Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
I’ve recently been reading a lot of science fiction. Most won’t be original to fans of the genre, but some people might be looking for suggestions, so in lieu of full blown reviews here’s super brief ratings on all of them. I might keep this updated over time, if so new books will go to the top.
A deepness in the sky (Verner Vinge)
scifiosity: 10⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 10⁄10
A deepness in the sky excels in its depiction of a spacefaring civilisation using no technologies we know to be impossible, a truly alien civilisation, and it’s brilliant treatment of translation and culture.
A fire upon the deep (Verner Vinge)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 9⁄10
recommended: 9⁄10
In a fire upon the deep, Vinge allows impossible technologies and essentially goes for a slightly more fantasy theme. But his depiction of alien civilisation remains unsurpassed.
Across Realtime (Verner Vinge)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 5⁄10
This collection of two books imagines a single exotic technology, and explores how it could be used, whilst building a classic thriller into the plot. It’s fine enough, but just doesn’t have the same depth or insight as his other works.
Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
scifiosity: 7⁄10
readability: 5⁄10
recommended: 5⁄10
Children of Time was recommended as the sort of thing you’d like if you enjoyed a deepness in the sky. Personally I found it a bit silly—I think because Tchaikovsky had some plot points he wanted to get to and was making up justifications for them, rather than deeply thinking about the consequences of his various assumptions.
The Martian (Andy Weir)
scifiosity: 10⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 9⁄10
This is hard sci-fi on steroids. Using only known or in development technologies, how could an astranaut survive stranded on Mars. It’s an enjoyable read, and you’ll learn a lot about science, but the characters sometimes feel one dimensional.
Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
This is more speculative sci-fi than the martian, but still contains plenty of hard science[1]. It focuses more on plot, but that’s not really Weir’s forte and the sciencey bits suffer as a result. Still enjoyable though.
Seveneves (Neil Stephenson)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
This is really two books. The first is a hard sci-fi, how do we build things rapidly in space using current technology. The second half is… kinda wierd, but still enjoyable. Stephenson is less good at the science than Weir, but better at plot, if a bit idiosyncratic[2].
Cryptonomicon (Neil Stephenson)
scifiosity: 9⁄10
readability: 7⁄10
recommended: 8⁄10
I was recommended this as a book that would incidentally teach you a lot about cryptography. That must have been targeted to complete newbies because I didn’t learn much I didn’t know already. Still it was enjoyable, if somewhat weird.
The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
scifiosity: 4⁄10
readability: 6⁄10
recommended: 5⁄10
This started off really well, but then got steadily sillier as the book progressed. I loved the depictions of descent into madness, the surrealism of the 3 body game, and the glimpses into Chinese culture as seen by Chinese. But the attempts to science-bullshit explanations at the end kind of ruined it for me.
Machineries of Empire (Yoon Ha Lee)
scifiosity: 4⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 8⁄10
I would classify this more as science fantasy than fiction, since the calendrical mechanics seem to be made up according to whatever the plot needs, but it’s a brilliantly written series I thoroughly enjoyed, if a bit difficult to follow at times.
Stories of Your Life + Exhalation (Ted Chiang)
scifiosity: 10⁄10
readability: 10⁄10
recommended: 10⁄10
These are both collections of short stories by Ted Chiang. All are great, but some are incredible. Chiang is an absolutely brilliant short story writer, and I could read his stuff all day.[3]
The Clan of The Cave Bear + The Valley Of Horses (Jean M. Auel)
scifiosity: 7⁄10
readability: 9⁄10
recommended: 6⁄10
Auel does well at imagining an extremely alien, yet still human, culture, and vividly depicting a prehistorical world. It loses points on scientific accuracy, silly psuedoscience, and her strange obsession with the size of Jondalar’s penis. The first book is better than its sequel.
Startide Rising[4] (David Brin)
scifiosity: 5⁄10
readability: 9⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
This is a really great read set in a fun universe, but it doesn’t actually have much in the way of interesting concepts . Far more science fantasy than science fiction.
Oryx and Crake (Margeret Atwood)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
This is a book which is kind of silly, but perfectly prepared to own it. I enjoyed its deliberately cavalier depiction of a world that’s both far more advanced than our own, but also falling to pieces through sheer apathy.
