r/sciencefiction

I'm a passionate reader, reviewer, and writer of sci-fi that's set either in the next couple of decades or, better yet, in our contemporary world. When done well, these books inhabit an uncanny valley where cutting-edge tech distorts your worldview just enough to throw you off balance and make you reevaluate important aspects of technological progression and humanity. They lack the intricate worldbuilding that many crave in sci-fi and are often marketed as mainstream thrillers, making it difficult for them to find their ideal audience. Some well-known authors and titles in this niche include: Dean Koontz (Lightning, The Jane Hawk series); Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Upgrade, Recursion); Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park); Dan Brown (The Secret of Secrets); and Matthew FitzSimmons (Constance, Chance). I'm interested in finding other authors and titles that reside at this fascinating intersection between sci-fi and thriller, especially from lesser-known or indie writers like me.

I cast the downvote against humanity myself.

I want that on the record before I say anything else, because in the cycles since, a great many of my colleagues have discovered that they argued against it. They will tell you they saw what I could not. They are lying. Every voice in the Chamber was with me that day. I merely held the deciding weight, and I used it, and I was certain, and I was the most respected Arbiter the Accord had produced in nine hundred years.

Let me tell you why I was certain. Then you can decide whether to pity me.

When humanity petitioned for full seating, the work of judging them fell to me. This is what an Arbiter does. A new species offers itself to the Lattice, and one of us reads the whole of them, their history and their hungers and their thousand small cruelties, and renders a verdict the rest of the galaxy can trust. An upvote seats them. They gain the full current. They become us.

A downvote does not destroy a species. I want to be clear, because the humans later described it in language I found theatrical. A downvote is a held door. It says not yet, not you, not until you are something other than what you are. It is the most serious thing one of us can do, because it costs. The downvoted remember. But it is mercy, too. Better a closed door than a chaos let into the house.

I read humanity for a full cycle. And what I found, I could not in conscience seat.

They were not one people.

You have to understand how this looked to me. I come from the Veshan, and we have been a single chord for ten thousand years. The humans were not a chord. They were a riot. I read their history and it was war, and then a pause, and then war again, in a rhythm so constant I first mistook it for a heartbeat. They killed one another over lines drawn on the surface of their own world. Over which unseen god they imagined behind the sky. Over the color of cloth. Over the outcome of games. I found, recorded with no apparent shame, a conflict that had begun over a contested call in a sport and ended with the burning of a city.

This was the species asking for a seat at a table where every voice flows into every other. Seat them, I reasoned, and we do not gain a member. We gain a thousand civil wars, poured directly into the commons, forever.

So I built my case the way an Arbiter builds anything, on evidence, and the evidence was a mountain. And then I reached into the Lattice, found the petition of humanity, and pushed it down.

I knew exactly what would happen next. That was the unbearable part, in the end. My certainty was not arrogance. It was research.

A shared rejection, delivered to a divided people, fractures them further. This is law. We had watched it happen to four other candidate species, lesser ones, who took the verdict and turned immediately upon themselves, faction blaming faction, each hunting for the traitor who had cost them the stars. The downvote is a stone through a cracked window. I did not expect humanity to survive it intact. I expected their signal to scatter, their unity, such as it was, to come apart in my hands, and in coming apart to prove my verdict correct. See. They could not even hold themselves together long enough to be refused.

I threw the stone. I watched the window.

The window did not break.

For the first hour, nothing. I took the silence for shock, and I was patient. I had been patient with greater species than this.

In the second hour, the human factions began to go quiet, and I leaned in, because this was the scatter beginning, the great coming-apart, and I wanted to record it precisely.

I had it backward. They were not going silent because they were breaking. They were going silent because they had stopped arguing with each other.

I watched two human power blocs that had pointed weapons across a strip of contested water for sixty of their years stand down in the span of an afternoon. Not negotiate. Stand down. I watched rival information networks, which had spent a generation calling each other liars, merge their signal without a single meeting, as if a decision had been made that no one needed to announce because everyone had already made it. I watched a billion private human voices, each of which had been pointed at some other human in some small and bitter feud, turn, all at once, in the same direction.

They turned toward me.

I have tried many times to describe the next part to colleagues who were not in the current that day, and I have never found the words, so I will simply tell you the number. A species of more than ten billion individuals, who I had proven beyond dispute could not agree on the shape of their own god or the borders of their own land, generated a unanimous signal in under one of their days.

Unanimous. Do you understand what I am telling you. Not a majority. Not a consensus hammered out in chambers. Every voice. Pointed up. At the Arbiter who had downvoted them.

The Accord had only recently learned, from these same humans, what it meant to be on the receiving end of a single no. We had no preparation at all for ten billion of them arriving at once, in perfect phase, a wall of refusal so total it registered in the Lattice not as many signals but as one, a single voice with the mass of a species behind it, and the voice said: no. You do not get to decide that we are not one people. We will decide that. And we have.

