5/ This Time of Darkness, H M Hoover (juvenile / YA). In a somewhat similar vein. Imagine the movie Dredd, but without violence, following a pair of 12 year old kids trying to escape Mega City One. Still haunts me. Reread it a dozen times, as recently as last year.
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16/ The Integral Trees, Niven. Small scale hard science fiction adventure in a very interesting world.
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17/ Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement. The father of ultra hard SF talks about humans crash landing on a planet with gravity varies between 3g and 700g
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18/ Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. Humans communicate with the strange creatures that live on a neutron star.
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19/ Delta V, Daniel Suarez. Recommended by Neal Stephenson when I asked him at a signing what he was reading. I quite enjoyed it. Hard near-current-day SF dealing with Elon Musk, Bezos, etc. like figures, plus asteroid mining.
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20/ Slow River by Nicola Griffith. An offbeat story following one woman in the near future.
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21/ The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Somewhat dated, but given that they're really about human nature, not rockets or Mars, still perfectly timely. Read them, as with all Bradbury, as if they're poetry.
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22/ The Alien Years, by Silverberg. Inscrutable aliens arrive, do things. Humans try to deal, and ... kind of do? Kind of don't. In the end, the aliens are revealed to be ... quite alien.
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23/ The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. Light hearted fun.
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24/ The Steel Beach by John Varley. After the aliens kick us off Earth, the center of human civilization is the moon ...but with long life and near infinite wealth, how do we avoid boring ourselves to tears?
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... more later ; need to get some writing done on "Escape the City"https://escapefromthecity.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders …
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25/ Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle - the single best apocalypse / prepper novel ever written, with massive doses of Heinlein Competent Man trope
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26/ The Last Centurion, by John Ringo. Another apocalypse / prepper novel, and it doesn't suffer from most of the
@hradzka "Oh, John Ringo, no!" flawsShow this thread -
27/ Snowcrash, by Neal Stephenson. A tiny tiny bit dated now, but still a great exploration of memes, burbs, post-Westphalian systems, phyles, and more.
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28/ Metropolitan, by Walter Jon Williams. Hard to say if it's really SF, or some sort of urban fantasy, but it's a political novel set in a dieselpunk city that spans a world. Weird, and very good.
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29/ Dune, by Herbert, of course. Galactic Empires had been done before, but he was the first to do it seriously, and make us take it seriously. Also a very early entry in "ecological SF". Laid down the universe and tone that WH40k expanded on.
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30/ The Draka series, by S.M. Stirling. Ripping mil SF if a cruel, imaginative alt history.
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31/ Kiteworld by Keith Roberts. Set either in a future of this world, or - I think - an alternate sister world to ours, it follows a priesthood of kite riders who defend the borders of their realm from demons that may be weird technological incursions.
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32/ Downbelow Station C. J. Cherryh, follows politics at a vast space station / border town as political provocations between two superpowers turn into open war.
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33/ Timescape, by Gregory Benford. A cross-time-communication thriller combined with ecothriller.
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34/ Starship Troopers, by Heinlein. The great granddaddy of mil SF, which has only been equaled once. Almost everything else that follows in its footsteps gives the adventure, without any of the introspection.
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35/ The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. A response and rebuttal to Starship Troopers, and the only mil SF novel to ever equal or perhaps even exceed it, on its own terms.
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36/ Dhalgren, by Samuel Delaney. I hated it, and I didn't finish it, but there's something going on there.
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37/ There are Doors, by Gene Wolfe. Perhaps the easiest onramp to the often challenging master. Multiple universes, doors between then, maybe a goddess.
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38/ The World Next Door, Brad Ferguson. Set in an alternate history where World War III happened in the late 1960s, the children and grandchildren of the survivors, living a relatively placid agrarian existence, start to have dreams, dreams with lyrics from our universe...
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39/ Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson. Part of a triptych of three novels, each set 30 years in the future in the same California town, but in three very different futures.
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40/ Hyperion, Dan Simmons. The Canterbury Tales, in the future, when three factions of AIs are plotting against humans, but we don't know it and are more concerned with a time travelling murder both protecting time tombs. ...but then it gets weird.
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ok, back to writing the homesteading book more later
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41/ A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. A meditation on human nature, sin, the cyclical nature of history, all in the context of recovering lost science 1,000 years after a nuclear war.
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42/ Souls in the Great Machine, by Sean McMullen. very odd post apocalyptic novel where the exact nature of the apocalypse is unclear, but the remnant orbiting weapons can still be seen with the naked eye, and the mutated sea mammals still use their Call to lure humans to doom
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43/ Orion Shall Rise, by Poul Anderson. Again, set a thousand years after the nuclear war. There are several interestingly evolved future cultures, all vying for supremacy. I need to reread this.
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