All the birds in the Sky (Charlie Jane Anders)
scifiosity: 2⁄10
readability: 9⁄10
recommended: 8⁄10
This is an even sillier book depicting a world that’s falling apart, and with a far sillier plot. Yet for all that it remains a beautiful story, well worth reading.
Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
An enjoyable exploration of childhood genius and ruthlessness.
Hyperion + The Fall Of Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
scifiosity: 5⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 10⁄10
Again, this is far more science fantasy than science fiction, but is an incredible literary work. Simmons masters the ability to write in multiple genres and voices within the framework of one cohesive story.
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow)
scifiosity: 8⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 5⁄10
This does fairly well at exploring meaning and purpose in a post scarcity, post mortality world. It’s also well written and consistent. But for some reason I just feel meh about it.
Barrayar (Lois McMaster Bujold)
scifiosity: 2⁄10
readability: 8⁄10
recommended: 7⁄10
This is really just a classic court intrigue/civil war novel which just happens to be set on a distant planet with somewhat Victorian cultural norms. But it’s a good one. I haven’t read any other books in the series, and probably should have read them in chronological order.
Permutation City (Greg Egan)
scifiosity: 10⁄10
readability: 4⁄10
recommended: 8⁄10
To be blunt, Egan is not a great author, and this book is mostly his excuse to elucidate some ideas in philosophy. He gets much of it wrong, but enough of it right that it’s worth reading if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
- ^
Although I’m pretty sure astrophages violate the second law of thermodynamics.
- ^
See my analysis of one of the book’s major plot points here. Essentially spoiler free.
- ^
In particular one of the things that Chiang does really well is take some conceit and explore how people would react to it. What would it be like if the cosmology of the bible was actually real? What about if the world was clearly created 6000 years ago? How about if God, heaven, hell, and angels were all well understood and regularly impacted our lives?
- ^
I mistakenly started with this book, which is the second in the Uplift series, but you’ll probably want to start with Sundiver.
Do Metropolitan Man!
Also, here’s a bunch of ratfic to read and review, weighted by the number of 2022 Lesswrong survey respondents who read them:
I greatly enjoyed metropolitan man, but feel like web serials, especially fan fiction, are their own genre and deserve their own post.
Great post. I’ve been trying to find SF reviews that aren’t just blurbs to get an idea about what’s going on with the scene currently. With the exception of Tchaikovsky, most authors whose names keep popping up seem to still be ones who started publishing back in the 20th century. Unfortunately, I already know about most of the books on this list. So I’m going to write a wishlist of books I’ve heard of but don’t know that much about and would like to see reviews of,
Radix series by AA Attanasio
Starfishers series by Glen Cook
The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler
The Truth Machine by James Halperin
Appleseed by John Clute
Light and Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
Gridlinked by Neal Asher
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
Silo series by Hugh Howey
Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone
The Last Astronaut by David Welligton
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
XX by Rian Hughes
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
Virtua by Karl Olsberg
Recommended, but only the print version. It is absolutely pointless to read it as an ebook—don’t even try. But as a print book it’s really something.
Outstanding series. Strongly recommended. Classic space opera, philosophical exploration of identity and personhood, excellently written. Some of the best sf I’ve read in a long time.
More good old-fashioned space opera. Not quite as satisfying as the previous, but beautifully written. Also recommended.
I enjoyed several books of this. I think it keeps going? But I have no intention of finding out. I read just enough of this series to have been satisfied with how much of it I have read.
I absolutely could not stand this book. It seemed like it was written specifically to annoy and disgust the reader. Mission successful, if so—I didn’t even get a quarter of the way through it.
Mostly of historical interest (it’s mentioned in the Sequences, and it’s somewhat interesting to see what sorts of things people were envisioning, back then, as hoped-for outcomes of successfully developing and spread rationality techniques). Readable enough, but not exceptional, otherwise.
Might be worth posting this as it’s own question for greater visibility
Very well-crafted world. Some might dislike the robotic narrator, some might enjoy it as a fun layer in a complex plot puzzle. High scifiosity.
Surreal & unusual novels. Good tone & imagery. Unlike Radch, i think this is more about style & perspective than a style layer over a intricate, hidden plot layer.
I read a lot of scifi, but i haven’t gotten this obsessed with a book since Green Mars! Like Radch, a unreliable narrator presents a intricate world. Set on Earth four centuries in the future, it follows the political, technological, & dialectic trajectories of a culture that has mutated in strange & fascinating ways from today. Try it for the economics of future aircraft & the vivid soliloquies. Avoid it if you dislike books that frontload worldbuilding & characters, where the plot is confusing until the end. I love it & i have another post about it here.
I found this short book very fun & cool. About spies in a extraordinarily spectacular time-travel war. Does feature some very confusing plot points that i still don’t understand.
Fantastic, much appreciated. It looks like you read scifi with much the same lens I do (very aware of scientific and logical realism), which makes your reviews much more valuable to me than sifting through amazon reviews. I agree with your reviews pretty closely for the maybe 1⁄2 of your list I’ve read.
I’ll just mention a few of my favorites from a similar perspective and try to not spend too much time describing why I love them so despite their minor shortcomings.
Charlie Stross is amazing for actual futurism. So is Cory Doctorow, but Stross also happens to be a crack storyteller, with the pacing, characterization, and brevity that turns an interesting idea into a bestseller.
Stross’s Accelerando is a must-read for any aspiring futurist- which means anyone working on alignment. It’s not as good a story, as an early work and collection of connected short stories, but some details of his near-future history toward AGI takeover are highly plausible and non-obvious.
His Glass House is simultaneously utopian speculation, and a micro-lens on current gender politics. And a rollicking tampered-memories adventure. And a touching, resonant romance. But no real AI involvement or major insights on possible futures. And low on the science rating. I recommend it to non-scifi people since it’s so good as a story and occasional mind=blown moments.
The Fractal Prince is also, IMO, a staggering achievement; a story told so beautifully that each paragraph is almost a poem. This doesn’t make it easy to follow, but surely you like a little challenge? I found it captivating. It’s not about AI as much as brain uploads, and hierarchical self-slavery on an epic scale. It has some dramatic departures into quantum magic, but for the most part its world and plot is driven by theoretically realistic technologies of brain uploading and editing. But it’s a world sculpted by poets as well as described by one; it is strange and beautiful first, and a study in futurism second. Few insights for societal or AGI alignment, but holy heck what a book. The fact that this was the author’s first publication is part of what makes me so puzzled at how he pulled it off.
I’m noticing that, despite having read everything I can find that tries to treat AGI seriously, very little of it has any relevance for alignment, beyond helping with predicting societal impacts of emerging technologies or mostly-aligned parahuman AGIs. I think some good realistic fictional stories centering on alignment might be really helpful. If anyone with more talent and time for fiction wants to take a swing, I’ve got ideas for plots that could both carry a story as well as get the reader into some of the important alignment logic.
re: The Fractal Prince (really the whole Quantum Thief trilogy), I may be biased, but when I first read it I had 2 reactions: (1) this is the most targeted-at-my-ingroup novel I have ever read (2) nobody outside of my ingroup will get the kajillion references flying around, since Hannu Rajaniemi never bothered footnoting / defending any of them (unlike say what Peter Watts did with Blindsight), so people will think he’s just making up technobabble when he’s not, which means he’ll be generally underappreciated despite the effusive praise (which will be of the generic “he’s so smart” variety), which made my heart sink.
But Gwern not only got it (unsurprisingly), he articulated it better than I ever could, so thanks Gwern:
Rajaniemi confirmed that Gwern “got it” like nobody else did:
I admire Rajaniemi for pulling it off as you said, but I’m somehow not that surprised. He’s bright (mathematical physics PhD) and has been working at writing-as-craft for a while:
I personally got the Quantum Thief trilogy because I’d been blown away by Stross’ Accelerando, wanted more, and saw Stross say of Rajaniemi: “Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am. The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”
Cool list, I’m going to start reading Ted Chiang.
Some thoughts
Permutation City
”To be blunt, Egan is not a great author, and this book is mostly his excuse to elucidate some ideas in philosophy.”
You are being, if anything, too nice to Greg Egan’s writing here. I think 4⁄10 is extremely charitable.
But if you enjoyed the hard sci-fi elements you’ll probably also enjoy “Diaspora”. Even the errata for this book make for a fun read and show you the level of care Egan puts into trying to make the science realistic.
The Three Body Problem
The two other books in the series (particularly The Dark Forest) are very interesting and have a much wider scope which gives Liu a lot of space for world-building. There’s also a fair bit of commentary on societal cultural evolution which you might enjoy if you enjoyed the non-western perspective of the first book.