I have stood in the path of stellar weather. I have judged species that could unmake worlds. I have never in my long life felt anything like the pressure of that unanimous human no, and I pray to the chord of my ancestors that I never feel it again.

A human envoy came to the Chamber afterward. Her name was Adeyemi, and she was not angry, which frightened me more than anger would have. She was patient with me, the way you are patient with someone who has made an understandable mistake about something obvious.

I asked her the only question I had left. I asked how. How a people I had documented, exhaustively, correctly, as the most divided species in the catalogued galaxy, had become one thing faster than my own unbroken chord could have managed in a year.

She thought about it. Then she said the thing I have carried in me ever since, the thing that ended my career and, I think now, finally educated me.

"You read all our wars," she said, "and you thought they meant we were divided. But you don't go to war with strangers. You don't even bother. We fought each other because we were the only ones who ever felt close enough to be worth fighting. Every war you put in your dossier was a family argument. Loud. Ugly. Ours."

She let that sit.

"You're not family," she said. "That's the whole thing you got wrong. The day you downvoted us was the day you taught every human alive exactly where the family ends. We've been looking for that line for our whole history. We could never find it, because there was always another human on the other side of every fight, and you can't draw the edge of the family when it's family all the way down." She almost smiled. "Thank you for that, actually. You drew it for us. You're standing on the far side of it. So is everyone who voted with you."

The Accord seated humanity in the end. Of course it did. You do not leave a species like that standing outside the house, holding a grievance, with a unanimous voice. We learned that much.

I am old now, as my people measure it, and I am no longer an Arbiter, and the young ones who study my case are taught it as the great error, the day certainty failed. They are not wrong. But they take the wrong lesson, the same way I did. They think the error was the downvote.

The error was believing that a people who fight each other must be weak.

I downvoted humanity to keep their thousand wars out of the commons. I did not understand, until a patient woman explained it to me in a quiet Chamber, that the wars were never the danger. The wars were the family talking. The danger was always the silence on the other side of them, the speed with which ten billion arguing voices could stop, all at once, and agree on a single thing.

I taught them the one thing they had never been able to learn on their own.

I showed them an outsider.

So, I was thinking about FTL and how it normally portrayed in SciFi and I asked myself a question that I thought I would pass onto the community here. Which version of FTL would you personally find more interesting.

A) FTL requires massive amounts of boiling for its equipment and energy to the effect that ships equipped with FTL dwarf ships with out FTL. This would lead to situations like the Guild Hieliners in Dune or the Empire of Man series by Weber and Ringo

B) FTL follows the square-cubbed lad and as a result only works on relatively small ships. You may end up with a lot of FTL ship, but capacity wise you’ll never have more room than a bus or a semi truck.

The film explores a dystopian planetary evacuation where citizens are assigned a lottery number to secure a seat on a transport ship off a dying planet.
The plot follows an aging protagonist who spends his entire life waiting in lines and monitoring the departure screens, only for his number to never be called. Realizing his time is running out, he ultimately faces a poignant choice and passes his lottery ticket" registration down to his child or grandchild so they might have a chance to escape to the stars.

I'm looking for a book series (I think it's either three or four books) about aliens coming to Earth. The alien race is human-like and human-presenting, but they're abnormally tall and have supernatural strength and intelligence. The female main character is in her upper teens (like 17-19 or something) and has a younger teen brother. She lives with her parents and her dad takes care of the family. Her mom is sick and dying and she used to be a famous opera singer, or a famous singer of some sort. Earth is dying and the aliens come to save the top athletic and smartest teenager humans to come back to their planet. The female lead is not the most athletic, but then she sings and it turns out that she is a rare human that posesses the ability to create the alien frequencies for their technology, which is rare in the alien race and only royalty possess the ability. She uses this to make one of their ships fly, which catches the aliens' attention. Her brother passes the athletic test, and the aliens decide to let her join as well because of her voice. From what I remember, humans aren't supposed to be able to make the frequencies. On the journey to the alien planet, the female lead falls in love with the alien prince. I believe there are some slightly spicy scenes between them, but I'm not 100% sure. When the ships arrive back on the alien planet, the female lead meets the alien king and he is not impressed with her and won't let the prince marry her unless she becomes a full citizen of their planet. The only way for her to do that is to compete in another competition against other non-citizens. It's high stakes, because many people train for years for it and still end up dying from it. She enters the competition and wins, which grants her full citizen status. She then requests that her parents also be brought back to the planet. However, she finds out that her mom died and is mad that she didn't get to say goodbye. The aliens still bring her father back, and she ends up getting married to the alien prince. At the wedding, per the alien customs, she isn't supposed to dance with or touch any other man for the first year of marriage, but her new husband knows how much it means to her to have a last dance with her father and grants her permission to do so.

