The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The survivors live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. VDNKh…

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 — an…

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 girlf…

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…

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…

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? Join the Hugonauts book club on discord! PS We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is still coming soon, but Brent had a family emergency,…

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…

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 Scan…

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 de…

We talked with Peter about: Why he quit science to write fiction The real-world science that inspired Blindsight Why vampires?! Blindsight movie(s) in the works What's coming next (the sequel to Echopraxia!) Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video, or join the Hugonauts book club on discord! And if you haven't listened to our ep…

Tyler, Jason, and Diane are growing up together in the suburbs of Washington, DC. One night, as they are outside looking up at the sky, something shocking happens - all the stars go out at once. The 'Hypotheticals' have wrapped the earth in a spin membrane that isolates the Earth, making time move millions of times slower inside the barrier than ou…

Winston Smith is a Party member living in London. He, like every other member of the Party, is under constant surveillance. Despite the risk, he dares to buy a blank book and begin to write down his thoughts. From the first moment he writes “down with Big Brother” he believes he is doomed to die in the torture chambers below the Ministry of Love. W…

Ranking the 2023 Hugo nominees: N/A: Nona the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir #5: Spare Man - Mary Robinette Kowal #4: Daughter of Doctor Moreau - Silvia Moreno-Garcia #3: Nettle and Bone - T Kingfisher #2: Kaiju Preservation Society - John Scalzi #1: Legends and Lattes - Travis Baldry And three amazing sci-fi books that should have made the list: The Mountain…

Shevek is a brilliant physicist, working on a new theory that may be as transformative and foundational as the work of Einstein. In pursuing his theory, he discovers that his dry homeworld of Anarres is not as free as he believed it to be. His society of anarchists has grown rigid, bureaucratic, and resistant to change in the years since the revolu…

The bombs fell, and the world ended. A man and his pregnant wife survived the blasts. Their son would be born into a world changed entire. It grew darker, and colder, and more violent. The new world was grim and grey and relentless, and the wife could not bear to live in it. The man and his young son had to set out on the road, alone, heading south…

Kris Kelvin is traveling to the ocean world of Solaris. For more than 100 years, scientists have been trying to understand and communicate with alien life. But Solaris is truly alien - the entire planet-wide ocean is a single living organism. As Kelvin arrives, he finds that things are going wrong. The science station is disturbing and nearly aband…

Jim Holden is XO of an ice hauler making runs from the rings of Saturn to the asteroid cities of the Belt. Out in the darkness, they detect a distress signal, and move to investigate. Holden leads the away team to check on the signal, and they find a dead ship called the Scopuli that seems to have been boarded with military precision. Moments later…

Guy Montag is a fireman - one whose job is to burn books, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag and his wife, Mildred (who spends all day with her television ‘family’) had never questioned his life as a fireman, until he meets his eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse. Clarisse introduces him to a bigger world and new ideas, and Monta…

Substance D is a new drug sweeping the nation and slowly destroying the minds of its users. As the connection between the two halves of their brains degrades, they grow increasingly disoriented and confused before suffering irreversible brain damage. Fred is an undercover narcotics agent working to uncover where the new drug is coming from. But to …

For all six of the nominated books we'll give you a quick summary (with no spoilers), a review, and a rundown of what kind of reader is likely to love (and who might hate) each book. Featuring: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler Babel by R.F. Kuang Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree Spear by Nicola Griffith Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher Nona …

Set in a futuristic, unified World State, Brave New World tells the story of a very different kind of dystopia. The population is not tightly controlled in the traditional sense - instead they are free to do what they choose, and live phenomenally happy lives. However, people are born in test tubes and modified in-vitro to fulfill their role in the…

Four soldiers are serving a four year tour of duty as the only crew members on a super-advanced AI battleship, dispatched to fight the alien Salamanders who have been spewing black holes everywhere and killing humans in space. The ship is fully controlled by AI, and as the mission goes on our heroes feel more and more like window dressing - they su…

