As author of the acclaimed Children of Time sequence and the dazzling new work The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky knows a thing or two about literary science fiction. In this exclusive piece he shares the books that he feels best encapsulate the wonders of the form for new readers.
So maybe you’ve seen a Star Wars or two, and gone boldly once or twice, had an unfortunate lunch date with an alien or a predator of some kind, and now you’re hungry for more. There is a universe of books out there waiting for the incautious tread of a new traveller, and some of them are welcoming and others might be said to require specialist equipment to brave their less-forgiving pressures and atmospheres. From the point of view of an old hand, a few suggested answers to the eternal question 'where are some good places to start tugging on all the varied cosmic strings of science fiction?'
AI is a hot topic right now. Will it destroy us? Will it save us from ourselves. Just what would a computer want if we made it sufficiently clever that it started to want things? The protagonist of Ancillary Justice was once the AI mind of a vast warship with an army of bodies at her disposal, before finding herself restricted to a single human form. What happens when the powerful toys we build decide they don’t like the way we treat them, and what does revenge look like to a superhuman machine.
Further reading: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a key work of formative cyberpunk, also presents AI in a struggle with humanity, a theme that goes back to the monster-master clash of Shelley’s Frankenstein.
SF loves its close encounters of the first through nth kinds, humans encountering the wonder of the strange or locked in ray gun duels with bug-eyed monsters. Okorafor’s Binti is a novel of problematic contact with the alien in the mid to far future, where the boundaries between us and the other get blurred and stretched. Okorafor’s earlier novel Lagoon is another good first contact novel, though there the entity involved is far less comprehensible on a human scale, far more truly alien, bending low to try and understand little humanity.
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Further reading: Rosewater by Tade Thompson is a compelling, action-packed story of what we might do, if something incomprehensible dropped to Earth, bringing with it waves of both miracles and terrors. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is a character-rich slice of life in a far future where humans and many species of alien live alongside each other and rub shoulders.
The spaceship is probably the most iconic symbol of SF, and there are no shortage of books exploring what people think of them and, indeed, what they might think about people. An excellent recent read is Powell’s Embers of War, the story of a warship turned rescue vessel trying to avoid getting dragged back into an emergent conflict that spirals wildly out of control. The ship itself is a (the?) main character in the narrative, and she and her crew are intensely likable protagonists in a fast-paced, thoughtful story.
Further reading: Iain M Banks’ ‘Culture’ series is also heavily concerned with the dealings of its ship Minds and their shepherding of sentient life, perhaps best seen in his Excession.
Time travel, whether or not it is permitted by the straightjacket of the laws of physics, has fascinated writers for a long time, despite the narrative knots it can leave one tied up in. Butler’s Kindred is a fascinating story of people connected across time, and also a good example of SF shining a light on history, injustice and the tortuous path that people have followed to get from then to now.
Further reading: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, a recent, award-winning and gorgeously-written story of a burgeoning romance across a shifting braid of timelines between two opposed time-warriors.
We might not have much of a future. We may never get to the spaceships and robots and time machines. Here, also, SF has you covered. And right now there’s a lot of climate-change based SF, and much of it is very good, and frequently the better it is, the harder a read because the future can be very grim. When Miller wrote Leibowitz, the perceived threat was not climate but nuclear, and his gentle, wry and poignant story about the travails of a monk in the blasted future remains a true pleasure to read, without being relentlessly downbeat.
Further reading: JG Ballard, a true master of the genre, gives us a lush, almost hallucinatory vision of a fallen future in The Drowned World.
Then why not round it off by reading, or re-reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which is an absolute joy that no amount of time can take the shine off.
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