A sci-fi novel for every month of the year
Recommendations for someone getting into the genre.
This past xmas my brother revealed to me that despite recommending me amazing fantasy novels all my life, he had never read science fiction. Used books are cheap, so I figured I’d give him a present that lasted all year long.
This is in no way a “best” or exhaustive list. These are the 12 books that came to mind when recommending science fiction to a newcomer. There’s a good mix of newer work and older sci-fi canon. The older stuff I did include is mostly offbeat in a way that’s not just deadbeat traditional sci-fi.
January: Blindsight by Peter Watts (Firefall)
I think January is a good month for reflection on our pasts and aspirations to our future, and that’s Blindsight to a tee.
Blindsight is… well, Blindsight is blindsight. It is very uniquely its own. To be honest, not much happens in the book. That’s a weird statement to make considering it’s a story about first contact during the end of society. The setup is that a comet in the Kuiper belt has begun transmitting radio signals, and it’s up to our plucky crew of adventures to go out there and sort this mess out. Who are these adventures you ask? Well let’s see….
We’ve got our main character, who is a perfect empath thanks to extremely invasive surgery and cybernetics which have robbed him of his own emotion.
A combat specialist who controls a fleet of robo-grunts.
A linguist with Dissociative Identity Disorder, so four linguists I guess.
A relatively normal pair of doctor-biologists.
A fucking vampire.
An artificial intelligence named “The Captain.”
I don’t want to give too much more away, but I chose it to head up this list because what Blindsight lacks in prose and rhythm, it makes up for in ideas and batshit insanity. That’s not to say the prose or rhythm are bad at all, they just aren’t on par with the heavier hitters on this list.
Blindsight is a compelling exploration of consciousness and transhumanism. I don’t think I’ve ever thought so much after reading a book. If you’re curious at all about the role of consciousness and its place in the universe, this is the book for you.
February: Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse)
February and The Expanse go together because it’s a weird, liminal month, and Leviathan Wakes is a weird, liminal book. Also, you’re going to immediately want to read the sequels so I figured I’d give you the rest of the year.
You’ve likely heard of this series, and for good reason. It’s a sci-fi epic done right. This is the first book in a trilogy of trilogies exploring humanity’s exit from the solar system, and how it responds to the help and hurt it gets along the way. The series also sticks the landing, which is hard to do after 9 books.
I don’t want to say too much about this book, save that there’s a twist in the middle of the novel that sets the scene for the 8 that come after it. So if you’re thinking about dropping the book and haven’t made it to Eros yet, give it a little longer. The character work, dialogue, and world-building are all fantastic.
My one criticism is also the series greatest strength, which is that it manages to place the same group of people at the center of every major civilization-changing event for several decades. Though this decision flies in the face of believability, it pays off for the level of comfort and attachment we achieve with the main cast. The two authors also bring in lots of interesting side characters, which lend needed color and perspective.
March: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time)
This is hands down my favorite book of the past 10 years. I put it in March because it’s really all about re-growth, re-emergence, and recovery, like spring! There are two sides to this narrative: Human, and Spider.
Yeah, you read that right. This book is about hyper-intelligent sentient space spiders. The setup is such:
Humanity has reached the height of gods, and decide to engineer more life in its image. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Predictably, conflict and terrorism rip society asunder and puts humanity into a pretty grim situation.
Meanwhile, a terrorist attack sabotages a landing craft containing apes infected with a genetically engineered “uplift” virus that speeds the process of evolution. All the apes die. The portia spiders freeloading on the craft, however, survive- along with a host of other insects like ants. The uplift virus sets to work on its new and unfamiliar hosts, to very bizarre results.
Tchaikovsky isn’t kidding about the “time” element of the title- the story is told in small segments of narrative often spaced centuries apart. Alongside the development of spider civilization, we also follow the doomed wanderings of humanity’s last-gasp of hope: a cobbled-together ark ship. It’s not an easy narrative structure and he pulls it off without a hitch.
I can’t recommend this book enough, you won’t want to put it down. A lot of research obviously went into the various biologies featured. You’ll probably learn something about ants and spiders in between the space opera. The sequel is also excellent, well researched, and worth your time.
April: Semiosis by Sue Burke (Semiosis Duology)
Spring has sprung! With the flowers in full bloom and the scent of pollen on the air, why not read a book about a sentient plant grooming a far-flung human remnant into its personal attendant species.
Wait what?
Semiosis is a solid book that starts out with a WILD premise and does a decent job of exploring it. Similar to Blindsight, You really want to read this one for the ideas, not the execution. While the prose is readable, the super-intelligent alien plant ends up sounding like just a normal dude.
To Sue Burke’s credit, I don’t know if there’s a writer alive who could shed anthropomorphism in order to inhabit the soul of a sentient plant. I really admire her for what is ultimately a spirited and satisfying exploration of a thrilling concept.
May: Daemon by Daniel Suarez (Daemon Series)
May is another transitional month, and Daemon is a book about one hell of a transition.
