75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time - What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?
This is a damned fine list.
Three Readings and a Festival | Unbound
More on that event with Brian Aldiss I was reminiscing about: that was the first time that Kate unveiled part of her Purple People book:
Jeremy insisted this would be an excellent opportunity for me to read an excerpt from Purple People, and so invited me onto the stage with those illustrious, wordy wizards to share an early indigo excerpt. I was quite literally shaking that night (even more than a talking tree, ho ho), but all was jolly. I read my piece without falling off the stage, and afterwards, folk made some ace and encouraging comments.
Now the book is being crowdfunded for publication and you can take part. It’s currently 59% funded …come on, people, let’s make this happen!
Related links
The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist
I’ve read 16 of these and some of the others are on my to-read list. It’s a pretty good selection, although the winking inclusion of God Emperor Of Dune by the SEO guy verges on trolling.
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
The other side of egoism | A Working Library
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times
A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.
Related posts
After the end
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
Tragedy
Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.
Living Through The Future
William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
Nice
The meaning of life.
Machine supplying
Book recommendations.