3rd place - The Hyperion Cantos.
I just read through the first two books, have you read Ilium and Olympos by the same author?
I liked those two much more, but they didn't have the unusual structure of the Hyperion Cantos.
The Revelation Space series is great. It's interstellar science fiction without FTL, soyou have to deal with time dilation etc. At the start of the first book chapters alternate between several characters who are years and lightyears apart. I liked the first book the most, but the others are also pretty good.
Neuromancer is also amazing. The original cyberpunk book. Rather gritty and pretty edgy but a very enjoyable read. The book doesn't explain any of its terms, leaving you to figure out what they mean from context, which I actually quite enjoyed.
I really like these ones, Revelation Space was one of the first really hard science fiction I ever read.
Neuromancer is one of the finest works of science fiction I've ever read, also I felt like everything except for the environment of cyberspace described the internet fairly well. Especially the consensual shared hallucination part.
Have any of you read the Poseiden's Children series at all?
Or the Quantum Thief?
The last person I recommended that one too found it very slow going and not terribly entertaining, but I really enjoyed it because it was very vibrant.
I second the rec's for The Expanse (starts with Leviathan Wakes), Hyperion Cantos, and Fire Upon the Deep. Loved them.
Ian Banks' "Culture" novels. If you like Dan Simmons' Hyperion, you'll enjoy these. There's like a dozen of these, but they all read 100% stand-alone so no need to read in order.
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi. Near-future scifi eco-dystopian.
The
Windup Girl was one of the hardest reads I ever made it through. The universe is just so... frustrating to me. Yeah sure, just throw away all this nice stuff we have and replace it with the Flintstones-esque woolly mammoth powered factories, not even joking. The ending was sort of satisfying, but Idk, the book wasn't really worth it in my opinion.
Fire Upon the Deep has my favorite alien species. I imagine them as packs of semi-sentient dogs, but they have snake necks and stuff, so really more like weasels with a dog body. No surprise that they end up forming basically the same bond with humanity as dogs, but... more mathy actually.
I'd recommend the book
Marooned in Realtime by the same guy. It's fairly good, a nice science fiction detective story with a fairly solid cast of characters.
The Expanse is great as a book series, and the television series of it done by the Syfy channel is actually top-notch as far as television adaptations go.
The Culture series is actually my favorite science fiction series that I've ever read. If you like them, then there's a book called "
Swallow the Sky" which I've seen compared to the series.
I wouldn't call them all that similar, but
Swallow the Sky is a far future story about an antique collector in a universe where all of humanity's history from Earth is gone. Kinda like
Bloom actually.
Bloom is good, but it's a bit of a pain to read due to the way that it's structured, big parts of it are serialized as a reporter's... not quite narrative, but like a description of a cameraman with notes about how the footage should be edited. It's a bit interesting, and the story is good, the setting is acceptable, but Will McCarthy isn't a terribly strong storyteller in my opinion.
More recently I've read
Starship's Mage, by Glynn Stewart is actually one of the better things I've come across with Amazon's kindle unlimited. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be published in a physical form yet, but the price was right.
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Topic: Fantasy / Sci-fi Books (Read 8476 times)