Hugonauts: The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

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 outside. In Tyler, Diane, and Jason's lifetime the s...

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. Will his deviance be caught, or will Winston succee...

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 and the Sea - Ray Nayler  Sea of Tranquil...

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 revolution.  In order to pursue his work, he must leave...

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. The road, though, is dangerous. Cannibals and s...

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 abandoned. Will he be able to unravel the mystery of So...

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, a stealth ship fires nuclear torpedoes at the ic...

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 Montag begins to question everything he has ever known....

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 find the source he has to pose as Bob Arctor, a u...

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 the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir And join us for our...

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 caste system, to love their work, and to love 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 sure are killing a lot of aliens, but are they anyt...

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 Going from self-publishing to winning a Hugo  Her pr...

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 revival and crisis of faith. Ellie works with an...

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 the virtual world. One of his hacker friends, Da...

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 the void of space. When one of the scoops comes dow...

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 society? And will the Handmaid ever see the people s...

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. In this world he’s not a college professor - th...

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 the solar system's most important politicians has...

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 the streets outside. Lauren’s father, a pastor and...

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 about what's happening behind-the-scenes in sci-fi...

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 to Earth.  A ship is dispatched with a crew of fi...

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 to help write a story The singularity and uploadi...

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). We talked with her about how she manages to cre...

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 the most powerful entities on earth, thriving by...