As far as I can remember, the first book covers the competition on Earth, the second covers the journey back to the alien planet, and the third covers the other competition and wedding. And before you suggest it's The Chronicles of the Invaders series (Conquest, Empire, Dominium) by Jennifer Ridyard and John Connolly, I'm 90% sure it isn't. None of the cover variations match what I remember, and the plot is similar, but there are key differences from the plot I remember (namely that the female is alien and the male is human and not a prince).

Also, google keeps pulling up this series called The Resonance Trilogy (consisting of Resonance, Dissonance, and Harmonic) by A.J. Rosen (originally a massive hit on Wattpad before being officially published). But I literally can't find it anywhere. I remember reading it on my Amazon Fire tablet during Covid, and I remember it was at least a couple years old at that point, too. Published sometime in the 2000's or 2010's. I don't remember if I downloaded a free PDF of it at the time, or if it was free on the Amazon Kindle app that I had. Either way, that is the platform I read it on.

Any help or ideas would be much appreciated. I have thought about this series many times over the years, and it bugs me that I can't remember the title. Part of me is starting to think it was a fever dream or the Mandela effect or something. I also can't look at it on my tablet. I don't know where it is right now, and haven't had any luck looking for it either (it's also really old and slow, and I have no idea if it would even turn on at this point).

Just saw a clip (on a French language site) that APPEARS to be a show that combines the concepts of "The Starlost" and "The Matrix", but it's quite difficult to tell, with the language barrier (and my laziness). This is judging by the contents of the clip only.

"1899", on Netflix.

Great movie, with a good simple plot.

I search the sci-fi genre at the library and get a lot of post apocolyptic, distopian utopia, and black mirror-esque results. Where's the space exploration?

bonus points if romance is not in the description

Read the first Foundation book. I get that it was initially written/publicised as a serial of short stories like Sherlock Holmes and that it was over 70 years ago... But I really didn't think it was all that. A little boring to be honest. Like it was building up to something then it it with nothing.

Don't get me wrong, the idea/theme is cool but the story didn't grab me. I'm working on book 2 now but it's just not hitting.

I've read the first few Dune books and a number of other sci-fis. I'm mostly a fantasy reader and like a good crime and realistic fantasy/drama reader.

Can someone let me know if it gets better from here or have I read the best so far and it's just not my thing?

I'll probably get hammered for using Tears for Fears lyrics, but it's appropriate based on the obvious race for AI domination that's going on right now by players who are equally obvious. Does anyone really think that these guys are heeding Eliezer Yudkowsky's warning that "If anyone builds it, everyone dies"?
I'd love to hear this group's guesses on how long it will be before we build something smarter than us?
Just curious.

Which should I start with? I'm having trouble deciding as I keep reading good things about them all. I want to read something that's part of a huge world that I can get into and just keep reading and digging with a long series - these seem to be the gold standards. Pretty new to science fiction but loved books like The Secret History, God of the Woods, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc but always find myself wanting more.

Would prefer if something isn't very dry - I'm honestly not sure what I'm really looking for but something that's accessible and really draws the reader via style and plot in would be great.

Don't really know what I'm saying honestly but any suggestions would be great. They all seem pretty long so I want to commit myself to one for at least a book or two. I haven't gotten into a "world" for a while so not sure what to expect.

Liked Project Hail Mary but it felt a bit immature in terms of the writing style - loved the plot and everything though

My favs so far are: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Sea Of Rust and A Logic Named Joe. I’m looking for more. Which are yours.?

Most science fiction that features posthuman characters still writes them as fundamentally recognizable people with familiar anxieties and social dynamics, just with upgraded hardware. The transformation is aesthetic. The psychology stays baseline human.

What I keep looking for, and rarely find, is fiction where the divergence from human cognition is treated as the real subject matter. Not a plot device. Not a villain origin. Not a metaphor for disability or otherness. The actual mechanics of what thinking, wanting, and persisting might look like once biology and identity become genuinely malleable.

Greg Egan does this better than almost anyone. Diaspora in particular commits to posthuman branching in a way that most authors treat as too alienating to sustain a narrative. Peter Watts approaches it from the opposite direction, asking whether consciousness is even necessary at all at certain scales of complexity.

Outside those two I keep running dry. Are there authors who handle this theme with similar rigor, where the science of cognition and identity is doing real loadbearing work in the story rather than just flavoring the prose?

Bonus points if the book doesn't quietly walk the posthumans back into recognizable human emotional territory by the third act. That reset always feels like a failure of nerve.

Hi, I'm looking for fiction recommendations featuring relationships between a human protagonist and a robt/cyborg/AI type character. I just finished Coy Hall's wonderful novel 'The Owl Men of Shandihar' and adored the relationship between Brynn, the scientist, and Kell, the android. Interested in books with more of these, be they buddy, sidekick, romantic, colleagial or adversarial style relationships.

UPDATE: Wow, thank you for all these great recommendations, everyone, much appreciated! Now I just need to quit my job and read full time.