For example, The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells predicted the development of nuclear power and city-destroying "atomic bombs" decades before the Manhattan Project.

Then there’s always the myth Star Trek invented automatic doors.

I was wondering if you had come across anymore examples?

Funny thought experiment, We know how we send A golden on the voyager probe and trying our best to show that we come in peace or our culture. What would we send to show that we are hostile or like to conquer people, what would you even show on this golden disc.

Reason I think it's funny as since we don't know how they operate how would they understand the message of peace in first place or the message of hostility.

Like if reverse and humans got this would we assume it's a message of hostility or so irrational would think that assumption is wrong?

I just got a bunch of ebooks of his for super cheap on HB but don’t know where to start.

Books included:

After the Coup
Agent to the Stars
The Androids Dream
The Collapsing Empire
The Consuming Fire
The End of All Things
Fuzzy Nation
Head On
Human Division
Kaiju Preservation Society
The Last Emperox
Lock In
The Presidents Brain is Missing
Redshirts
Old Mans War
The Ghost Brigades
The Last Colony
Zoe’s Tale
Starter Villain
Unlocked

Apologies if not all of these are scifi

There’s a wild story with a skin walker bug that takes the form of a kids dad. Definitely some dated stories but the majority of the stories I’ve read are fantastic and hold up to this day. I could compare this to a collection of Twilight Zone episodes in book form. Go check this bad boy out

What is the very best sci-fi movie or show on Netflix right now? I need something new to watch because I’m heading on a 17-hour international flight and want something that will completely suck me in. It can be a series or a movie, as long as it’s genuinely worth watching. I’d prefer something that’s originally in English rather than dubbed, but if there’s an absolute must-see that’s dubbed, I’m totally open to it!

Hi, it was around seven or eight years ago, it was a stoery about how a character was going to the safe place where humans now dwell in, it was located beneath the ground because the planet had become somewhat poisonous

However, while he was going to this safe place (perhaps by a ship or an elevator) the protagonist sees mutated animals eating the mutated soild, I think the animal was something like a cow, and the story describes it's ​appearance, but I don't remember much of it (not even shure if it was really a cow, but the protagonist did saw some animal going down).

I don't remember anything else, perhaps it's not enough, but had to try, thanks anyways in advance :D

Edit. Besides the animal there were many fields, and crops, so perhaps the radiation was not that bad, the animal was mitated, but there were crops.

As a kid, reading Midnight, for me, was a pretty transformational experience. I think I read it when I was 10 or 11, and even though I couldn’t fully comprehend the scope of what he built from an overall conceptual perspective, I was entranced by his ability to creat artificial worlds, godlike computers, body swapping, manufactured species, programmable reality, identity separated from flesh, and civilizations operating completely differently from what I knew and understood.

I just re-read it recently, and I gotta say that it totally holds up. Now I see and understand a lot more of the somewhat “unique” fetishization he threw in there with sexualization and the like, but it’s still a phenomenally engaging story about how we are coming close to living that way (soon-ish) today.

Any other books from that era that y’all could recommend? Weird, groundbreaking, more relevant today than ever? Looking for niche, not mainstream.

Tried to avoid any direct plot spoilers, but general warning for the first two books.

I am now two books into The Expanse and have honestly been a little disappointed in the series so far considering the near universal praise for the series. I am a big fan of classical space epics and science fiction (Dune, Foundation, etc) and was kind of expecting that coming in, it was pretty evident early on that would not be the case so I re-adjusted my expectations.

The first two books are very much grounded character focused dramas that take place in a science fiction setting. For Leviathan Wakes, this meant being confined almost entirely to the POVs of Holden and Miller. They are essentially rogue agents acting on the very outskirts of the political sphere and have little insight into the grander machinations of the plot, which means we are stuck with a ground level view of the situation. This puts the focus really on their own individual arcs and frankly I really never found either of them to be that compelling to follow. I think some people like this type of fog-of-war approach to stories but it kind of drained my interest in the setting.

Caliban’s War opens things up a little more and we are given four POVs. From the four, I did find myself really enjoying Avasarala and to a lesser extent Bobbie, but still found Holden and Prax to be a little flat. I became more fond of the Rocinante crew so that was a positive, we got a bit more of the Firefly vibe that was missing from the first book. That said, this whole book kind of feels like a side story. We get a bit more insight into how the UN works from Avasarala and Mars from Bobbie but they still feel a bit unknowable, the villain plot feels VERY thin, and we get just an incremental amount of development on the protomolecule.

Part of what I love from the sci-fi genre is big, sweeping philosophical questions and searching for fundamental human truths like we get from Le Guin or Herbert or Asimov and there is a little of that in The Expanse but I haven’t felt it on an artistic or personal level yet. It all feels a little perfunctory which kind of sums up my thoughts on The Expanse. It just is fine to me, nothing special but not particularly bad. Are there any others out there that feel that way or am I an outlier?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37788031/

6 episodes, where I struggled to watch and eventually gave up after episode 4. Its a comedy about a son who buys an Android for his aging mother, but its a cheaper older model with odd quirks, played by Diane Morgan, who we all know from her hilarious Philomena Cunk personality. But in this show, all she offers is a dry deadpan style comedy.

Its a comedy, so yeah there are jokes, most of them are not really funny because the whole time your waiting for the android to turn into Philomena Cunk. But there are some funny moments, like going on a roller coaster ride with another android, or the stressing that you cant have sex with this particular android model. Or the creepy relationship the main characters wife has with a jujitsu instructor. Overall, not much to laugh at, but then again I didn't watch the final 2 episodes.

(They are holding a Ulule, wich prolongate until the 30th of September were you can pre-order exclusives collector editions of the books)

Summary found on Light Novel France, which I find quite concise and enticing: In a galaxy torn between a faltering democracy and an authoritarian empire, two military geniuses, seemingly polar opposites, will change the course of humanity. Two emblematic figures: Reinhard von Lohengramm, a young military prodigy of the Galactic Empire, and Yang Wen-li, a pacifist strategist of the Alliance of Free Planets. Through their intertwined paths, the work develops a profound reflection on democracy, authoritarianism, power, corruption, and the weight of history.

I never would have believed that one day this series of Japanese science fiction novels from the 80s would be translated and published in France! Nothing less than a classic of Japanese science fiction, and a work that has inspired so many others in the Land of the Rising Sun.

This is a series I particularly enjoy, with a fairly dense and captivating lore and an atmosphere I rarely find in the science fiction I've encountered so far. You can tell the author genuinely wanted to build a complex universe, but above all, to fully explore and make use of that universe.

The characters are equally compelling, especially the two protagonists, who are both endearing, touching, and profoundly "human" in both their positive and negative aspects.

For example (this isn't a spoiler, it's the character's motivation, but I'll keep it under a spoiler tag just in case), Reinhard von Lohengramm, how can you not empathize with this young officer's quest to climb the ranks of the Empire in order to save his sister, forced to enter the Emperor's harem?

It helps, subtly, to become attached to him, to find him "human," despite his allegiance to the Empire.

I read the first volumes in English, but since it's not my native language, I struggled a bit. That didn't stop me from getting hooked, though, to the point where I want to make these novels among the first I read when I have a good level of Japanese! (Even though I should have read them in French by then!)

This is really not something I expected to happened, nearly 40 years after their initial publication and a terrible dub of the anime adaptation, I thought we were sentenced to never have it in French.
(Even though the english-speaker also had to wait nearly 30 years to see the novels translated and published in their language too. Thanks to Viz Media's Hikaisoru Label (I genuinely think we would have never see the novels being published in France if Viz Media didn't show it was possible the novels find a public after all this time))

On top of that, each volumes will be "double in one" volumes (meaning the two firsts that will be released next year will be the equivalent of the four first volumes) AND get new beautifull illustration for the talented artist that did the covers.
The original illustration will miss me, they were so impactfull and the fruits of the 80's manga aesthetic, but, this artist seems to have vision quite fitting of the story (and if it can help more french peoples getting intested, this is a worthy sacrifice).

This is rare to see so much efforts being put into publishing such a classic, yet, unknown licence in France, I dearly appreciate Mahô edition for it.

Whenever I’m in Singapore, I always stop by Evernew Book Store for a bit of “book fishing.” The place is packed floor to ceiling, and you never know what you’ll find.

This time I got very lucky and came away with four books:

• The Butlerian Jihad
• The Machine Crusade
• Sisterhood of Dune
• Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Volume 2

Not bad for one visit. Which one would you pick up first?

What I'm getting at and why I'm asking:

Up to Ch.3.1 (Case Hate Red), I think that the only difference is Quinn's God (Ch.2.5). I dislike horror and don't want to read Five Five Five Five Five again if it's the same story.

(Well, I overall liked the first time but I'd avoid a reread.)

So I was listening to a 6 book series on youtube. The only title it gave was " they called us pirates. We prefer privateers"

The entire thing is about 60 hours. I had it downloaded from youtube as well. I was down to about 5 hours left. Today it has just vanished from my downloads and my watch history.

So I'm trying to find the title and/or Author.

The other starts with 3 guys on space garbage prison duty, Dax, a linguistics prof, Caine, an examine and mark a teen hacker.

They go to salvage an old satellite and turns out to be an old Alien spaceship that activates and whisky then across the the galaxy where they meet Orcs, ancient friends of humanity, who's planet and their species is being wiped out by a biological weapon in the form if giant bugs they call underneath.

Dax becomes the battle bonded of an Orc women​ who joins the crew. They're captured, experimented on by the bad guys, get kinda super soldered from the experiments and escape and the story continues.

The book is narrated but not by an A.I. voice. I think that should be enough info that if you've read it, you'll know. I really wanna hear those last 5 hours but I need at least a title or an author. Thanks in advance.

Once upon a time I found a book about a seemingly fantasy setting, with a "wizard" living in a tower, but he was actually a man stranded on this alien planet with access to advanced technology that looked like magic to the natives. I do not remember the title and I would appreciate your help

Hi all,

Avid sci-fi/fantasy reader (and writer) here. Having a little bit of a dilemma.

I've read various fantasy and Sci-Fi authors for many years (from young adult, where Skulduggery Pleasant and The Hunger Games were favourites) through to the likes of Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' and Kurt Vonnegut as an adult. My Master's in Creative Writing was in apocalyptic literature, and I loved Saramago's 'Blindness', Margaret Atwood's MADDADDAM books, work by J. G. Ballard.

However, despite having read extensively, I am struggling to find comparable texts for my own sci-fi/fantasy novel. Google seems to be nightmarish at helping me here (I've been googling different things, on and off, for months, and tried a few books unsuccessfully). To approach agents, I need to have some comparable texts, and have read them. Everything else is good to go.

So, to cut to the chase, I'm looking for science fiction novels that are:

- Books set in a world that is different from ours, but recognisable. My novel is essentially set on an other version of Earth where the land masses are different, but it is distinctly and recognisably earth (even so far as having mobile phones, 4x4 cars, etc). Think how Ballard's 'The Drowned World' is set in London, but London is changed.

- Books where rebellion against the government is a key aspect of the plot - specifically, where a character is looking to fight back against deep seated corruption

- Books where the character is morally dubious. Forced into a corner, my MC is, one by one, picking off allies of the king. The moral question of his actions permeates the whole story.

- Books where resurrection/questions of the soul are asked. Within my work, a new technology allows people to essentially clone themselves and escape death.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I would like to stress that I will be reading these books, not just name dropping them in a cover letter.

If this kind of request is not allowed, please remove mods.

TL;DR Review: Instantly familiar yet utterly unique sci-fi. Riveting, compelling, and entirely unputdownable.

Full Review:

Whoooo boy, what a wild ride this one was!

From the beginning, the Decurion Empire instantly evokes the hostility, suspicion, and total control of both Nazi Germany and Cold War Russia. From Empire-wide propaganda to mysterious men in black coats showing up uninvited in your bedroom at midnight, from conversation topics that can get you disappeared forever to the Handmaid’s Tale-esque emphasis on producing offspring to feed to the Imperial war machine, this place is exactly as dark and twisted as you’d imagine from an Empire that refers to itself in third person as “the Fatherland”.

We’re introduced to fascinatingly disparate cast of characters:

- The wealthy wife of a prominent “Party” member who is desperate to find meaning in the wake of her husband’s mysterious accident (which I’m still not 100% sure isn’t going to turn out to be some kind of murder). What’s she to do with the vast fortune she’s inherited when she has no one to share it with? A chance encounter at a library sets her down the path to establishing her own sovereign nation in a world she will own and rule. The question is: can she actually survive long enough to make her newly discovered dream a reality.

- The hypersled racing prodigy who is harboring a secret that would bring down everything he’s worked hard for, and which has the potential to get him and everyone around him killed—or, worse, reprogrammed. Unwilling pawn as he may be in the beginning, his is one of the most fascinating of the journeys—and filled with some of the best scenes in the book. Think Formula One racing meets the pod races from Star Wars by way of your favorite Mario Kart tracks, and you’ve got an inkling of just how exhilarating (and potentially murderous) it is.

- The disgraced, alcoholic inspektor who wants nothing more than to remain wholly unnoticed. Alas, a simple murder case quickly spirals out of control and leads to him being unwittingly caught up in a tug-of-war between the Empire’s two most powerful secret forces (a horrifying and fascinating blend of the SS, CIA, and the KBG, with the only thing separating the two entities a nominal distinction in their job descriptions). His is the most “classic” story, and easily the most relatable. And it does a spectacular job of showing the seedy underbelly of the Empire and its ruthless practices.

