The 10 Best Science Fiction Books I've Ever Read

Neal Stephenson, of course, is the author of Anathem, not Neal Stepson. Let’s just say that proofreading has never been my strength.

Just bought this after listening to your review !

I would like to see a video of your favorite Literary Novels. Thank you for a very thoughtful and articulate presentation.

Any list with the book of the new sun is a good list

Now, this is interesting. List after list after list features many of novels, series and authors I like, and two much raved about which i don't: Herbert's Dune and Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. I am willing to entertain the notion that I might have read them at the wrong state of mind, in the wrong moment, whatever, and that I should give them another chance.

I did and was hooked

😎The Quantum Thief
by Rajaniemi is Amazingly Bonkers🤯👍🏾

I also hated Consider Phlebas. Excession might be my favourite Iain M Banks book.

thank you💜

I really regret not being able to share The Dispossessed with my Dad. The book really speaks to the spiritual basis of both our politics and would have helped bridge some of our differences.

She would have been right up his street too. He loved both her kind of science fiction and her style of prose, was an anthropologist himself and had an interest in both Jung and spirituality. She must have passed him by as I never heard him mention her or saw any of her books around the house.

Funnily enough, their life-spans almost exactly matched. He was three days older than her and their deaths were a few months apart. On top of that, he was an anthropolgist with a science-fiction writer for a dad and she was the opposite. I wonder if the latter coincindence may even have helped him to reconcile some of the ambiguous feelings towards his dad and his writings. In a way, Le Guin expresses some of what my grandfather was trying to say in a language my father would have understood and found appealing.

I would recommend anything by Robert Silverberg, who is a great writer, but especially Dying Inside.

No Ender, no Hyperion?

Fucker, Herbert and Heinlein and Asimov established sci-fi!

I get that you're listing stand alone books not series, but whenever I think of SciFi the first thing that always comes to mind is Asimov's Foundation trilogy. It's still to this day my favorite sci-fi, infinitely re-readable and thought provoking, and of course nostalgic as the first non-fantasy fiction that I read and loved.

'Prefect' by Alistair Reynolds is a superb scifi book. set in his own universe created by other books, but this is a standalone novel and you dont need to have read any of his other books. Superb book and story. One of my all time best books, not just scifi.

"Prose suffer in the 2nd book of the remembrance trilogy"

The prose were pretty bad in the first, so...

lee-ooh suh SHEN maybe

Startide Rising is just about my favorite, by David Brin.

My recommendation is to go back to the great classic Russian and French writers. Just pick up one from Russia and one from France or even a single story. BTW, I originaly wanted to marry a Chinese woman and live in China, Years went by, and I set up a job as a lecturer at Tai Chung Univ in Taiwan. I was saving up money to go there, when I got an offer in the US I couldn't refuse...by staying in the US I met a wonderful, Difficult, amazing Japanese woman....and so, I have lived here in Japan for a long time. However, however my oldest and closest friend married a woman from China while in post grad studies at Univ of Ga, and my nephew married an ABC artist.

Yes I consider the Space Trilogy is excellent!; Remembrance of Earth's past IS EXcellent!! Yes! Ursula's Left Hand is Excellent. I know nothing about Butler, Dune for 3 volumes is too much. I know nothing about the New Sun series. Canticle of Leibowitz is a classic dystopia, I know nothing of Player of Games this sounds like a poor man's Glass Bead Game, I know nothing of Anathem, I have heard of The Dispossessed, but not read. I should probably check Wiki,

Good Video. I recommend Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

the dispossessed is straight up garbage - it's not even scifi it's more like politics and fantasy. Maybe read some real scifi like Children of Time

Read the novel "Grass" by Sherri S. Tepper...simply amazing...plot, world building, character development...just wonderful.

Thank you Jared. Nice list. I suggest reading Ira Levin's much underrated, This Perfect Day.

Really liked this video but may I make a request? Can you have on display the book you are talking about? If you lose track you can’t pause and go back because the progress bar will reveal all the books to come and ruin the whole show. Thank you

Imagine being such a bigot that having religious values stops you from reading a book. People are so hateful nowadays its insane.

Dune the gate way to my science fiction journey still haven't found a book that beats it😂

No Vernor Vinge or Cordwainer Smith. Can't be the best top ten IMNSHO!

Use of weapons by Banks is better. Great ending.

Player of Games winds up on most of these lists, and I just don't get it. If I started reading Banks with this one I never would have read another. Kept waiting for it to get good, waiting for the protagonist to be someone I gave a damn about, but it never happened. Best thing about this book is it eventually ended.

great list! i am so love this vid! i alwyas loved these types of stuff cuz our culture does not have sci-fi so it is rly interesting what u say about these books! soo very interesting, i rly wish i was a native eng speaker so i could enjoy them 😮

you don't have to read him in translation, but it is much easier I admit :)

Interesting video but we have rather different tastes in SF. I started reading the stuff in 4th grade and decided to go to college for engineering in 7th.

However I find it interesting that you have The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin as #1. I have read it multiple times. With all of the blather this society has and has had for decades about socialism, capitalism and communism this is an important, interesting and entertaining work displaying socio-economic dichotomies.

But as a comparison work I would recommend Voyage from Yesteryear by James P Hogan. Somewhat similar in background theme but wildly different story and conclusion. Though that is the problem with The Dispossessed, there is no conclusion to the economics.

I haven't read too much Sci fi, but "The Wanderer" by Fritz Leiber, which won a Hugo Award in 1965, made a huge impression on me. I liked it as much as "Solaris", which I also love.
"The Big Time" is another great Leiber book.

Yay Bulter!! She is my favorite

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

You will probably enjoy some more Culture books. Great list and with some recommendations I didn't know yet. Have you read anything by Alistair Reynolds? And another all time favorite of mine even if it's quite dark, the Gap series by Donaldson

Try "Geometry for Ocelots"

Use of weapons is probably better than pPlayer of Games. Probably the best one of the series.

You talked about humanity shooting itself in the foot. Sometimes it is broadly humanity, but often it is a very few who manage to take power under false pretenses, and manage to disenfranchise large portions of the population. Isn't this the way it happened again and again in the twentieth century? These despots seem to embody a mob insanity that they manage to propagate into the social system of their sphere of influence. They induce a significant portion of their subjects to at least claim to view the world as they do, and many of those subjects actually act out the insane notions of the despot.

Good people should be brave people. Good people should be fair people. Kant's idea of the universal law should apply. Instead of worrying about our own safety and those of our family, we should perhaps worry more about the safety of society and the species when things become so dour.

Perhaps I'm just showing my age (north of 70), but the old masters still seem best to me. Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, Heinlein. Nevertheless you've given me some titles to try.

Your videos have inspired into reading Le Guin for the first time. Both Left Hand and Dispossessed were exceptionally good. She's now counted among my favourite authors.

From your list I get the impression that you haven't read a lot of science fiction. You didn't include any of the SF greats, except maybe LeGuin(I personally don't care much for her books) who is far less relevant than writers like Silverberg, Blish, Bester, Asimov, Bradbury, PKDick and others. C.S. Lewis? Seriously? Is he even a proper SF author? His books are more like Fantasy than anything else. He and his buddy Tolkien would go to the Interplanetary Society meetings and make Fun of Arthur Clarke and the more 'science oriented' members. He doesn't belong in SF, imo.
Dune, yeah, it's kind of a 'must' in any of these lists, right? BTW, weren't you listing your top 10 'books'? How come there's so many trilogies or multiple series? Not very focused, I guess...
Octavia Butler was a great writer, I agree with you on that.
The rest are contemporary bestsellers, not really my cup of tea; not 'classics' in any case. And the chinese guy, from what I hear, seems a bit overrated. The translations certainly make It hard to evaluate his talent as a writer.
Anyway, I suggest you try looking at a wider variety of authors, mainly those who actually made SF what It is today. Yeah, the older guys.

Genuinely surprised to not see Ender's Game or The Expanse Saga on here

Oh no not christian ideas. Anything but christian ideas /s

I'm interested in your take on Vinge's stuff

Would love to hear your top 10 horror books.