Fun fact: Philip K. Dick, a legendary science-fiction writer himself, believed Stanisław Lem,, was a communist committee. According to a letter he wrote, Dick thought Lem didn't even exist as a single person, but rather as a figurehead created to spread propaganda. He claimed Lem was "probably a composite committee rather than an individual." Dick's justification for this accusation was that "[Lem] writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not."

My friend grew up across the street from Butler; 12 years old, drinking tea, just two chicks sitting in Octavia's kitchen talkin' stories. Can you imagine?

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a book that you likely will appreciate.

Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorites, it's alo by Le Guin

Every Octavia Bulter book is beautiful and crushing and something you read once and can’t read again. Parable of the sower and parable of the talents are both amazing

I live in Cuba, and growing up I had access to Soviet Sci-Fi, classic (19th century) Sci-Fi, Cuban Sci-Fi, and American (as Isaac Asimov, etc.) Sci-Fi. My favorites were the soviet, as their approach to stories was not "kill the other", and more likely about overcoming some difficulty: how to communicate with aliens, or an hostile environment.

Le Guin is such an amazing author. My aunt gave me "A Wizard of Earthsea" and it's some of the most rich and deep writing in such short stories.

Iain M Banks: The Player of Games. This is a stand-alone novel in the 'Culture' series. They're all great.

Vernor Vinge, "A fire upon the deep", is a wild ride full of strange and interesting concepts, and weird aliens (including different laws of physics across the galaxy, and sentient plants riding around carts...). Rainbow's end is also really good, closer to our times (augmented reality, virtual worlds, and questionable methods to digitise libraries...)

Must recommend Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Dude imagined today's "AI" used mainly for targeted advertisement in 1968.

My first Le Guin was The Dispossessed. It changed my life, and it is my most re-read book. The instantaneous communication device from The Word for World Is Forest, the ansible, is possible because of the physics done by the protagonist in The Dispossessed. I'll echo others who've suggested reading all of the Le Guin you can, but if you had to pick only one, that would be my recommendation.

I watched a snippet of an interview with Le Guin not too long ago, and I found her absolutely captivating. I didn't want to blink in case I missed something.

Octavia Butler was a great writer. Parable of the Sower is also heartbreaking but worth the read, and Liliths Brood is one of my favorite book series that i read every few years.

My first, and still favourite, Ursula le Guin is The Lathe of Heaven - about a man who believes that his dreams are re-shaping the world, and a psychiatrist who takes advantage of him.

White’s _The Once and Future King_ is absolutely phenomenal. The first section was the basis for the Disney film _The Sword in the Stone_ (my favorite Disney flick).

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester is an excellent scifi novel

I have the same problem with kids in fiction. It's very, very rare to find a kid written like an actual kid. Sci-fi seems to be particularly rough in this regard.

Thanks for reviewing some older classic books so thoroughly. This was a great concept for the video. 10 other sci-fi to consider if you haven't already read them: Isaac Asimov - Foundation is probably the most famous and worth reading, but I actually prefer the first three R Daneel Olivaw robots series (Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn). In these books the 3 laws of robotics that Asimov developed are explored with interesting detective stories. Well worth reading (the books are complete so you don't need to read the full series if you don't want to, but it works even better when you do). Frank Herbert - Dune (extra popular thanks to the movies) is a great foundational scifi read. Again, parts of the themes are explored more completely (including the downsides of the rise to power that happens in the first book) if you read the later books in the series, but again there is a complete story if you just read the first book. Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars is really good hard sci-fi about colonizing Mars. Again, the trilogy is worth completing if you enjoy the first book. William Gibson - Neuromancer is basically the foundational text of cyberpunk, and Gibson is a great author (I actually think his later books are even better, but Neuromancer is likely is most important/impactful to the sci-fi genre). If you enjoy cyberpunk then Snow Crash by William Stephenson is well worth reading as well as a bonus recommendation. Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama is not as well known in general public as 2001 a space odyssey but I remember preferring it, and an interesting sort of alien encounter story from one of the big three Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is my favorite Heinlein and well worth a read. Heinlein's politics were interesting and if you span this, Stranger in a Strange land, and Starship Troopers you certainly cover some interesting perspectives, but despite this, the book is still worth a read. Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale is a cautionary dystopian that unfortunately seems to grow in relevance (similar to the way Parable of a Sower by Butler does too) but that might extend that scifi from a feminist perspective. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game has lots of children, training for war, but is still worth reading. Like some of the others, you don't need to read the sequels, but if you do you actually get a rich recontextualization of the experiences of the first book and I actually think Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are in some ways more interesting, if less actiony, than the first book. Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 has a special place in my heart as it was the first scifi book that really got me into scifi (at least for books, star wars movies were before this for me) but this is another classic of the genre. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice is much more modern than the others on this list being only 10 years old instead of 25-75, but this is a classic and won all the awards (Nebula, Hugo, Clarke, Locus) and has an interesting perspective of protagonist (Breq, the offshoot ancilliary of the AI of a destoryed Imperial Starship).

If you haven’t read it, based on what you enjoyed on the list presented here I think you’d love The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It’s essentially a big allegory for the Vietnam War, but more significantly explores themes of communication/conflict with aliens, time dilation due to space travel, the shifting of cultures over long periods of time, and much more. It’s genuinely a phenomenal piece of science fiction.

I'm sure others have already said so, but both in my experience and in common opinion Le'Guins books "The Dispossef" and "The Left Hand of Darkness" are her best reads. For me personally the dispossed is one of perhaps 5 pieces of media that actually changed my life. The word for world is forest sacrifices some of le'guins masterful culture building for, what seemed to me, to be very raw frustration and anger at irl politics

I would suggest Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It is a BIG book but you get three genres in one. First, there is a alternative earth history where physicists and astronomers are restricted to monasteries. Second, there is a thriller section involving the aliens. Finally, there is a space opera with realistic orbital mechanics.

Let me echo all the others: more Le Guin and Butler! They’re both literary geniuses

If you haven't read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman I think it might be up your alley. Particularly when you mentioned the communication and such in The Word For World is Forest, this is what came to mind.

I'm always gonna push the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams, I absolutely love those books! Although I feel like they're a bit underrated in 2024, i never really hear them get brought up in classic book discussions.

Warning for books written in the later 1800s some were serialised in literary magazines and this was a way for known authors to finance longer works, so they can have this cliff-hanger structure. For example Dostoevsky’s *Crime and Punishment* was published in this way originally. This is fascinating, but is not the case for *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde* which is a straight up penny-dreadful inspired by two things. One a friend of Stevenson was prosecuted and executed for murdering his wife. Stevenson knew nothing of this crime, but attended the trial shocked by the revelations that emerged and later became convinced that his former friend was a multiple-murderer. Secondly Stevenson had another friend called Walter Jekyll who was a former clergyman, writer and probably a closeted homosexual, so the story was also about someone living a double-life.

Regarding your comment on the cliffhanger chapter endings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a lot of those books were first published as serialized stories in newspapers, which encouraged the cliffhangers to get people to buy the next paper. Also, I think you would like "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, which is a great first contact story, where the cultural assumptions of both sides have some big consequences for everyone involved.

An interesting book which deals with the issue of vast time between events is Joe Haldeman's Forever War. Humans fighting aliens but the perspective is from one of the soldiers dealing with the changes in society that the army keeps experiencing every time they come back to base because they are using sub-light ships which the time dilation of near light travel drops them back into an increasingly alien to them earth.

I thoroughly enjoyed your discussion on "The Word for World is Forest." Your insight into the motives behind deforesting an alien planet was spot on. You've captured the delicate balance between a writing sin and the depth of imagination with such eloquence. Thank you for sharing your thoughtful analysis!

