GOSU-B by ukitakumuki
The best military science fiction isn’t just a bunch of space battles and cigar-chomping armed combat (although those are fun). The most interesting books also examine what life in the military actually involves, and what combat can do to a person’s mind.
Hard science fiction is characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy or technical detail, or on both. From a movie perspective, think more Blade Runner or Alien than Star Wars.
Steampunk is science fiction after a few LSD-laced absinthe jello shots; it can include alternate histories, vampires, time travel, magic, and romance. As long as you feature some technology suggestive of steam power, you can go as crazy as you want, and several writers on this list have done exactly that. For some reason, a large number of steampunk authors appear to live in Portland, Oregon.
I’m not a huge fan of time travel because of all the paradoxes that are usually ignored or explained away badly. I also watched way too many Star Trek episodes where time travel was used as a fix-it for almost any situation, like some temporal Gorilla Glue.
Fortunately, the books below deal with time travel in intelligent (or just fun) ways, introduce cool ideas, and are generally excellent stories that are very well written.
Continue reading
Robots are ridiculously cool, but why, exactly? Are humans just narcissists that want to see copies of themselves? Do we want to obliterate the line between human and machine out of raw curiosity? Or are stories about robots really stories about super-powerful humans, and we’re afraid of what someone much stronger or much smarter could do to us?
The answer is probably “yes” to all of these and more reasons, besides.
Discovering a new book series is a fantastic feeling. Here’s hoping you find something new below.
If none of these is enough for you, look into the Perry Rhodan series. A new novella has been published weekly since 1961, and there are currently over 2700 stories. If that’s still not enough of a challenge for you, they’re also in German.
Art by: ANTIFAN-REAL @ deviantART
Far future science fiction (usually meaning about 10,000 years from now) is the most optimistic SF subgenre because it assumes humanity will still be around in some recognizable form.
For readers a little tired of familiar stories, non-English science fiction is one of their best sources for new perspectives, ideas, and stories. From Polish great Stanislaw Lem (in my opinion, the best science fiction writer out there) to newcomers like Ryu Mitsuse from Japan, Ofir Touché Gafla from Israel, Khaled Towfik from Egypt, and Vandana Singh from India, people who have only read English-native science fiction are in for a treat when they broaden their global horizons.
Mary Shelley, Connie Willis, Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, Madeline L’Engle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hiromu Arakawa
While hundreds of women published science fiction stories in the 1950s and earlier, it wasn’t until the 1960s—with its second-wave feminism (the first wave focused on suffrage and legal gender equality) and the sense that science fiction was a literature of ideas—that a large influx of female authors appeared on the scene.
Like many popular terms, “space opera” was coined as an insult. It’s based on “soap opera” (nothing to do with music) and its original meaning was a “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn.”
Continue reading