I love first contact fiction. When I was a kid, my uncle once told me about seeing a UFO, a ship landing in the Varangerfjord in northern Norway. No one believed him, of course, but the way he told that story made me feel like I was right there with him.
These books pull me in because they highlight the difference between what we experience and reality. All of them left me with more questions than answers. I am a math teacher and an indie science fiction writer, and I'm still not entirely sure if that uncertainty is a good thing or a warning.
This is technically a trilogy, but Remembrance of Earth's Past brings all three books together in one huge, essential volume. I read nonstop, and I couldn’t just recommend the first book without the rest.
Cixin Liu’s work deserves the top spot. I was already interested in the Dark Forest Theory before reading it. Many books have a great idea, but Cixin constructs and deconstructs an entire universe around it, in a way that just blew my mind.
I’m truly grateful to have experienced it. I now live, forever frozen, in a Van Gogh painting, thanks to him. What stands out most is the scale. Simply put, this is the Tolkien of science fiction, at least in terms of sheer volume.
'This series will soon become a Netflix series... so get in on the ground floor while you still can' Esquire
Imagine a universe patrolled by numberless and nameless predators.
Imagine what might happen to any civilisation unwise enough to broadcast its location.
This is Cixin Liu's THREE-BODY PROBLEM TRILOGY.
Weaving a complex web of stratagem, subterfuge, philosophy and physics across light years of space and 18.9 million years of time, this tale of humanity's struggle to reach the stars is a visionary masterwork of unprecedented scale and momentum.
As a math teacher, I thought Egan’s world of numbers would give me some kind of home-field advantage. I admit I lost that feeling rather quickly. The story explores post-human minds, simulation theory, and far-future consciousness, and Egan keeps the pace intense.
His skill with math makes the confusion feel real. By the end, I wasn’t sure of anything. Even now, I'm still not sure.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
The future is uncertain, and the stakes are high. Climate change has wreaked havoc on the planet, and humanity is on the brink of extinction. The only hope lies in the Olympus Project, a plan to colonise the moon and build on the Artemis Base.
As I mentioned, I teach math. Math can open doors, but it often hides behind symbols until someone relates it to real life.
Ted Chiang does something similar: He explores themes such as time, language, memory, and consciousness. Exhalation is a collection of SF shorts, unsettling because it’s written so clearly. His ideas are delivered with such simplicity that there is no hiding from the thoughts that follow after each piece.
Also, I must mention, "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" is the best story I’ve ever read about time travel!
'Lean, relentless, and incandescent.' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate,' a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary 'Exhalation,' an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects,' a woman cares for…
Watts says Blindsight isn’t complete without Echopraxia, and I agree. Following the same logic as #1, I’ve put Firefall on the list, which includes both.
I must admit that at first, I was unsure about Watts because vampires in serious science fiction seemed straight-up cringe to me. But in Firefall, vampires have a purpose. They show how evolution doesn’t care about self-awareness. The book is full of truly alien minds that are scary because they work without the inner life we think makes us human.
Watts uses biology the way Egan uses mathematics, and I bow to it.
Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia.
February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere - a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot.
And then... nothing.
But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks - but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark…
Professor Yonatan Brand dreamed of unlocking time itself. When he’s found dead inside his sealed study, he leaves behind an impossible crime—and a machine that might have killed him. Two unlikely detectives—Bunker and Abigail—must solve a mystery where the question isn’t…
This book could have been first on this list, perhaps it should have been, but then it might not have been a list—because Lem, with the particular patience of a man who had clearly lost all faith in the genre he was writing in, and possibly in the human species as a whole, decided to write a novel that doesn’t so much engage with the first contact premise as slowly, methodically, and with what I can only describe as contempt, dismantle every single assumption the premise rests on, including the assumption that we would be able to recognise an extraterrestrial signal if we ever received one, or that we could decode a signal if we in fact managed to recognise it, or that we could, in any sense, agree on what it meant if we actually did manage to decode it, and furthermore, that meaning itself would even survive such an encounter—which, when put that way, (I hope you approve of my honest attempt here, Lem, it took all night), makes every other book on this list, and the very list itself, feel just a tad optimistic.
Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space.
By pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders-even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of…
In 2042, when Earth receives its first reply from the stars, the message is a single number: –273.15. Absolute zero—the temperature at which all motion stops. The Norwegian radio operator who logged the signal is sent into deep space aboard Aletheia, tasked with destroying the Voyager probes before they become a map to humanity's doorstep.
What follows is a philosophical descent through the dark. Alone with NOUS, the ship's AI, the astronaut must decide what the signal actually means—and whether understanding it is even possible. Aletheia is a novel about the distance between what we experience and what we can ever truly know.
When an unauthorized oil rig appears offshore of Ecuador, a military team is sent to investigate. The deep-water platform has no markings, no drilling rig, and no workers. But it’s surrounded by a curious bank of fog, and when their helicopter closes in, they’re swallowed without a trace.
Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But…