Daemon is butting up very aggressively on the “near future” part of “near future sci-fi.” Everything that happens in the book is conceivable with modern day technology, and is more poignant than ever with the recent media fascination over AGI.
And it was written in 2006.
Daemon kicks off with the death of billionaire-genius-CEO-and-founder of not-blizzard (remember, this is written before Blizzard started to suck). The twist is that this crazy software prodigy left behind a distributed piece of software that begins to change the real world in the wake of its creator. Soon, the FBI are fighting robot cars, people are wearing augmented reality glasses, and major corporations are on their knees (if only 😮💨) at the feet of what is essentially a botnet of mailer daemons connected to an RSS feed.
I’m not gonna lie, this book is pulpy, and I love it. There’s a gruff detective, several car chases, and a morally-despicable villain attempting to bring about the apocalypse for his own gain.
If you can make it through the pulp and the somewhat dated (and still somehow not?) technology, it’s worth the read. That said, Suarez’s inner futurist truly begins to blaze in the sequel, Freedom™.
June: Red Rising by Pierce Brown (Red Rising Series)
It’s June, you probably don’t want to be inside reading all day. Red Rising is the perfect June novel because it isn’t that deep, it’s fun, and it’s flirty. It also sets you up well for the rest of the year if you decide to continue the series.
Red Rising is a complicated inclusion on this list for a bunch of reasons. Here’s the prognosis:
As a standalone novel only half of it qualifies as science fiction.
It’s very YA. You will at times cringe and ask yourself if teenagers actually like this stuff while reading it.
You will need to struggle through the first few chapters, they aren’t very compelling and serve as an overdrawn emotional setup for the rest of the novel/series.
It follows the story of Darrow, a slave in an extremely hierarchical color-based society with a rigid, genetically enforced cast system. Darrow is a “red,” the lowest of the low. Through some plot alchemy he receives surgery to turn him into a gold, the ruling class.
After that it’s the hunger games. I’m really not kidding. You get about a third of a book of sci-fi build up and spend the rest of the novel watching teenagers kill each-other with medieval weaponry from horseback.
So if this book comes with so many disclaimers attached, why is it on the list? Well, I’ll tell you:
As a series, Red Rising is one of the most fantastic examples of authorial growth out there. Pierce Brown seemingly stumbled into a hit, and instead of just sending the characters back to the thunderdome (*ahem* Suzanne Collins) he decided “fuck it, I want to write a space opera.” And write it he did.
Looking back on Red Rising from the 5th book in the series, Dark Age, it’s hard to see how we came so far. Brown breathes life into a world that initially seems dull and contrived. He takes what were odd affectations in the first novel and turns them into full-blown mythologies. No one has done techno-fantasy so well (please comment and recommend authors if you disagree!). It’s like watching a gymnast face-plant after stepping onto stage, but somehow incorporate it into their routine and manage to make it look like a natural setup for a quintuple backflip.
That all said, Red Rising is still a compelling and fun read. It’s not even the most difficult to get through in the series, that title belongs to the extremely bizarre 4th novel. And even that ambitious train-wreck serves as evidence that Pierce will never stop pushing himself to improve as an author.
July: Columbus Day by Craig Alanson (Expeditionary Force)
Even though the titular events of this novel are set in October, it’s a much better read for the month of July because of all the explosions. It’s pithy, fun, and not too deep. The basic gist is that humanity gets invaded by aliens and loses. Humanity soon discovers that it has become a pawn on a galactic chessboard that stretches waaaaaaay beyond their new lizard overlords (I’m not kidding, humanoid lizards end up in control of the earth government).
The main character is a spunky Mainer marine that has a habit of always being in the wrong place at the right time with a gun in his hand. The real start of the series, Skippy, doesn’t show up until halfway through, at which point the novel turns into a pretty funny & enjoyable power fantasy. I won’t spoil the book any further except to say that every book I’ve read after the first is a nearly exact replica of the second half of book 1. So, the Expeditionary Force series is a fun popcorn read, but ends up being quite one note, not unlike popcorn.
If you can, listen to it on audiobook- the voice actor is fantastic and I really appreciate the Maine accent.
August: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
In the throes of summer heat, this is the perfect book to cool off. I mean, like, really cool off. The main plot of this novel is about stopping mad science from turning all of the water on Earth into ice.
Cats cradle is lovely in that it’s a bit of a vacation from Vonnegut’s normal fair. That is to say, the end of days is in sandals and a Hawaiian shirt this time. The setting is a fictional Caribbean island that plays host to an even more fictional religion called Bokononism. In both the setting and the religion, it’s all island vibes.
September: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor (Bobiverse)
Ah, September. The start of the harvest, of autumn, the return to school (if you aren’t American). Such a jumble of ideas in such a short span of time. It’s actually a lot like the first installment of the Bobiverse series.
Bob is the eponymous main character of the series, and in some ways is the majority of characters as well. Let me explain. Bob was a software executive in the 21st century, a real Bill Gates type. He gets hit by a car and wakes up about a century later (thanks to a cryogenics contract) as property of a future dystopian theocracy in the former states. They inform him politely that his consciousness, should it be up to snuff, is intended as the pilot for the world’s first Von Neumann probe. Things only get crazier from there as he jets off into space building more probes and cloning his now digitized person into them. They new Bobs take on new names, hence why I say that Bob is both the main character and the majority of the side characters.