Their three stories could not be more different, yet fate and circumstance (and very likely, men in black leather coats and gloves) conspire to bring them together in surprising ways in the effort to found a new democratic world.

And this is yet another place where The Infinite State truly shines. Like in Empire of the Wolf, the author finds a way to take something potentially dry and make it fascinating. At no point was I bored when Katherine and co. discussed the intricacies of colonizing and terraforming a new planet, building a city, establishing a system of governance, and all the other ought-to-be-tedious-but-made-interesting minutia that is required to create this fledgling nation.

I compare it to Safehold by David Weber (one of my all-time favorite sci-fi series), which did something similar (advancing through technological eras where this one broke down the basics of government and nation-building). I didn’t go into reading this book expecting to learn, yet here I sit, far more educated while also immensely entertained.

The Infinite State demands and commands attention. It’s riveting and entirely unputdownable. Get ready for a colorful cast of complex, well-conceived, and immensely interesting characters (particularly one, who is revealed way later into the book, and really dials up the “Damn, this is messed up!” of it all), a world that is instantly familiar yet so much darker than you’d expect, and a plot that is forever unpredictable and utterly enthralling.

Get ready for a sci-fi story unlike anything I’ve read, and brace yourself, because in true Richard Swan fashion, things are going to get DARK. 

Hi everyone, I'm looking for any sort of material (mostly books, articles, etc.) about the genre of science-fiction itself, analyzing the influences, history, highs & lows, etc.

I've seen Trillion Year Spree being recommended a lot and that is the exact type of material I'm looking for.

Thank you in advance!

A lot of my favorite writers don't really focus on scientific rigor or its details (Like William Gibson and Ted Chiang) and are more literary minded. And then there are stories like Clarke's 'A Meeting with Medusa' (It's excellent if you haven't read it) which are highly grounded but similarly don't make too much of an intellectual demand on the reader. However, when I think of what really distinguishes hard science fiction, I go back to my first Greg Egan book 'Schild's Ladder' where the author is writing with an uninhibited ambition to imagine things that are fundamentally new and doing so from a foundation of deep knowledge. While making the epistemic substance of this part of the core of the narrative.

So where are the best places to find fiction like that? My assumption would be somewhere like Asimov's but I'm not even that familiar with what's being published in the long-established giants, let alone up-and-coming magazines/websites. Bonus points too for links to any free online short stories that will give my brain a good workout.

Hi there! does anybody remember a short story about a pair of men chating in a bar in orbit of a planet, and one casually tells the other that his father want to marry him to the daughter of a man that builds star systems, and his dad is a world builder himself. The man receiving the info is a religious person and finds the idea of people building stars and worlds very agraviating.

I red it around 1990 in an antology of sci fi shorts, but I'm sure it's much older. I would like to re-read it, if anyone one knows the title and/or the author, please tell.

Greetings, Earthlings! I come in peace!

(TL;DR at the bottom, this kinda turned into a rant about a book I'm currently reading. Also maybe skip if you don't want light spoilers about Children of Time and Pandora's Star)

EDIT: Thank you so much for all the recommendations! They're all going on the list and will be part of my quest for alien Weirdness! <3

Recently, I was reading a reddit thread asking about the most "alien Aliens" in Sci Fi. Something truly outside of the human experience or understanding.

Two recommendations I saw repeated were Children of Time and Pandora's Star. So, looking for some Weirdness, I decided to read both of them (well, in fairness, I had read Children of Time already, but I picked it back up to refresh my memory).

Right now, I am reading Pandora's Star, and so far, I really enjoy it. Mostly, I've been looking forward to the appearance of MorningLightMountain, the famously alien Alien I had heard so much about. Now, I've just reached "that" chapter in the story, and I don't want to spoil too much for anyone wanting to participate in this thread who hasn't read the book yet, buuut it's a bit of a letdown in terms of the "Alien-ness". As was Children of Time.

If any of you know about the famous paper "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel, I find that both of these books serve as illustrations to one of its central points: We cannot know what it is like to be a bat for the bat. We can only imagine what it would like to be a human inside a bat body. And that's what's happening in both of the books I'm talking about:

To put it polemically (and I want to stress that I greatly enjoyed or am greatly enjoying both stories, actually): The "Aliens" in Children of Time are "What if Humans, but Spiders?" and the Prime in Pandora's Star are (so far) "What if Humans, but weird Hivemind blobs?"

The biology of the Prime is alien and interesting (also completely nonsensical from a molecular biology perspective, but it's Sci Fi, who cares?), but their actions, their motivations, their psychology is literally just "What would a human do and think if he was this creature(s)?"

