2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson – 2012
I’m starting this list off by breaking the 10,000-year rule because 2312 simplyfeels far-future. Author Robinson’s technological inventions are creative and wondrous, and it’s a delight to follow the characters around the solar system with him.
My only beef with this book is that the personalities of the characters cleave a little too closely to their planets of origin. That is, the character from Mercury is totally mercurial (she’s a whole playground of mood swings, which gets annoying), and the character from one of Saturn’s moon is purely saturnine (slow, steady, gloomy, which gets boring). It’s nice to have drama between characters, but I felt they were a little one-dimensional and predictable.
2
A Fire Upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge – 1992
Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind’s potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these “regions of thought,” but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, composed not entirely of humans, must rescue the children—and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.
3
Accelerando
by Charles Stross – 2005
It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother and seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all humanity.
About the title: in Italian, accelerando means “speeding up” and is used as a tempo marking in musical notation. In Stross’s novel, it refers to the accelerating rate at which humanity in general, and/or the novel’s characters, head towards the technological singularity. The term was used earlier in this way by Kim Stanley Robinson in his 1985 novel The Memory of Whiteness and again in his 1992–96 Mars trilogy.
4
Blindsight
by Peter Watts – 2006
A derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet?
Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find—but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .
5
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley – 1932
Both Brave New World and 1984 saw dystopian futures, but Huxley seems to have gotten much of it right (though Orwell did nail the surveillance state). According to social criticNeil Postman:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism… Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.”
6
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke – 1953
It looks like a good deal at first: a peaceful alien invasion by the mysterious Overlords, whose arrival ends all war, helps form a world government, and turns the planet into a near-utopia. However, they refuse to answer questions about themselves and govern from orbiting spaceships.Clarke has said that the idea for Childhood’s End may have come from the numerous blimps floating over London during World War II.
7
Seed to Harvest
by Octavia E. Butler – 1984
Seed to Harvest contains Octavia E. Butler’s four acclaimed Patternmaster novels: Wild Seed,Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster.
In ancient Africa, a female demigod of nurture and fertility mates with a powerful, destructive male entity. Together they birth a race of madmen, visionaries, and psychics who cling to civilization’s margins and back alleys for millennia, coming together in a telepathic Pattern just as Earth is consumed by a cosmic invasion. Now these new beings—no longer merely human—will battle to rule the transfigured world.
8
Dune
by Frank Herbert – 1965
Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family and bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.
Dune is the world’s best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and often described as The Lord of the Rings of science fiction. If you’ve never read a science fiction book before, don’t start here, but make it your fifth.
Did you know Dune was inspired by a trip to Oregon?
9
Foundation
by Isaac Asimov – 1951
Psychohistory is one of Asimov’s best inventions: using a combination of history, psychology, and statistics, one can accurately predict the behavior of large groups of people.
Foundation covers the beginning of the Galactic Empire’s collapse, and one man’s plan to reignite civilization after years of barbarism.
Asimov’s characters tend be one-dimensional, but his stories are so entertaining that it’s easy to forgive that lapse.
10
Galápagos
by Kurt Vonnegut – 1985
Narrated by a ghost that watches over the million-year evolution of the last group of humans on the planet, Galápagos questions the merit of the human brain from an evolutionary perspective.
Some critics consider it one of Vonnegut’s worst novels, but I strongly disagree. It’s funny, clever, and asks questions most post-apocalyptic books skip.
11
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons – 1989
Few science fiction books can claim to use the same structure as The Canterbury Talesand still be kick-ass sci-fi, but Hyperion pulls it off.
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
12
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
by Harlan Ellison – 1967
Pissing off science fiction writers everywhere, Ellison wrote the story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in a single night in 1966, making virtually no changes from the first draft. He won a Hugo award for it, too. Bastard.
Credit: sci-fi.com
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