A fair warning about the readability of The Dark Forest. Liu’s editor somehow let him keep in some crushingly boring material.
Death’s End is extremely wide in scope and faster paced. But I think you might hate the more fantastical sci-fi elements.
For me the problem is that the good bits of the Three Body Problem were the Cultural Revolution, the dynamics of political pressure being put on the science base, the virtual world computer game, and the tough guy, conspiracy theory obsessed bejing taxi drive who is always smoking and wise-cracking.
I thought the last 1/3rd of the book was nonsense. The technologies premised to enable some of the things that happened earlier in the book also make the whole plan redundant, as those tools could be equally applied with much less effort and subtlety to just brute force an immediate victory. Somehow (by the way books work) I just don’t see the sequels going back to the good stuff that was used to set the scene, but instead charging on with the aliens.
The sequels obviously include a lot of stuff relating to aliens, but a big focus is on how human group react to the various dangerous scenarios they now face. Much of the books are concerned with how human culture evolves given the circumstances, with numerous multi-generational time-skips.
I found the series to be a slog until about halfway through The Dark Forest, when jura Yhb Wv ragrerq pelbfgnfvf naq jbxr hc gjb uhaqerq lrnef yngre. After that, the series ramped up, and I couldn’t stop reading.
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Maybe I’ll give The Three Body Problem another chance.
Updating to say that I just finished the short story “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang and it was absolutely exceptional!
I was immediately compelled to share it with some friends who are also into sci-fi.
Some recommendations of mine:
Inverted World—A surreal world with a very strong mystery that pulls you in. Ending is unfortunately not fully satisfying.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Gene Wolf) - A very engrossing story that pulls you in and keeps you interested. Not much in the way of scifi cool technology or fancy concepts, but still very good.
The Stars my Destination (also published under the name “tiger tiger”) - This is a very fun book, the author seems to be possessed by some kind of madness and I imagine them typing the book at the same furious pace it demands to be read.
Lord of Light—Very Science-Fantasy. But if you enjoyed the first Dune book and are looking for more in that vein then I would recommend that you read this in preference to the Dune sequels.
Raft (Stephen Baxter) - A really interesting story about the politics of oppression, where its all free trade, but one side needs to buy food. The backdrop is a weird looking and strange world that makes enough surface level sense to be fun. (Warning: This is the first story in a “sequence”, I would recommend against reading the others, which I thought were bad).
I see that A Deepness in the Sky is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, but was written later. Does it make any impact which one I read first? Deepness seems to be more interesting to me, but I generally I prefer to read things in the suggested order.
It’s a prequel in the loosest possible sense. In theory they could be set in two different universes and it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
You’re O.K. to read in publication order.
I read A Deepness in the Sky first, and haven’t yet gotten around to A Fire Upon the Deep, and I enjoyed the former quite a lot.
I feel like you’re not giving enough credit to Greg Egan since he came up with all the philosophy himself.
Possibly, but some of the missteps just feel too big to ignore. Like what on earth is going on in the second half of the book?
I’m in the camp that Seveneves is three books: disaster thriller to start, space-based intrigue in the middle, and fantastical science fiction at the end.
Agree that this is a cool list, thanks, excited to come back to it.
I just read Three Body Problem and liked it, but got the same sense where the end of the book lost me a good deal and left a sour taste. (do plan to read sequels tho!)
I thought the sequels were far better than the first book. But I have seen people with the opposite opinion.
A Deepness in the Sky feels like the author know he can’t write female characters, but knows that women ought to feature in the plot, so is going really out of the way to avoid showing their viewpoint … at least, in a direct way.
There are a lot of surprise plot twists, so its hard to expand on this without plot spoliers.
Oh (not a spoiler) the second narrator is obviously not being entirely truthful. The book gets a lot better when you realise they;re supposed to be read as an unreliable narrator. (So, sure, its communications intercept of an alien species approximately rendered into English by an intelligence analyst who has been enslaved by Space Nazis … someone, somewhere, might be lying here...)
That’s totally a spoiler :-), but for me it was one of the most brilliant twists in the book. You have this stuff that feels like the author is doing really poor sci-fi, and then it’s revealed that the author is perfectly aware of that and is making a point about translation.