All of Becky's writing is excellent, but if you haven't read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet it's a great place to start. It's a wonderful, warm, and character-driven space opera that follows the tight-knit crew of a wormhole-drilling starship working their way across the galaxy. We talked with Becky about: Growing up in a 'space' family Goin…

Ellie is a brilliant radio astronomer who has often felt alone in the world. When she detects an indisputably intelligent signal emanating from the Vega system, that all changes - for her and for the entire human race. The nations and people of the world begin to come together in the face of the alien intelligence, and humanity faces a simultaneous…

Hiro Protagonist is a self-described hacker working as a pizza-delivery driver and living in a storage unit at LAX. He lives in a US that has been fully corporatized - from Judge Bob’s Judicial System to Pastor Wayne’s Pearly Gates. To get away, Hiro spends much of his free-time in the Metaverse, where he wrote many of the subroutines that underpin…

Michael Crichton was fresh out of Harvard Medical School when he wrote the Andromeda Strain - and we're so glad he did! The book that launched his literary career and all that followed, from Jurassic Park to Sphere. Here's the setup: A US government program is sending satellites with scoops into orbit, looking for alien organisms that can survive t…

The story is told via the diary of a Handmaid - a young woman living in Gilead, an extremely repressive, patriarchal society that has taken over the United States. We explore the dark world through her eyes, and follow her struggle to express herself, escape, or just take control back over any part of her life. What are the rules of this brutal soc…

Jason Dessen is walking home one night when he realizes he is being followed. A strange man in a geisha mask abducts him at gunpoint, drives him to an abandoned building, takes his phone and clothes, and injects him with a strange drug. When Jason wakes up, he’s surrounded by strangers congratulating him for something he’s supposed to have achieved…

The story is told from the first person perspective of Laurence Smith—the self-styled “The Great Lorenzo”—a down-and-out actor who spends most of his time in bars. He's approached by a space-pilot who offers him a drink and, despite some trepidation about Lorenzo’s high opinion of himself, offers him a dangerous job at a very high pay rate. One of …

It’s the year 2025, and society is descending into anarchy in the face of climate change and other disasters. We see the world through the diary entries of Lauren Olamina, a teenager living in a walled-in neighborhood in the exurbs of Los Angeles. Jobs are scarce, food and water are increasingly expensive, and armed gangs and drug addicts control t…

Seth Fishman is one of the biggest movers and shakers in the world of sci-fi publishing, representing Cixin Liu, Ann Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal, Becky Chambers, Mur Lafferty, River Solomon, P Djeli Clark, and many others (plus huge names in lots of other genres too, like Randall Munroe, the creator of XKCD). We had a great time talking with him a…

Aliens have taken a snapshot of the entire earth, down to 1 meter of resolution - we know because they lit the entire sky on fire to do it. Then, humanity detected something out at the very edge of the solar system sending a signal - but not to us. The signal is being sent out, into deep space, to another planet, or to something already on the way …

This week we are so excited to interview Ken Liu! All of his writing and translation work is excellent, but if you haven't read his short story collection The Paper Menagerie we recommend you start there, it's full of incredibly memorable stories. We talked with Ken about: Growing up in both China and America Robo-Ken - the neural network he built …

We had a great time rolling out the red carpet in Chicago, and we're excited to release the first set of interviews! The Seanan McGuire interview starts at 2:10. Seanan is a multiple Hugo award winning fantasy and sci fi author, most well known for her Wayward Children series and her Newsflesh zombie series (published under her pseudonym Mira Grant…

The vast majority of the world's fossil fuels have been expended, leading to a climate and economic catastrophe. In the aftermath, calories from food become the world's most important energy source, not only for human consumption, but also to power industry and technology. A few mega-corporations produce almost all the world's food, and have become…

