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Hasn't heard of When Women were dragons before....

I think it helps to relate to Murderbot itself and not everyone will. I just loved it from the first, and found it funny as hell. Murderbot simultaneously finding humans disgusting and baffling while needing to protect them. Developing relationships despite itself.And ART is just a wonderful foil.

Some of those books, I love. Others I need to read, so will look at all of those unread

A common theme, like for example, very good science, or breathless war scenes, or particularly societally aware, or relatable, rounded characters, or intriguing nature, or... something each author does well and that was the reason for their books becoming your faves.

A debut that really spoke to me this year was "The Forest on the Edge of Time", one of my favourite time travel stories.

Thank you! (Have already read a few; put the others on TBR list.) Your criteria are similar to mine. 🙂🙂🙂

With those first 3 I was gonna recommend you check out echopraxia, because it gets really weird with the concept of "intelligence", but the guy who wrote lt might be trying to make people sad.

Have you read - Saturn Run - John Sandford.

I deeply love The Left Hand of Darkness (and pretty much everything else Ursula K. Le Guin has written)

Sure! Send me an e-mail through my contact address on my website?

My main rule is that if you create a fictional world with massive structural injustices, the stories you write about it have to include victory against those injustices, or at least meaningful progress in that direction. I’m looking to sci-fi for hope, not despair.

Read a couple, but too dark.

I’ve read bits and pieces but should really return to that

I enjoy a lot of classic SF and I'd like to argue with that last bit but... you're really right Even most authors who were trying not to say anything bigoted were often leaning on ridiculous stereotypes PKD's least sexist stories are probably the ones with no women in them at all

The various bits of mass market sci fi I read as a kid, like the Battletech books, had so many women in leadership or main character roles that (between that and Captain Janeway) it didn't occur to my autistic ass until later in life that not all media was that way.

Can't believe nobody in this thread has recommended Aliette de Bodard! Culturally Vietnamese sci-fi worlds with mostly women. Goes hard for awe and wonder and sweetness in a lot of the same ways as Becky Chambers, whose work a lot of people here seem to like.

Ann Leckie did such a great job with those.

Dude The Sparrow is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever read

A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet and Record Of A Spaceborn Few certainly fill the "spaceship" criteria!

Pretty sure I’ve read everything she’s written

...to the orbital adventures and terrifying AIs of the latest, when they fully realize that the world isn’t as simple as they thought, and that they must define their own future: each book portrays a stage in a child’s growing awareness. Start on any book, but Water and Food are the most mature.

No spaceships but lots of commentary (and jokes). bsky.app/profile/sste...

Runs very much afoul of the “shouldn’t have vast amounts of sexism” criterion, I’m afraid.

You would love Gareth Powell

Iain Banks?

Iain M Banks’s Culture novels?

It’s a beautiful and haunting book

So I'm guessing Fire Upon the Deep hit big with you.

I think one reason I like the Culture books is even while they have...oh lord a LOT of dark themes, they are, inherently, incredibly optimistic. They posit a universe where things get better, sometimes painfully. I read sci fi to escape, and right now, real world is dark enough.

I’ve gotten a lot a great reading by following your various recommendations that you’ve posted here. Thank you!

Thanks! Glad you said that about sexism and classic sci-fi. I get sick to my tummy reading such stuff. And again, when men today praise such a sick-tummy-book. Convinced me to have a closer look at your lists, I might find a new friend 💫

Adrian Tchaikovsky is your man here.

Since I don’t think she’s on your radar, I’d suggest the Terra Ignota books by Ada Palmer. She’s a history professor who apples that knowledge to impeccable world building. No cool spaceships in this future, though. Space travel is hard.

I thought The Interdepencency series was a fun space opera. People definitely acting like people.

I read a sci-fi book by a pretty big contemporary name where the first section was this incredible, breathless, terrifying hard sci-fi masterpiece and the rest of the book was rendered completely implausible by the author seemingly being unable to understand that humans get horny a lot.

Three-Body Problem was too dark for me to enjoy.

Just finished Earth 7. It was moving, tender, and very humane.

Oh. I've read and at least liked all of those! Have you tried any of Elizabeth Bear's White Space books? The first is Ancestral Night. They can be read out of order, though, if you prefer the description of Machine or A Folded Sky. I recommend publication order, though.

Love book lists!!

Thank you for this, I use things like this for Christmas shopping :)

Me too

I enjoyed A Psalm for the Wild Built (and the sequel). Haven't read the other series -- will take a look!

Thanks for the list. I wound up getting Kill Cat Kill SAT on audiobook (and then discovering a BOGOF sale at libro.fm and getting 2 more audiobooks. Heh.)

Thanks for sharing! Always happy to find good sci-fi picked by someone who actually knows space 😄

Will do!

Thanks, Katie--this is great!

I think the audiobook is excellent.

my to-read pile just got dangerously taller, science fiction lists are the best kind of trouble

Please report back after you have read it 🙏🏼

Currently plowing through Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books and I suspect that you’d like them, based on your suggestions. (Disclaimers: I’m only 2.5 books in to a very long series and, I guess you’re s’posed to read them in a different order than they were published so, research needed)

In college, I shared a crummy off-campus house with a microbiologist. One day, reading a wildly-popular non-technical book in his field, he silently got up, got his hammer and a spike, and nailed the book to the woodwork framing the living room archway.

the number of people who are fully up on the science but can also devote themselves to writing it up for normals (like me) must be a very small number? i wish i could either do it or pay someone to do it full-time.

This is exactly right, for me as well. I simply can't read any of the almost-certainly-excellent books about climate change or water resources because it's just too close to my own field. It's challenging enough keeping up with the actual science.

Anyway if you like books about spaceships and science fiction more broadly, check out my list of recommendations here and let me know what you think! bookshop.org/shop/astroka...