In high school I read everything I could find by Larry Niven. He wrote “hard” SF, in which the word building includes much discussion of the science, physics, and technology enabling the space stories. I have no idea how it holds up today, but his won awards for his 1970 novel Ring World.

Twenty thousand leagues under the sea! Excruciatingly comprehensive lists of fish! Strange old-school science, and enthusiastic victorian conjecture about the deep sea, and the fantastical potentials of electricity, in that era where it still feels like magic! I listened to it walk-commuting home at 4 in the morning and the wide-eyed optimism and breathless wonderment about the ocean and technology freaking transported me

Reccos: - The Left Hand of Darkness and the The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (The first two Earthsea novels are great too, if you want fantasy instead of sci-fi.) - Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Worth it even though you say you prefer standalone books to series.)

"reading classic sci-fi until the world makes sense" Oh what perfect words in this time, just instantly relatable.

I was looking forward to seeing this list after you first mention Canticle!

stanislaw lem is soooo good (unless he isn't. which is rare, but then he is really bad). probably the most underrated, or underappreciated scifi author. at least in the west.

Oh, Dr Collier, Parable of the Sower! You MUST!

Robert L. Forward, Dragon's Egg, 1980. Fast-evolving life on a neutron star... basically "Flatland" for techies.

"Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson quite literally changed my life and how I viewed the world. I think you might love it.

I just recently finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time", I loved the heck out of it. It's one of the few sci-fi books I've read that really plays with evolutionary concepts and timescales (dovetailing nicely with long-distance space travel), which I thoroughly enjoyed.

For something unique, funny, and imaginative, try Jack Vance, very underrated writer

"Ender's Game" if you haven't already, seems like it would be something you'd enjoy.

Even though its a series of books, and not sci-fi, I would actually highly recommend Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea books. Each one is its own complete story that feeds into the greater world of Earthsea and they're all wonderfully thoughtful and philosophical takes on fantasy and wizardry and patriarchy.

I had good luck reading Hugo and Nebula Award winners to find SF authors I like.

Canticle for Leibowitz has long been considered one of the greatest sci-fi works of all. Pretty cool to see younger sci-fi fans discovering it and still seeing how great it was.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin.

When you said your #1 choice I literally hissed “yes!!! Yesss!!!” One of my favorite books

I just read Roadside Picnic recently, and it was a pretty quick read but really interesting!

If you like weird aliens you will love: Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's the best description of a truly alien species and its first contact with humans. Very imaginative.

I am loving the evolution of your set up! The video quality and sound seems to have improved a lot (it could be my new phone and the bias comes with not looking at a broken screen on a device 3 years old but, I don’t think it is!) Really enjoying the updates we are getting on this channel and seeing you have enough time in your day to day to still come in and update us with these fun videos!

I appreciate your insights. One author who I find generally does kids "right" is Stephen King. He remembers what it's like to be a kid, and how they are treated and viewed by adults.

This person is so smart. I really enjoy their ramblings and rants

Thank you I've wanted this content since your first videos, thanks!

My I suggest (Mr. Fix It and Miss Sue) book?This is the poetic tale of Miss Sue, a contentious young woman no matter what a father and mother would do. In trying to raise a proper woman of dignity and respect, what she became as she grew up was something they did not expect. So what are the parents to do when they are down to their last wit, and realize they have no choice but to send for Mr. Fix It.❤❤❤❤

Lem is fabulous. Both his books about profoundly alien aliens and his feudal robot fairy tales. Annoyingly, I've only found Solaris translated via French.

I loved the quantum shift in delivery when you reached Butler. I was like "Yeah, a book; another book; but now a BOOK, like a REAL BOOK."

People still read Joanna Russ! Hooray! One book and one collection of stories that are emotionally on the opposite end of the scale: 1) Cyteen (might be one volume or bound as a trilogy) by C J Cherryh. On a future colony far away: murder, politics, the ethics of cloning and genetic manipulation. Designing people and designing societies. 2) Any of the short stories by Cordwainer Smith (pen name of Paul M. A. Linebarger.) One to start with: The Ballad of Lost C'Mell. You'll either be hooked on his lyrical writing style and the universe he builds or you'll hate it. I don't think there is an in-between.

Oh these were really awesome recommendations! Loved your reviews of the ones I had already read, a *loooong* time ago, and the ones I've never heard of are going on my TBR. Thanks!

I enjoyed this so much, please make more of these videos if they interest you! I also love short books, slow and overly-detailed writing, and Le Guin. I'm going to check the library for everything on here I haven't read yet. As you can see from the comments, you could probably do an entire Le Guin video, with The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and, my very favorite book, The Left Hand of Darkness. Other short classics I love are Roadside Picnic, Rendezvous with Rama, and Remnant Population. edit: just after posting this I realized this is a second channel from you come up in my suggestions, hah. I'm excited!

I just got into reading any sicfi for the first time this year through the channel bookpilled, love to see this sort of content from you too!

R.U.R. is one of the books almost every child going through the education system in Czechia has to read, myself being among them. Interesting you liked it so much! I didn't expect such a positive review at all. I'll happily join the other commenters in recommending War with the Newts, it's a book Čapek wrote near the end of his life. The premise is actually very similar to R.U.R., but I personally liked it much much more, but it's not a play so it might not be your cup of tea as much. Čapek is one of the most important Czech writers, who's written many books during his unfortunately short life, including many other plays.

If you liked RUR, I HIGHLY recommend Capek’s War with the Newts. A satire about humanity trying to subjugate a race of amphibious creatures discovered living in the sea.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is great, takes a look at how an anarchical society might operate. I haven’t read it yet, but The Left Hand of Darkness is another highly regarded one of her works in the vein of 70’s feminism sci fi.

Grass by Sheri S Tepper is a great old sci-fi book. It definitely felt like it should be considered a classic.

For me, listening to Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds is as satisfying as reading a good sci-fi book. Everybody should check it out if not familiar.

Sweet lighting ✨️

Stanislaw Lem has something like a tetralogy that can be described as a 'First Contact Cycle.' All four books-The Invincible, Eden, Solaris, and Fiasco-are excellent sci-fi, and what's cool is that in every case, the aliens are incredibly well-conceived. Fiasco may be the most complicated, with all its intertwined plotlines and the main plot that seemingly contradicts itself, but in a sense, it is quite unique. Lem experimented with the relationship between the information he gives to the reader and the information that the reader infers, and with every book, this relationship shifted towards 'don't tell the reader; let them infer it themselves.' I also recommend the cycle of short stories Star Diaries, which is full of good laughs. Lem also has philosophical and futurology works, but I tried and failed to read them. I must admit, they are too hard for me

I'm so glad to hear you read Kindred!! It's my favorite book of the past year and easily cemented Butler as one of my favorite authors ever

Definitely read more of Le Guin. I'd highly recommend The Left Hand of Darkness, it's one of the most touching books I've ever read. A bunch of her books are interconnected in what is known as the "Hainish Cycle" but this is not a series and she didn't like this name readers gave to her work (for instance, there's no cycle). However, you do get bits that inform stuff in other books, but the chronology isn't automatically evident. Others have recommended The Dispossessed. I just finished that book a couple weeks ago and would also recommend it. This is not at all the point of the book but something I really liked and kept thinking about while reading was the implied discussion around epistemology and how a different culture may view and do science. You get a brief and more explicit mention of that same sort of perspective in The Left Hand of Darkness, too, and the book also deals with some topics that I'd argue are handled a lot better there than in The Dispossessed.

28:01 Something to note about the Le Guin: it’s a part of the Hainish novels, so there are also implications of the development of the ansible and the FTL, which are talked about in The Dispossessed and other novels

If I remember correctly, many of the oldest books were originaly weekly serials, chapter by chapter, in newspapers, thus the cliff hanger at the end off each chapter.

Good list and good discussion of the books. When you were describing your selection process, I was a little afraid there'd be a bunch of E.E. "Doc" Smith and Jack Williamson, but that apprehension was almost immediately dispelled. I was interested in what you had to say about "Kindred" - like you, I'm very glad I've read the book and found it enthralling, but haven't reread it.

Thank you for the recommendations! I’ve just added half of them to my reading list :)

Oh, We is my favourite dystopia of all time. it’s idealistic but terrifying, so good

12:30 H.G. Welles was also a wargamer and wrote one of the earliest sets of miniature war game rules called Little Wars. You can find with Google and it's pretty fun, akin to playing with toy soldiers but with rules. Many war gamers still play the game today but they use Nerf pistols instead of the spring loaded cannons of Welles' rules. Someone even added rules to play War Of The Worlds as a scenario. They use laser pointers instead of heat rays.

'Make a book short again' made me lol

Stanislaw Lem is great. His last scifi novel Fiasco is brilliant, if you like dystopian hubris in novel form. Other people have already recommended Anathem, and Children Of Time, both of which are amazing.

Informative! Learning that there are so many bite sized sci-fi stories out there. The description for 'Eden' sounds curiously like the set-up for the recent streaming show Scavengers Reign.

Thank you Angela. That was a wonderful quick review. I haven't yet, but now I will read over half of all of these, maybe all. One thing I wish I could yell to the world, Do not google "best sci fi books of year xxxx"! It doesn't work. You get drek and all the names you already know. Your review Angela, and several others I've watched on KZfaq such as Bookpilled opened my eyes to dozens of authors I never even heard of. I thought I was done with science fiction. Now I'm just beginning. All over again. Grazie.

If I may recommend you the works of Dan Simmons, who's novels can rarely be defined as belonging to just a single genre of literature. He has classic Sci-Fi novels, horror in the style of Steven King, novels inspired by true event that always involve some "supernatural" elements in the fictional parts, and many other. I know most people only know Simmons for his Hyperion and Endymion series, but to me many of his non Sci-fi novels are also masterpieces. Novels like: Summer of Night, Song of Kali, The Terror, Drood, Black Hills and The Abominable...to name a few.

In case you have not already read it, you might like Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men._ It was published in 1930, and was written as a history, not a novel as such.

Thank you for this list. I am adding many of these books to my queue.

i was looking for something new to read and a lot of these sound great

I read The Word For World Is Forest recently, and IIRC the earth had been logged out. There were no trees for logging.

The episodic nature of the writing of someone like H.G. Wells might be a throwback to the way Dickens wrote. I don't think he ever wrote a (cover to cover) novel. What he did was write this month's or week's episode of the story for the magazine that published these episodes, along with other content. I don't think that's how things worked by the time H.G. Wells came along, but as part of knowing "how to write", he might've just taken for granted that a chapter has to end on a cliffhanger. He would've grown up reading Dickens - maybe even in the "latest episode/ soap opera" format. So that would make him exactly, indistinguishably like us, then? We still do 90% of what we do just because that's "the right way" (i.e. "normal"). That's why when e.g. we try to replace our CO2 emitting vehicles, we just stick an electric motor in a car. Because people drive cars. Always have driven cars, always will drive cars. I mean what else can you do? "People don't want to live close together". (Or "crowded like battery hens" - which is another kind of "normal" sacred to us ---- because everything normal is also sacred. That's where religion went to. It never went away.) At least Dickens didn't have Claudio di Muerte somehow return from the dead after having accidentally burnt alive - I forget why - to be there at the end of the final episode of the current series with that old lady whose only job seems to be to do the curses for them. OK, maybe you watch a different soap, so this makes no sense, so you'd have to make up your own example that makes no sense to make the point. Point is if Dickens fires one of the actors in the show, that's it, character is "dead", finished, never to be seen again. It occurs to me that you might easily have missed out on hearing that Jeff Wayne made an LP record based on War of the Worlds, once upon a time, long, long ago. If memory serves, the narration was by Orson Welles. They tell a bit of the story, then there's a song about it, and then it reaches The End, and everyone lives happily ever after. (There's a movie, too. The LP record was the soundtrack. It has an orchestra at least part of the time.)

