the next century, it’s genetic engineering. It’s fun to imagine flying cars and spaceships, but we could just as easily end up with migratory buildings and Be a New Species Day in elementary schools.
I get excited by a good book, and sometimes read more quickly than I should. Audiobooks slow me down to a more humane pace, allowing me to really spend time in the words of a book instead of blasting through it. Listening to an audiobook can give me a surprisingly deeper reading experience than, well, reading. I’m not ever giving up paper books, but I’m impressed at the depth of the experience of a really well-done audiobook.
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