Good science fiction always makes us think.
And great science fiction entertains the hell out of us while doing so.
So here are the five best sci-fi books of recent times that I enjoyed.
Number one: Ready Player One
Okay, it’s a low hanging fruit, but Ready Player One does deserve all the praise.
Ernest Cline’s novel gained a cult status immediately after release because of its 80’s
and 90’s nostalgia.
It’s basically a love letter to the childhood of many of us.
And it came at a right time.
I mean there are new Predator, Jurassic Park and King Kong movies coming up.
We’re living a zero-lite version of the past.
But the greatness of Ready Player One goes beyond style and tone.
It’s not just about the past.
It’s about an accurate prediction of the future as I’ve seen.
Virtual reality will change our lives more than Apple and Facebook combined.
The barrier between the real world and the virtual will slowly vanish.
And it’s not necessarily a dystopia.
It will create a new kind of social network between people, and bring them closer through
their shared experience.
And unlike how it was presented in Wall-E, gamers are probably going to be the most athletic
people.
Oh, and one more thing; the film is fun, but the book is the real deal.
Number Two: Six Wakes
This one was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula award for Best Novel.
The story is set on a generational starship, taking humans to their new home.
But the crew is made up of clones.
In this future, people take backups of their minds, and when they die, those backups are
restored into new, young bodies cloned from their own DNA.
It’s an interesting way of solving aging and mortality, and the question is obvious:
Is a copy of you, really you?
But it wouldn’t be good sci-fi without a fast-paced plot.
So when six clones wake up from restored and outdated backups, we have a murder mystery
on our hands.
One of them killed the others, but nobody remembers anything.
So basically, this is a closed room, whodunnit, murder mystery, in space, with clones.
It’s a recipe for greatness.
Number three: The Themis Files Well, technically this is a trilogy of books,
but it’s one big story.
And it’s another debut from a previously unknown writer who writes as pragmatically
as Arthur C. Clarke, and as thrilling as Michael Crichton.
In the story, a girl named Rose discovers a giant metal hand, buried under the Earth.
It’s a thousands of years old, made out of unknown metal and has strange symbols inscribed
in it.
This bizarre artifact remains a mystery seventeen years later, but Rose became obsessed with
it.
When she realizes that it has various other components scattered around the world, the
hunt begins to assemble this creature.
And the hunters are so obsessed whether they could, they never stop asking whether they
should.
It’s also about what happens if we have to bend our biological features to adjust
to new technologies.
Say no more.
Number Four: Artemis
It’s a new novel from Andy Weir.
If his name rings a bell, he took the literary world by storm a few years ago with his novel:
The Martian.
A year after that, it was turned into a movie that became a blockbuster hit.
He became an overnight success, but there was a little doubt whether he’s a rising
star or a one-trick pony.
Well, the answer is kinda both, but in a good way.
In Artemis we get the same tricks he used in The Martian but in a fresh new way.
This time we’re in for a heist story on the Moon.
But it’s the same kind of highly detailed scientific puzzle, and it takes you by force
all over again.
Number Five: Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer’s book is a gamechanger in sci-fi.
It doesn’t just turn everything on its head in the genre, it’s also something unprecedented
in literature.
We follow an expedition of investigators tasked with exploring Area X, a mysterious dome that
has popped up out of nowhere.
Area X defies explanation: nobody knows its origins or what happened to the people who
lived in there.
But instead of focusing on characters, VanderMeer doesn’t even give them names, and instead
of focusing on a story, he’s more interested in mood.
What’s new in Annihilation, and what makes it great, is that it strips away objectivity
as nobody in the team can agree what they see.
It seems like Area X presents itself differently to everyone.
And that feeling of reality slipping away and our perception is being unreliable sets
the tone for the horror of the uncanny.
Annihilation is a spiritual sci-fi like never before.
I hope you will enjoy these and if you have any suggestions for me, I can’t wait to
hear your favorite sci-fi books.