“The best science fiction is heavy on science and light on fiction,” Professor Chris Mason told us in his interview on science fiction and space travel. A geneticist and computational biologist at Cornell, he is just one of several scientists who have recommended sci-fi books on our site. Below, we've collected all our sci-fi books recommended by scientists—good choices for readers who love their fiction scientific.
“It’s a fabulous book of something that will likely be in our near future. The book started as chapters that were released for free and everyone was effusive in their praise for the accuracy of the technical details and the acumen of the writer to get everything just right. Even though it’s fiction, everything’s based on technology and methods that exist. It required no new technology that we don’t have right now.” Read more...
Space Travel and Science Fiction Books
Christopher Mason, Scientist
“This book highlights how humans can adapt to what would seem to be an impossible survival circumstance. It really highlights the fragility of our planet.” Read more...
Space Travel and Science Fiction Books
Christopher Mason, Scientist
“Ishiguro’s literary trick is that the world Klara knows is limited by what she can see or what she is told about. As readers, we might have a better idea of some of the things she doesn’t realise—what she has got herself into, say—but the narrative might not go where we expect or perhaps hope. We’re assembling Klara’s world alongside Ishiguro. And the idea of the Sun as potentially a God is fascinating; in science fiction it could, of course, be a superior being.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist
Andrew M. Butler, Film Critics & Scholar
“This book imagines a far future in which the world is populated with a diverse range of what I will call ‘persons’, rather than ‘humans’. This is a society without significant scarcity. In this society, people have immense freedom to consider what kind of life they want to live because they don’t need to hold down a job to draw an income. Furthermore, you can control your own values, especially if you’re one of the AI systems. You can just tinker with your settings, saying, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to really love math for a little while’, or you can change your values in many other ways. You can voluntarily adopt a new worldview for a while, then shed it. It gives us the existentialists’ question in its purest form.” Read more...
Science Fiction and Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher
“In the first book of the trilogy, science basically stops working on Earth, and there’s a big puzzle as to why. Particle accelerators start giving random results, and a bunch of scientists commit suicide. It is then revealed that an alien civilisation is at the origin of those events. These aliens themselves are going through a systemic collapse, and they create an AI that they send across space to take control of another civilisation…all of this is the setup of The Dark Forest, in which humanity realises the scale of the potential risk, and learn that they have 400 years to prepare before the alien fleet arrives. They know that the adversary is more technologically-advanced than them, but not by how much.” Read more...
The best books on Existential Risks
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Scientist
“The Southern Reach is a research institution set up to investigate the mysterious ‘Area X’, an exclusion zone with strange and frightening effects on the human mind. We follow ‘the biologist’, one member of a four-woman team that has been dispatched into the zone. Long abandoned and fenced off, it has grown into a pristine wilderness – but it is haunted by traces of the expeditions that have gone before them. I can’t tell you how eerie and absorbing it is.” Read more...
The best books on Abandoned Places
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“This book is by Greg Egan, an Australian science fiction writer. He’s well known in circles that think about what I’ve been talking about and pretty much unknown outside them. To my mind, he’s written better about AI than any other writer, because he takes it seriously. He recognizes it represents enormous change. Permutation City is about a time in history when uploading becomes possible and very rich people can upload themselves into machines which operate quickly and in real time. Poorer people have to upload themselves into machines which process very slowly and so they live very slow versions of life” Read more...
The best books on Artificial Intelligence
Calum Chace, Novelist
“In the book, people who live on the moon are called Loonies. Their bodies have adapted to the lack of gravity and they have lighter bones. It’s basically a penal colony, because once you spend too long there, you can’t go back to Earth. I just like the idea of the adaptation in the biology of humans to different gravities and things like that which I’m sure would happen if people were growing up or living on the moon or on Mars.” Read more...
Space Travel and Science Fiction Books
Christopher Mason, Scientist
“It’s a very beautifully written book imagining that humans were so broadly successful in the universe that they’re in multiple galaxies and working at an interplanetary scale. The protagonist in the book is something called a psychohistorian. He has studied history so well that he can try and predict what will happen next.” Read more...
Space Travel and Science Fiction Books
Christopher Mason, Scientist
“What really is great about this book to me is that all the science fiction just dissipates in the face of absolute veracity. And that’s something that I think if you’re writing this kind of stuff, you should aspire to. You shouldn’t focus on the gizmos. In this, the power armour is a suit of armour that powers your joints and makes you a lot stronger. These are commonly known as exoskeletons, and I’ve actually worn one of those at Berkeley Bionics. It’s really exhilarating to see that that is something that is already 100 per cent true, but here it just becomes part of the background and the flesh of this story, without ever becoming a huge focus of it. The story ends up being about the characters and a story about war and soldiers suffering, and that’s an amazing accomplishment, I think.” Read more...
Daniel H Wilson, Novelist
“The story is primarily concerned with ‘How do you tell a human from a robot?’ But what I found most interesting about it was that it was an apocalyptic future, in which human beings had built machines not to kill other human beings, but to learn how to kill other human beings. The robots initially were just landmines, they were very simple things. They learned how to camouflage themselves, and then human beings became more scarce and smarter, so the robots actually had to begin to learn how to mimic us. What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message.” Read more...
Daniel H Wilson, Novelist
“The book has just enough science that it seems real. If you read it as a kid and re-read it as a geologist, you think there are some very interesting things in there.He plays around with certain facts. He comes up with a very interesting theory to explain that it doesn’t get hot as you go deeper underground (which was in vogue at the time), but the book imagines the preservation of prehistoric life in the subsurface and that’s something we’re still looking at. Many of the organisms that we find down there today look to be, from an evolutionary point of view, extremely primitive. The conditions we find them in are very much what the surface of the Earth used to look like, three billion years ago. There is no oxygen and three billion years ago there was very little oxygen on the surface of our planet.” Read more...
The best books on Life Below the Surface of the Earth
Tullis Onstott, Environmentalist
“It’s a series of short stories, or a novel really. But he’s doing something that no other novelist has ever done. He looks at the history of the universe, the history of life on Earth – all the major milestones – and he makes it human.” Read more...
Marcus Chown, Science Writer