Breq used to be the Justice of Toren - the huge, complex AI that inhabited a colossal starship and all of its thousands of ancillaries in the service of the Radch, the largest of the human empires. Ancillaries are human bodies that were captured in previous Radchaai annexations (or colonizations) – those who resist the takeover are killed and their…

Ranking and reviewing the best speculative fiction books of 2021! Here's the extremely abridged version of the list, with a one sentence summary of each: 6. Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark - A murder mystery set in a steampunk version of Cairo with lots of genies. 5. The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers - A bunch of aliens are stuck…

Gentian line is one of the most powerful forces in the galaxy - one of the 'lines' of clones (called shatterlings) who have been traveling the galaxy since the start of the star-faring era six million years ago. The shatterlings of Gentian line travel alone, but they come together for a reunion every 200,000 years to compare what they have seen on …

It is truly unbelievable that this story was written in 1909 - E. M. Forster's dystopian world feels all too real in our increasingly digitally connected and physically isolated real world. The story is about ritual & superstition, resistance to change, the dangers of reliance on an all-powerful authority, the origins of knowledge and creativity, a…

A world where everyone occupies a tiny cell, connected to each other only by machines, and where a parent's responsibility to their child ends at birth. Where all knowledge and experience comes secondhand, through the machine. A world where the machine rules everyone's lives. We absolutely love this classic short story, and we're lucky it's old eno…

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Startide Rising, and the Uplift War. He consults for NASA, companies, agencies, and nonprofits about the onrushing future. His first nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award. His newest book is Vivid Tomorrows: Science Ficti…

These books are among the most popular works of the Golden Age of sci fi, and for good reason. The overall story arc established in the first book is very, very good. Hari Seldon combines mathematics and psychology to create the new science of psychohistory and predicts that the galaxy-wide empire that has ruled and kept the peace for tens of thous…

Douglas Adams passed away 21 years ago this week, so it seemed like a good time to revisit his amazing work. These are short, digestible books that are jam-packed full of jokes and mad-cap adventures. The first book in the series (the eponymous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) is especially full of non-stop zaniness - the chapters are only a few p…

Despite the grim nature of a story about a pandemic that destroys civilization, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is full of subtle optimism and deep characters. It jumps between timelines and between characters, and builds mystery about how all these people are going to be connected. It tells a tense story about the dangers posed by other su…

In this episode we review Cixin Liu's Hugo award winning Three Body Problem (the book that made him the first person from Asia to win the award), as well as the sequels. If you haven't read the first book yet, you should - it absolutely deserves all its acclaim, with a huge number of big tech ideas, an incredibly compelling character in Ye Wenjie, …

In this episode we review and discuss Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang's two short story collections. These seventeen stories are full of novel scientific ideas, wonderful characters, and thoughtful takes on the morality of future technologies and how they will change society. We certainly aren't alone in thinking they're …

In this episode we review Ender's Game, what makes it so inspiring to generation after generation of readers, why Ender is so incredibly likeable, discuss empathy as a superpower, and talk about Orson Scott Card's bizarre and outspoken homophobia (and why you should get this book from the library or used book store as a result). As always, we also …

This week we were so excited to interview Joe Haldeman and his wife Gay! The Forever War is absolutely one of the best sci fi books of all time, and we were excited to discuss the origins, real-life inspiration, and message of the book, as well as sci-fi and writing more broadly. In addition to writing more than 30 novels, Joe was also a professor …

In this episode we review Adrian Tchaikovosky's most popular book, talk about how he pulled off making giant spiders likeable, discuss how the book started off so strong, and debate whether a book's optimism or pessimism should impact how we view it. We're also joined by a guest - Hasan, a listener who reached out and we invited to guest host an ep…

In this episode we review KSR's magnum opus, talk about the technology he includes that makes the terraforming project possible, discuss the decline in the quality of each successive book, and debate what makes a character feel real. As always, we also recommend and discuss some similar stories if you're looking for more great books to read. This w…