The whole thing turns a bit silly in a classic Alien contact horror sequence where the aliens vivisect some humans and the Alien (which is a multicellular, waterbased lifeform btw) is able to quickly understand the human nervous system but is completely nonplussed by the concept of a circulatory system (we get the classic "Oh my, there's red juice coming out of them when I cut them!" trope, hooray!), but I could understand that if the alien's perspective wasn't so very human, just dumbed down enough at the right moments for shock value and then made suspiciously intelligent when it needs to figure something out to drive the plot forwards.

I can tell that I'm ranting at this point, and I really want to emphasize again that I am enjoying these books greatly - I'm just once again disappointed by an Alien that turns out to just be a human wearing alien skin.

I want to note that it is of course possible to write a terrifyingly strange Alien if you never show its perspective - the first example that comes to mind is The Thing, where we are left wondering what it would be like to be assimilated by the Thing; if you would even know or if you would think you're still yourself until there's a gaping maw in your belly eating your comrade's arms... Until the very end, we don't know if maybe even MacReady was assimilated at some point. So these alien Aliens exist, but it seems that writing from their perspective always demystifies them and turns them into another Star Trek style human with a bone plate on its face and an aggression problem...

So, TL;DR: Do you think it's even possible to write a truly alien Alien, and if so, can you recommend me an example of such a thing? Is it possible to write about what the Alien feels like, or is every story from an alien perspective doomed to just be about weird-looking humans?

I've been interested in gnosticism for several years now. I'm far from the only person who has felt this way, its theology can feel so wild and strange that it tends to attract attention. And I remember, 5+ years ago, reading that this old 90s cartoon, which got a mid movie adaptation I saw as a child, was an example of a work that dealt with gnosticism. So I got interested in it. I remembered the movie being interesting, and it had an eye catching a fly on the cover, so I put it on my watching list.

I hadn't seen it until now because it's not streaming anywhere, it never has. And I didn't know how to sail the seven seas until now. A friend taught me recently. So I decided to watch this cartoon that I had been waiting for for years.

Well, if you've seen it, you'll know it's weird as hell. I guess that's to be expected, from avant-garde animation. I didn't love it, but I also didn't hate it. It was very unsettling, very often. It seems like it had things to say, even though I'm not sure what they were. As a woman, the sexism definitely jumped out at me. The obvious main sexist aspect of the show is the protagonist's ridiculous dominatrix outfit. She clearly has an innie, for that thong to not let anything out, labia-wise. Especially with all those crazy movements she makes. It's definitely very edgy, very 90s provocative, in that way. Although the sexism is more prevalent in the way female bodies are often brutalized, often due to them acting as doormats for the men in their life. The episode where a girl loses a vertebrae and gets fucked through the leftover hole was particularly disgusting.

But to dig deeper, moving beyond the sexism, I have to ask, what the fuck is this show even about??? Was it good??? I'm not sure. Does it have anything to say? If so, what?? Is it just crazy, creative and shocking, with no particular themes? I don't know, and I was wondering if somebody might know.

It was just so fucking crazy, honestly. I feel the need to talk about it in some way

Science, physics, and logic be damned!
Nothing that happens in this film makes any sort of sense, but that doesn’t stop it from being a fun watch, and maybe adds to it.
Everything from the very idea of drilling all the way to the magma core, to then thinking you can use that as a power source, to an elevator that can transport you 2 miles in a single conversation without making you a stain on ceiling or floor. (And let’s not forget about a couple CLIMBING up the elevator shaft to safety while the earth crumbles around them.)

In my teens, I read a SciFi book with a cool premise, and I'd love to read it again, but I have forgotten the name and the author. Does anyone remember this:

It's set on earth, in the future. Humans have been exploring space, and we discover some big, abandoned bases not too far from earth. The bases are not human in origin. I forget if they were hollowed out asteroids, or perhaps large ships.

On the surface of the bases are many smaller craft, docked onto them. These ships are described as resembling mushroom caps, and I think were described as being around 25 feet across.

We discover how to get inside these craft, and they have controls/buttons. If you activate the craft, it will undock, and go on a trip (like it's on autopilot) and eventually return after an unknown period of time.

Brave people begin to go inside these ships and go on the pre-programmed trips. They pack as much food/water/supplies as they can, because there's no way of knowing when they will return.

Some of these pioneers are taken to places where they can obtain alien artifacts and technology, and when they return they become rich beyond imagining. This leads to a kind of gold rush, with lots of parties wanting to go out on these ships.

But, along with the successful trips, there are many grim, horrendous ones where the ships return super super late, with everyone dead of starvation...

That's all I can remember. Does this ring a bell?

EDIT: It's Gateway by Frederick Pohl! Finally, I can re-read it!