I like your idea about using a short story anthology as a kind of survey course in SF. I’ll see what’s available at my library.
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Lucky indeed.
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_emphasized text_BTW if you use grok in a sentence, you have to read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It wouldn’t necessarily be my first recommendation* but it is a classic.
*I’ve been admonished by my wife for recommending SF books I read in my adolescence, which may, in retrospect, might not have been that good, but I’m pretty sure Heinlein is worth reading.
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Anything by Ursula K. Le Guin? You might want to start with The Left Hand of Darkness.
Also check out A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
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@Snowlark, I read your OP, and all the suggestions, and the OP again. Most suggestions are great SF, but I’m not sure you’ve really communicated what your taste actually is in fiction or non. I’ve given this speech before, but I like to say SF isn’t a genre, it’s a genre modifier. Every genre out there, romance, bromance, war, spy, cops, mystery, thriller, adventure, whatever, has been done as SF. So I ask you to say what genre’s of fiction or nonfiction does it for you?
That said, my favorite recent SF to recommend to people who aren’t into SF is Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and it’s sequel Freedom™. They’re really one book. Genius game designer releases a program onto the net when he dies that appears to be trying to take over the world. Where it goes is pretty unexpected.
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This, a million times this! She’s one of my all-time favorites.
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Connie Willis? She gets a lot of hate from a certain type of hard-SF fan which IMO can only be a good thing. 
“To say Nothing Of The Dog” barely scrapes into the SF definition as a Victorian comedy, a mystery and a light romance, flavoured with a nice take on the time-travel thing. Won a lot of awards, if that means anything to anyone.
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Everyone (including me) keeps recommending classics, but I also really recommend Hugh Howey. Quick reads, mind-bending plots and compelling writing. If you own a kindle, I recommend the Wool (aka Silo) series (start with 1-5) and other short fiction by HH. He’s a future classic.
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A very valid point. Heres a potential starting point.
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All good points. Most of what I read falls into one of the following categories:
- science (John Gribben’s Schrodinger’s Kittens, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewarts The Collapse of Chaos)
- philosophy (anything from Aristotle to Bohm, though I don’t read much standalone philosophy these days)
- sociology (Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk)
- biographies/memoirs (Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking)
- U.S. history (currently pecking away at Leon Fink’s edited book on the Gilded age and the progressive era; highly recommended)
- anything by John McPhee
I read mainly to explore new ideas, learn new things, gain additional perspectives, make sense of the unfamiliar or seemingly disjoint–pretty common motivations for a reader.
The one fiction author who really grabbed me* was Raymond Carver, who was a literary magician in his ability to convey so much through almost entirely objective details. His stories were fully inhabited and driven by his characters and I love that kind of storytelling.
ETA-- To give a short answer to your question: I like having my mind bent, which is probably why I enjoyed the heavily psychological 1984 so much.
*Besides Douglas Adams.
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It’s satirical SF. It starts out as what seems to be an exceptionally good spoof, but halfway through the fifth book, I realised it was also a towering masterpiece of the genre; that one series putting Adams in the same league as the undisputed giants of SF.
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Have you read his dirk gently books?
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Hah, Pratchett wrote fantasy for SF readers, particularly Adams fans. Truckers (not in the Discworld canon) is a clear testament to that.
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Of course, but not multiple times like HHGTG, and quite a while ago.
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Are you open to trying any comics? I’m thinking specifically about stuff from alan moore, in particular watchmen and from hell which would cover many of those categories you listed. It’s worth getting the collected edition of from hell because the extensive notes and references at the back are as fascinating as the book itself - i swear the whole thing seems to rewire your brain, there’ll be a version of you before you read it and a version of you after you read it.
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I never got into graphic novels but goddamn if that statement isn’t making me reconsider.
I’ve never been able to figure out exactly why I have such difficult attending to a graphic novel but I suspect much of that is due to my severe visual distractibility. There’s a reason that, growing up, the only comics I read were strips and panels. I did lots of cartooning and similar illustration in my teens and twenties and yet I never made a mental leap to temporal continuity beyond a few panels.
ETA: My mind is narrative-challenged in general, though. My episodic memory sometimes get corrupted and my autobiographical memory is riddled with holes. Ask me to describe a person and I’d be able to compose a profile on-the-fly. Ask me to tell you a story and I go mute. Perhaps this is partly why most of what I choose to read is focused on ideas, systems, and personalities, rather than narratives. I’d have to introspect on that one.
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Hmmm… well then, you might struggle a bit with from hell. It is dense with information, there’s one long chapter in particular that recounts a secret alt-history of london that has panels fighting for space due to the textual overload. It certainly plays with temporal continuity, or not so much play with it as chew it up and spit it out.
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Ok. There’s a lot to work with there, and a lot of the suggestions are apt. Things that come to my mind:
Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley. It’s a little book, but has a lot of science, a lot of humor, and a lot of though provoking stuff about immortality, cloning and body modification. The setting is the solar system after aliens kick humans off Earth to reserve it for it’s sole intelligent species, the whales.
Read Leguin for SF deep into sociology and philosophy. Iain Banks too. Player of Games might really tickle you, a visit to a planet whose government is based on the biggest, craziest board game in the known universe.
McPhee. Hmm. There’s tons of “travelogue” SF, even some that get deep into geology. You might really like David Brin’s “Uplift” space opera series, based on the premise that intelligence does not naturally occur, but can only be created. It’s very intelligently written, he’s a physicist, and he builds great worlds and aliens. Many SF aliens are men in rubber suits on the page, he creates alien ways of thinking, how would their biology and environment be different? He even does this for the intelligent chimps and dolphins humans have bio-engineered, giving them a racial voice. Entry volume is “Startide Rising”. Here’s a great interview with him https://www.wired.com/2012/08/geeks-guide-david-brin/
I’ll keep thinking.
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Never has my reading list grown so much after reading a single post. If I ever lose regular status, this’ll be why.
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Very good point!
Samuel R. Delaney’s Babel 17 is brilliant on this.
You will probably enjoy Robert Sheckley, to whom Adams owes a big thematic debt IMO - plenty of good short stories and some hilarious short psychedelic novels: Options, Dimension of Miracles, Mindswap, the Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton.
I second John Brunner (as @teknocholer said) and add The Sheep Look Up and The Jagged Orbit to his suggestions.
So do I! But for me it’s Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (the first five, anyhow; the second series underwhelms). Readable and fun from the very first page.
In fact I’m going to blaspheme here and say I find Pratchett (whom I hugely admire as a human being and thinker) to be overrated on the story and chortles front. Hey, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb: I’m also gonna propose that the only Iain M. Banks book you need to read is The Player of Games.
Finally, since you seem to be open to FUN in your fiction, I would submit that you can’t go wrong with Phil Dick’s short stories and much of the early Asimov, who may be well out of fashion now but is unquestionable a great “gateway” SF writer.
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