I’ll give We Are Legion the highest distinction I have to offer: calling it a romp.
This book is a romp. It’s delightful and funny and witty and full of fresh ideas and new takes on old ones. The action is satisfying. The stakes feel appropriate. The plot is intriguing. This book and the series it occupies are darling to me. I can’t recommend them enough.
They also have fantastic voice acting, and are worth listening to over reading.
October: Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos)
I’m going to be honest: I put Hyperion in October because October is the month I was born and Hyperion is my favorite book on this list. So, happy birthday me!
To continue with the honesty, I throw the term “masterwork” around a little lightly sometimes. Not so with Hyperion. This book is similar to Catch 22 in that it feels like a bolt of lightning from whatever gods of artistic inspiration still deign to deal with us mortals. I have no idea how Simmons managed to write such a perfect novel, considering the sprawling mess that constitutes its sequels.
Hyperion manages to sit perfectly at the intersection of respect for classical literature and canon and aspiration for more, more, more. It is a retelling of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in space. Now I don’t know what I expected from such a wild-ass concept but it sure wasn’t the jaw-dropping masterpiece that I read.
We get 7 pilgrims with 7 stories, told sequentially on their way to the time tombs. With each story, another piece of the puzzle falls into place and gives renewed meaning to what we’ve already read.
This book has it all: star crossed lovers, time travel, alien ecology, a mysterious and terrifying monster that hunts its characters in cold blood. What’s better yet, all of those things slot nicely into a coherent overarching plot.
Simmons manages to flex incredibly hard on the theme of time’s circularity by consistently calling back to medieval literature and history throughout this space epic. There are all these insane bells and whistles on the plot that somehow land and make everything more compelling than it was seconds before. The romance subplot especially is one I still think about sometimes and just say to myself:
“What the fuck? How did he pull that off?”
November: The Forever War by Joe Halderman
Ah, cold, bitter November. The leaves are shed, the air is chilled, the harvest finishes. Sure, there’s things to give thanks about, but November to me has always felt like a month of waiting, of time passing. That’s what The Forever War is about.
It is my somber inclusion to this list for historical context alone. Ironically enough for a book about not aging, it shows more age than an old folk’s home. This book was first published in 1974, 5 years after the next book in the list, yet it somehow manages to feel 50 years older. Why is that?
Well, to understand why The Forever War feels old, we have to talk about Starship Troopers. Not the brilliant satirical Verhoeven film, Heinlein’s annoying fascist novel. It came out to ‘59 and won the Hugo in ‘60. Starship Troopers opened the world to military sci-fi. It gave us space marines, power armor, drop pods, and racial slurs for aliens.
One of the reasons everything you will read in Starship Troopers and The Forever War feels like it came out of a ration can is because the topics have been done to death. The other reason is because Troopers has been the subject of criticism and controversy since its release. I’m not really interested in rearguing any of that controversy, suffice to say people feel that Troopers is a fascist, military aggrandizing, hyper-masculine, racist fantasy. It doesn’t help that Heinlein liked to brag that he finished the novel (as with most of his work) in a few weeks. That’s one way to make a literary critic foam at the mouth.
The reason I recommend The Forever War over Starship Troopers is that The Forever War is better written and deals with relativity. The entire point of TFW is that waging interstellar war is dumb because you’ll end up with a situation akin to roman legionnaires defending a base from SEAL Team 6. It really takes the whole Pershing quote to the extreme:
“Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.”
One of the earlier includes on this list, Columbus Day, is a direct descendant of both of these books, though We Are Legion shows some shades of resemblance as well. Old Man’s War is another popular novel that’s got DNA from Troopers and TFW.
These day’s it’s not exactly an interesting read, but it’s one that will give you context for things you see in almost every other work of its type. In my mind, that sort of drudgery makes it ideal for a November novel
December: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Hainish Cycle)
TLHoD is really perfect for getting into the winter vibe. It takes place during summer on a planet that’s basically Hoth, so their summer is pretty much the worst winter you could imagine on Earth. The main character is an emissary to this planet from a much more technologically developed one.
This book is part of Le Guin’s disavowed “Hainish Cycle” which takes place in the tail end of a galactic dark age where previously connected and human-colonized worlds were left isolated for so long that divergent evolution led their genes and societies to speciation. Le Guin is really good at using these deviations from floor-model humans for social commentary.
For instance, all of the natives in TLHoD are hermaphrodites that only take on the ability to reproduce (either as father or mother) once a year, and do so randomly in something akin to a cat going through heat. Being the stellar feminist she is (see what I did there? 😛), Le Guin flexes heavily on this biological quirk to highlight abnormalities in our own gender politics.
Conclusion
Well, there it is! 12 books for 12 months. Please tweet at me @laulpogan with any questions or comments, and don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe :)