The Best Sci-Fi Book Series

Signing up for a whole series is a significant reading commitment. What’s the reward for a reader in returning repeatedly to the same science fiction world?

The longer an author has to work with something, the more they can build up. As my friend Jo Walton often puts it, you get a really long spear, and you can therefore have a great impact at the end. What you can build up in a novella is more than you can build up in a short story; what you can build up in a couple of books has a weight to it beyond what you can build up in one.

I often think about it, especially if I’m structuring my own series, like composing a symphony or a musical. You’re introducing motifs bit by bit, and in the earlier sections, you’re teaching your listener or your reader what they mean and how to recognize them, and which one’s a cue for what. Then when you get to the final movement, when you have all of your resources, you can do a really thick musical tapestry where everything is happening at once, and all the leitmotifs come back in, and you realise the way they all harmonize with each other. It does something much more complex. If you play somebody just the last movement of the symphony, or just the finale song in the musical where all the characters are singing at the same time, without the rest of it, it doesn’t have the same power – because you don’t know the pieces on their own, so your ear can’t find them in the thick tapestry.

That’s beautiful! Do you read a series back-to-back, if you can?

Yes! I’ll occasionally deliberately wait a few hours or a few days if there was an exceptionally excellent cliffhanger. I know how much work someone is putting into a cliffhanger, they worked hard to earn it, and they deserve a few hours or a couple of days of me being in the tension, wondering what’s going to happen next. It’s the opposite of most people’s instinct, which is to read immediately when there’s a cliffhanger and to pause when there is a nice, resolved ending.

One of my very favourite series ever is an unfinished series by Osamu Tezuka called Vampires, which literally ends with my favourite character halfway through falling off a cliff – and it’s just going to be like that forever. I have been thinking very much more about the cliffhanger as a permanent state or an end state, rather than as just a passing state – because some things do end in a moment where you never find out what happens, including real life. You generally do not find out what happens in the end, because it keeps going forever.

Let’s talk about some of your favourite resolved series! Could you introduce us to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, which begins with The Shadow of the Torturer.

I would not want to call this one a resolved series, because one of the most important things about it is that when you’ve read it all the way through, it doesn’t make any sense to you until you’ve read it twice. Only on the second pass, when you know the structures of what’s happening, do you have the ability to understand, remotely, what actually occurred even in chapter one – in an amazing way. Gene Wolfe is my model for how complicated a world build can be, and how deep and layered; and also for how complicated a narrator can be, and how many layers there can be to peel back as you learn more about them, like the layers of an onion.

Book of the New Sun initiated what we now call ‘deep future SF’. It takes place so far in earth’s future that every mountain has been carved into a portrait of a king by now – that’s just what mountains are shaped like. Everywhere you dig a hole, there’s a city underneath. And space travel and contact with aliens was so long ago that it’s lost in the depths, not of history, but of mythology – before even the currently remembered eras of humanity. We’re so far in the future, in fact, that the sun is growing dim and the earth is getting cold. It’s an incredibly worked-through and deep world.

You’re plunged into a culture that is understood by your narrator, but who doesn’t know what you don’t know. So he’s often describing things that you have no apparatus to understand, and you have to figure it out as you go. There are moments where he’s describing, say, a castle with a tower made out of a strange metal that has a magical furnace in the bottom – and you realise it’s a parked space shuttle. But you have to figure that out, because that’s not a concept to him anymore.

It’s just an incredibly intricate, often cruel and frustrating read. My own metric as I write is always, I will never be as mean as Gene Wolfe; when a character hasn’t shown up for two and a half books and you don’t remember who they are, I will remind you, which he does not. But for all that difficulty, the depth of them and the payoff as you get deeper through this incredible world is just gorgeous… It’s gorgeous to think about what it’s like for a culture to accumulate that long, and then use that to reflect on how many layers our own culture has.

Do we follow one character through all the books?

Yes, we have one narrator, Severian. He is an apprentice torturer who works in an enormous castle at the edge of an enormous, strange city, and he was raised there in the strange unquestioning expectation that it’s his job to carry out bizarre and gruesome executions for a distant society. We watch him move through the world and come to understand it better.

If I tried to pretend that there was a plot, it would be misleading, because whenever it seems like there’s plot, you realise you need to back away from it. It has a structure like Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître, or like Tristram Shandy. There’s a great moment toward the end of book one, where we’re travelling with a caravan of people through a gateway, and suddenly there’s a battle. We don’t know who either side of the battle is. We were in the middle of being told a story about these magic beans that a woman brought back from a travel to a strange place that’s probably another planet, which has something to do with this weird river… and then in the middle of the story about magic beans, we are interrupted, and a battle between people that we don’t know and different people that we don’t know occurs. And that’s the end of book one! Then book two starts six months later in a different place, and we never find out the end of any of what was going on in that scene. Because the point of it isn’t any micro element of plot: it’s this much larger, much deeper progress of the earth, on the scale of millennia.

One of the things he does by introducing you into what feels like a traditional plot – say, a battle with sides – and then cutting away, is to get you to realise that you should never be invested in ‘what’s happening’. What’s happening is incidental in the course of history. You need to be invested in understanding the world and its structures, and time and its structures, and space and its structures. The actual plot is: Severian gradually gets to understand the world better, and so do we. There’s one chapter which is just the narrator sitting on a rock, looking up at the night sky, watching the stars move and thinking. He’s going through all of the philosophy and ethics and ideas about the creation of the universe that he has, and nothing occurs in this chapter; he doesn’t even physically move. There is literal stasis, except for the slow turning of the planet. But it’s one of the most pivotal and exciting chapters in the whole series, because the reflections on this world and philosophy and time are what it’s about.

So if you like big ideas books and puzzle box books where you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and deep world building and reflections on time and space, then it’s a wonderful series. If you want to know what happened at the end of the battle, you will be extremely frustrated.

Your next choice is more contemporary: could you tell us about Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, which starts with The Just City?

What we have here is time travellers setting up Plato’s Republic on an island with the help of Greek gods. These are time travellers from the past and present and future. So Cicero is there, but we also have Victorian people and Renaissance people who studied Plato, and robots from the future… And they are trying to set up and do the Republic. It’s a really delightful series, thinking directly through Plato’s Republic in the way it needs to be thought through.

I find it especially charming having taught many iterations of a course where I had undergraduates reading Plato’s Republic and then writing papers about it, almost all of which are variants on ‘Plato’s Republic is stupid and wouldn’t work’. To which the real answer is, Plato’s Republic would work if the human mind and human psychology operated the way Plato speculated that they did. We believe that they do not work the way he thought they would. So it’s really interesting to see what happens when you take people who behave like we think people will behave, and plunge them into an ideal city set up for people who don’t behave like that.

To unpack what I mean by that a little bit… Plato and many philosophers before the mid-17th century believed that one of the fundamentals of cognition was that knowledge is external and eternal, it exists as an absolute, and the mind is a sense organ which perceives that knowledge. Truth and justice exist out there in an immaterial, eternal space where knowledge is real, capital R. And when we learn, we are learning to process the mind’s perception of these things – just as the eye of a newborn infant needs to learn how to recognize objects and process shapes, and realise that this shape is ‘a book’ and this shape is ‘a bed’. So if that’s true, then the more one becomes wise, the more one agrees with everyone else who is wise; because when you’re talking about justice, you’re all looking at one eternal, extant object.

Plato therefore assumes that you can make a society co-ruled by several hundred philosophers, because the better their education is, the more they will completely agree with each other on all things. The philosopher kings would agree with each other. But we don’t think that knowledge works like that: we think knowledge is created within the mind, and the mind has concepts in it that we individually form based on our own past experiences. Your concept of a cat is different from my concept of a cat, because I lived with a cat that hurled itself bodily at pumpkin muffins, and you didn’t; so I associate cats with pumpkin muffins, and you don’t. Everybody’s concept of everything is unique and different. So when you ask whether Plato’s Republic would work as a real society, the answer has to be half ‘no’ – because cognition doesn’t work the way Plato thought, according to us. But the other half has to be ‘except…’ – except it might actually still work better than a lot of societies we do have, because even if it has a flawed plan, it has some plan. And it’s a plan with many elements that are better than most historic societies – like gender equality, and being assigned a job based on your personal aptitudes.

So the series is really fun because at the beginning, we bring in all these people who love Plato and Platonism and want to try this thing together; and then we watch the ways it doesn’t work, and the ways it does. There are people for whom it’s better than the society they came from, and people for whom it’s worse. It inevitably explodes in a ‘but that’s not how human beings work’ way – but at the same time, a world in which everybody is encouraged to live a philosophical life and self-examine and attempt to improve themselves as much as they can, to be their philosophically best self, is also going to result in good things.

Then the aftermath of that continues… I would say that some series are one book that is so long that you can’t fit all of it between two covers, and so it is published in several chunks – Book of the New Sun is that, and my Terra Ignota is that. This isn’t. Each of the books does stand alone as a book, but they all end by beginning something new – in the same way that if a book ends “They all got together and got on the ship and decided to sail off into the seas”, it would be both a satisfying ending for a book and an exciting beginning for the next book. The three books fit together like that: each of them is the end of that stage, but then you become excited to explore the next stage.

This brings us very neatly to your third choice. It’s another exploration of systems of government and their effects on people… You’ve nominated Ursula K Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, and since there isn’t a ‘right’ order to read these, you’ve elected to talk first about The Dispossessed.

Yes. I was rereading The Dispossessed recently, and it was so fantastic, because it has so many of the elements of what’s great about a deep world build. The best world builds are worlds that have great things in them and also terrible things – worlds that you want to improve but not destroy. I remember when my Terra Ignota books came out, lots of people wanted to argue with each other about whether it was a dystopia or a utopia, as if those are the only two options. It’s neither. It’s a world like our world and like the worlds in The Dispossessed, where there’s a bunch of stuff that’s great about it and a bunch of stuff that’s wrong with it. You are excited to see the steps that it’s taken toward being better and more fair than the world we live in, but you are also dismayed and distressed by the steps it has taken that lead to bad things. It’s so neat to revisit The Dispossessed and see how much it is an urtext for doing that type of world build.

I was also looking at it again recently partly because, with Jo Walton, I was doing a study of which science fiction books get assigned in courses about science fiction at universities. We collected over 100 syllabuses to look at what gets assigned. Often the only book by a woman is Frankenstein. But if there is a second one, it’s almost always Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and it’s never The Dispossessed. Because the assumption of the creator of these courses is, okay, we have to have a book by a woman; let’s do the one that’s about gender, because that’s what women do. So it’s always the one about gender, and it’s never one of her many, many other amazing books – and The Dispossessed is such an amazing book. To see it on zero syllabuses, despite it being so influential, and often so much more in dialogue with the rest of what’s on the syllabus than The Left Hand of Darkness, was really striking. It made me want to revisit The Dispossessed and think through this incredible corpus of material – of deep, examined, philosophically rich, socially rich and gorgeously written material.

So what’s in the world we explore in The Dispossessed?

What’s really neat in The Dispossessed is that we’re comparing two worlds that are right next to each other, because we have a world and then a moon on which people are also living. The moon has had an anarchist, collectivist revolution, and is living by a set of very strict, collaborative, cooperative philosophical principles, which leads to a life of equality, austerity, hard work, and many other elements. What’s that wonderful quote? – “But the decisions of a social being are never made alone”. Then the neighbour world is beautiful, and full of rich and gorgeous things compared to the world of great leanness and austerity, but also full of decadence and corruption and inequality – because when everybody who’s an idealist of that type leaves your planet for the moon, your planet gets philosophically pushed in the other direction.

The book holds these two worlds up next to each other. Both of them have things that are wonderful and that the other one lacks, and both of them have ways that they’re going wrong that lead to oppression or violence or inequality – even in moments that are trying to aim at equality. So we ultimately realise that they will both do better if they resume being in real dialogue with each other, rather than going off to the extremes. We see two lovingly thought-through worlds based on a philosophy, and each of them has wonders we wouldn’t want to give up; but each of them also has flaws that we cannot, in good conscience, accept.

The are just two worlds within the interconnected universe of the Hainish Cycle. There’s no strict chronology for this series – is this a good place to start?

The Dispossessed is a really good starting point, because its questions are about our society, so we’re ready to plunge into answering them.

A lot of its questions are things that people in 2024 are newly thinking about. Current issues have made a lot of people think very seriously about socialist, communist and anarchist movements and the things that they supply for the world. There are UBI experiments, and questions of the ultra-rich exploiting Covid to become wealthier, etc. If one is thinking through reform or counterculture options, it’s a great moment to look at someone who’s really thought it through – and shown that when you embrace the ideal all the way, the work still isn’t done. You still have to do the hard work of making it work in practice, and trying not to develop new evils or reinvent old ones.

There’s a really wonderful nonfiction book by the philosopher Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity, on living ethically in a compromised world. It’s looking at how much movements that are trying to improve the world in various ways tend to weaken themselves because of an obsession with purity. “X solution isn’t the perfect solution because it has Y problem. Therefore we will not pursue X solution. We will sit with no solution until we have the perfect solution” –  or, “X solution would require working with Group B which doesn’t hold to the perfect ideal that group A holds to, therefore we will not have solidarity with Group B, even though 90% of what we seek is in common”. The Dispossessed is looking at how isolating a society from the contrary worldview, and not discussing or collaborating, not having the other to hold a mirror up, is harmful – even to the movement that is more in the right than the other. It gives us very, very current and very lively tools for thinking through why collaboration and compromise are often more valuable tools than purity and isolation, for those who are really sincerely working to make the world better.

So it’s a really good jumping in point, because it’s really easy to access the issues that it’s about. The rest of the Cycle is not even necessarily these same planets, but in the same universe, in which multiple planets are in contact with each other and affected by that contact.

You mentioned earlier that The Dispossessed focuses on very different societies interacting, and benefitting from interacting. Your own series, Terra Ignota, beginning with Too Like the Lightning, sets up even more parallel systems of governance, all based on explicit philosophies. Was that your starting point, the idea of contact between societies?

I was trying to think through the question, can you have one world where a whole bunch of these almost-but-not-quite different societies are co-existing and overlapping? In the Terra Ignota system, when you come of age, you choose which of eleven-ish options for a government and legal system and philosophy of law you want to sign up for. Then you are governed by that, and your next-door neighbour or your spouse or your roommate or your siblings might have chosen a different one. Each of them governs their own citizens’ actions, and protects their own citizens.

People often say this is impossibly complicated, and no society could ever deal with having multiple legal systems at the same time. Actually, medieval Europe had multiple overlapping legal systems at the same time – one system for the church, a different one for the nobility; and it had different legal systems depending on whether Roman law was being applied where you were… If the Middle Ages could handle it, so can the future. This is a solved problem! We also deal with this when people live as expats in other countries: the laws of that person’s home country are part of what governs them, and the laws of where that person physically is at that time is another part, and the governments work it out between each other.

So I’m positing a whole world where that is the model, and everybody lives as if they are an expat. That is not any more complicated than real legal systems that the real world has had in past and present, but it means that you can have a lot of people who feel strongly and passionately about their really excellent legal system that represents their philosophy, that they have chosen and signed up for, whose ideals they love and respect. And they’re in an argument with somebody who’s in a completely different government and completely different philosophy, but who might be sharing the same living room.

You mentioned earlier that in your case, the series was one long story, chopped up. Is that how the writing process went?

Yes. I outlined every single chapter of all of it, from the very beginning, before I wrote the first sentence of the first book. One giant plan, and it was executed exactly as planned. I’m at the extreme end of how much authors plan in advance!

By the way, book one and book two were one longer book cut in half. That’s why book one does not have a satisfying ending. Book two has a satisfying ending, and so does book three, but book one does not because I was given very little time to cut it in half and make something semi-satisfying. So I urge you to think of them as one book, in which the first half is all set up and the second half is all payoff.

Planning all of that in one go is incredible… but then, there are so many reveals of secret motivations, I suppose it needed that approach.

As I described, it’s a symphony. It has movements, but you need to have an idea of what the end chorus is that you’re building toward as you introduce each of these harmonies.

Your next choice is at the other extreme – rather than one novel chopped up, shorter episodes have been collated. Originally serialised, Pluto by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki now consists of eight volumes. Can you introduce us to these graphic novels?

Pluto is Naoki Urasawa’s grown-up level rewrite of the grimmest story arc of Astro Boy. For those who aren’t familiar with Astro Boy (or just know the Americanized TV versions), it’s an incredibly important and powerful work within SF history. Osamu Tezuka wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. There was severe censorship in Japan, both by the Japanese government and by the American occupation government, which meant you couldn’t talk about the war that had just happened. It was not until the late 1980s that the main Japanese newspaper was even allowed to have the physical character necessary to type ‘atom bomb’. So you had a whole generation of kids who had watched their world blow up and burn down, and needed an apparatus to understand why and how this happened – and a world that wouldn’t talk about it. Except that the government wasn’t very serious about censoring what looked like a silly kids’ cartoon…

So Astro Boy is about the robot civil rights movement and anti-robot prejudice, and travelling the world to meet with civil rights activist organizations and learning how to organize, and petitioning to get citizenship; and battling a dictator called Hitlini, who is trying to purge all of the robots from his country; and dealing with the implication of the world superpowers having very large bombs that cause mushroom-shaped clouds. All of it is done as a children’s cartoon, but it’s incredibly serious and graphic. A lot of it is about race and 20th-century politics, and is very anti-war, very pacifist, very much arguing that racism is what caused all this.

There’s also an important element of it being a first contact story. When you’re writing a story about artificial intelligence being invented, you are fundamentally writing a first contact story between humanity and this other form of intelligent life. Tezuka wrote more than 700 series, believe it or not, in which first contact and war and genocide are the uniting themes. He was devoutly interested in Buddhism, and trying to find a way to rehabilitate the Buddhist thesis that all life is sacred in the wake of seeing humanity commit the atrocities that it committed in World War Two: how can you call sacred something that did what we did?

So in Astro Boy, we have a first contact situation between humans and robots. Atom – who became Astro in the Americanization – is the first robot to be designed with human-like emotion. So he is the ambassador between humans and robots, trying to help them understand each other. The other robots are intelligences, and they think and they act and they are self-aware, but they don’t mourn and they don’t hate and they don’t love. For example, one of the first scenes in Pluto – the more recent manga by Naoki Urasawa, who’s very much been recognized as the successor to Tezuka – introduces us to a morgue where we see some human parents whose child has been murdered, mourning their child. Some robot parents whose robot child has been killed in a hate crime are standing silently, watching both the body and the loud expression of the human parents, thinking about the question: how does one express this when emotion is alien to one’s nature?

Astro Boy is about that, and the Pluto arc specifically is about the inability of robots to understand how humans are capable of willing destruction for the sake of destruction. They look at the many things that humans make whose sole purpose is destruction, and try to understand that, as aliens; try to understand this human characteristic that just doesn’t compute for a rational synthetic organism. It’s a really powerful story. The original story arc was written in the 60s for ten-year-olds; but it had such serious ideas in it that by revisiting it and expanding it, and giving us in-depth and mature examinations of all the characters, Naoki Urasawa has created one of the most powerful first contact stories and robot stories that I’ve ever seen.

I’m someone who reads a lot of manga and watches a lot of anime, and will be the first to say there’s no particular need to get into this media. If you have enough other media in your life, you can be content. There’s a high learning curve. But Pluto is on the shortlist: this is a really serious addition to science fiction’s examinations of the question of first contact, and the question of robots and what kinds of stories we can tell with them. If someone is a serious lover of science fiction and only reads two or three comic books ever, one of them should be Pluto.

Let’s talk about your final choice. Tomihiko Morimi’s duology, Tatami Galaxi and Tatami Time Machine Blues, was published in 2004; but the books were only translated into English in the last few years, and shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.

Yes. It’s sort of a duology, in that those two are definitely the same characters, and one is a sequel. But there are also little bits of crossover with other works by the same author – so for example, the novel The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl has a crossover element with Tatami Galaxy, that isn’t direct.

I’m a big enthusiast for work in translation. A lot of us who operate in English are not conscious of how much English gets translated out into every language in the world, and almost nothing gets translated back into English. English has so much cultural produce that very few editors consider it worthwhile going to the extra expense of doing works in translation. So for us, unlike every other language in the world, the vast majority of our media is stuff that originated in our language, and only a small sliver of what we consume originated in any other language. It’s much closer to the human norm to consume a chunk of stuff that originated in your own language and culture, and then many chunks of stuff that originated in many others. So there’s been this one-way conversation in which SF – since the 19th century, when France produced a lot of it – is dominantly produced in English, translated into every language in the world. Every language in the world writes awesome, original, gorgeous SF, and then only the tiniest sliver of a sliver of a drop comes back into English to be able to have a two-way conversation. Really cool works, responding to Le Guin and to Asimov and all that, get written and get published, but don’t get back to us.

The first large body of SF ever to be translated into English is from Japan, because of the anime and manga boom. Only a minority of anime and manga is science fiction, but the anime and manga SF that has been translated is still more than the sum total of all English translations of SF in prose from every other language. The reason I became interested in it was largely that it was the first point of large-scale access to another linguistic culture’s SF world, in which different stuff was happening that was cool. Like, ESP is still a popular topic of SF there – the Anglosphere stopped caring about ESP by 1990, but all sorts of cool recent ESP fictions are being written in Japan, and also in Korea and China, where it remained a big thing. And then the question of what robots are for… In Japan, ever since the 60s and Tezuka, robots have been used as code for looking at racism and civil rights; whereas in early Anglosphere SF, it was very much about fear of labour uprisings and rebellions. This is well summarised by the fact that in English, when you say ‘the robot laws’, you mean Asimov’s laws that are programmed into robots to keep them from being able to harm and overthrow humans. When the phrase ‘robot laws’ got to Japan, and Tezuka heard it and got the idea that there should be robot laws and wrote them into Astro Boy, the laws give citizenship, civil rights and the vote to robots. It’s really awesome having these two completely different developments of what science fiction as a tradition used robots to talk about.

So it’s really cool when we get stuff in translation, and we’ve started getting more. The Three-Body Problem’s Hugo win made a big difference, and we’re now getting a decent trickle of the best of Chinese SF coming across. Magazines are working hard to have special issues where they’re making a point of translating Palestinian SF, or Finnish SF, or Brazilian SF, and it’s been really cool seeing that blooming. And anthologies – I know that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer do a really good job in their big anthologies, like The Weird, of always making sure to have a decent number of works in translation. You have to work hard, and editors pretty much always know they’re going to make less money from translation than they would from something that they just got in English in the first place. But it’s so much richer, and broadens our conversation.

Tatami Galaxy is a rare example of a serious prose novel written in Japan that got translated into English. Mostly it got translated because of an anime that was made of the novel, but we have the novel, I don’t care why! It’s in the mode of Groundhog Day, the mode of looping time. The beginning is hard to get through. I was actually having a book club discussion of this book with a bunch of friends last week, and all of them, including me, found it kind of gruelling until the end of the first loop. But the payoff is really incredible. It’s hard to talk about it at all without it being spoilery… The book is about learning to value the small experiences of life; the things which, as we pass through them, we don’t treasure enough.