Hugonauts: The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Details, episodes & analysis

This episode is sponsored by The Dawn series by Ray N. Kuili, which you can get on print, audiobook, or kindle here.

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• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

All the books in the episode (with YT links to those we've got full episodes on, or search for them in your podcast app): 

• The Hunger Games
• Red Rising
• Ready Player One
• The Giver
• Never Let Me Go
• The Children of Men
• The Machine Stops
• Clockwork Orange
• A Scanner Darkly
• Kallocain
• Fahrenheit 451
• The Handmaid's Tale
• Brave New World
• 1984
• We

The Mercy of Gods follows a team of research scientists trying to survive an alien invasion. The Carryx are ruthless - killing 1/8 of the population immediately as they arrive to encourage the survivors to cooperate. Our team, along with many others, are then abducted and brought to a Carryx planet, where they are set loose in an open-air prison populated by hundreds of other alien races. They’re told that if they want to survive they must be useful to the Carryx. Will they resist, or decide to serve the alien overlords? And what does service even mean to aliens who think totally differently?

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Similar books we recommend:

• Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Startide Rising - David Brin
• A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge

Six days ago astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

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Similar books we recommend: 

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of the young rebels who venture illegally into the Zone, one of six areas on Earth that have been profoundly changed by the visitation of aliens to Earth. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And despite the danger, the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answers he's been looking for. 

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

Similar books we recommend: 

• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/rendezvous-with-rama)
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/ted-chiang)

Space ships whip across the solar system, ice haulers burn in from the gas giants, stolen Martian corvettes sneak behind enemy lines, and very human characters tie it all together and make the incredible journey worth the ride. Miraculously all 9 books (plus a collection of short stories) are fun, well-done adventures that will keep you turning the pages and racing to find out what happens next. Seriously, if you haven’t read the Expanse yet, it’s time for a treat that goes down easy.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

Similar books we recommend: 

• House of Suns – Alastair Reynolds (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/house-of-suns)
• Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/children-of-time)
• Memories Legion – James S.A. Corey

In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. Unless D-503 can find a space within himself - that disease the ancients called a soul.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

Similar books we recommend: 

• 1984 by George Orwell (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/1984)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/brave-new-world)
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A starship is taking off from Mars, and just before it does one of the crewman arrives with a strange new creature. What will the Wub bring to those on board, and the headstrong captain who can't stop thinking with his stomach?

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PS We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is still coming soon, but Brent had a family emergency, so Cody stepped up to bring y'all this gem in the meantime.

Rumors are swirling about a species of super-intelligent octopus living off the coast of Vietnam. As corporations and other non-state actors begin to investigate, it becomes clear that we are not alone in the universe - alien life has evolved right here on earth. DIANIMA, a giant tech company known for its machine learning prowess, buys the islands to study the octopuses and try to monopolize their unique brains for profit. They send Evrim, the world’s first true android / AI, and Dr. Ha Nguyen, a brilliant marine biologist, to study the octopuses, and Altantsetseg, a battle-hardened drone operator, to defend the islands from rapacious automated fishing vessels. 

Can they learn to communicate with the octopuses? Or will this new intelligent life be destroyed by global corporations run amok?

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video
• Check out Ray Nayler's answers to your questions about the book!

Similar books we recommend: 

• Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/ted-chiang)
• The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi (https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-windup-girl)

Ranking our top 15 sci fi books of all time:

• 15 - Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu 
• 14 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• 13 - Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
• 12 - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• 11 - Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
• 10 - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• 9 - The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• 8 - Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• 7 - A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
•  6 - Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• 5 - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 4 - Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
• 3 - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• 2 - Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
• 1 - Contact by Carl Sagan

If you think something deserves to be on the list, drop us a line on Discord!

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
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Paul Durham has begun experimenting on his own mind. He uploaded a copy of his neural patterns - everything that makes him who he is - into a computer simulation. The more he experiments, the more the lines between the real person and the virtual person begin to blur. What he discovers there, out at the edge of consciousness and the pattern that defines him, give him an impossible idea. A permutation city, where immortality might be possible.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

Similar books we recommend: 

• The Hidden Girl and other Stories - Ken Liu (our interview with Ken Liu: https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/ken-liu)
• The Last Question - short story by Asimov (available free here: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html)
• Diaspora - Greg Egan