C.M. Kornbluth "The Marching Morons" Yevgeny Zamyatin "We" Old sci-fi that I only learned about within the past few years. Gives a different take on dystopian visions from the past.

Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the War of the Worlds is a classic experimental album. Richard Burton as the narrator was fantastic. The double vinyl album has a giant liner book with great artwork. There are no grooves left in my records. I had to get it on DVD. Scariest ‘oooo laaaa’ lyric ever btw.

Left Hand of Darkness! Ursula K le Guin too. Just make sure you have someone to hold afterwards, damn.

R.U.R. is such a great book, glad you loved it! I would absolutely recommend War with the Newts from Capek - it's the same core idea as RUR, but executed even better and more in-depth. It's not a play anymore, but if you like some experimental writing (using news articles, radio broadcast transcripts and such to tell parts of the story), you'll reallllllly enjoy it!

_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ - a magic potion that makes him more virile and rage-filled to the point he can't control his appetites. Ha! Magic! (Anabolic steroids and roid rage?) LeGuin's _The Dispossessed_ is one of her best novels and she is one of the greatest modern writers.

Glad to see that Karel Capek made the list. I highly recommend his satire "War with the Newts". Kind of a preposterous premise that resonates tremendously today.

Wow the coincidence - I started reading Eden just yesterday lol Anyway, great video as usual, I really enjoyed it! Also, I would recommend these from Lem: -Fiasco, -His Master’s Voice, -Golem XIV (more of a novella tbh) and The Invincible. They are my absolute favourites: Golem is like a manic philosophical monologue from a supercomputer speaking in front of humanity’s greatest minds like they’re a bunch of toddlers, Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are also heavily conceptual , like the best sci-fi should be; The Invincible on the other hand is simply a solid astronaut adventure with an air of mystery. In any case, really happy to see some love for non-Anglosphere authors on your list! Keep up the good work❤

Children of Time, Children of Ruin & Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky - space colonization and human evolution stuff. The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut series) by Mary Robinette Kowal - beginnings of space colonization. I Have No Mouth and Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (others from him too). Berserker by Fred Saberhagan - killer space robots (others from this author are good too).

10:00 - 10:42 for those who like the premise of "The Chrysalids", I recommend "The Waves Extinguish the Wind" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

So glad you love Le Guin. She's an all-time great. Any book of hers will be a solid recommendation.

Not old enough to be a classic yet but Embassytown by China Mieville is so so good (seconding The Disposessed also!)

My favorite Stanislaw Lem book doesn't get talked about as much: Cyberiad. It is not even slightly dry. It's chaotic fairy tales and extended jokes about almost (but not quite) omnipotent engineers and the silly things they create while exploring space.

Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or I will eat my hat.

Science fiction is how the human race daydreams about its own future. The Word for World is Forest is one of the greatest novels of all time. Thanks for mentioning it

I'm not a big reader but I now really want to read these books. Angela, you have a way of describing books that makes them really interesting.

The speech by the New Zealander near the end of The Chrysalids was "borrowed" by Jefferson Airplane for the song "Crown of Creation". I think that I read R.U.R. for English class in High School. I love Philp K. Dick, my favorite of his books is "Martian Time-Slip" it is brilliant in a dozen different ways at once.

can only say 'read everything by le guin you can find' and... chrysalids is I think the weakest wyndham 'proper novel' (he had a long history of shorts published in various sci fi mags etc going back to the 1920s). the kraken wakes is a fascinating take on 'alien invasion' stories, but for me his finest piece is 'trouble with lichen' which is that kind of sci fi that he does best - everyday ordinariness with one sciency thing that changes, and it is to me such a realistic take on the practicalities of coming across what would be a revolutionary discovery - do you make it public, do you keep it secret, do you use it for personal gain or to quietly shift how society works...? love it to bits.