Everyone talks about "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "1984," but I want to dive a little deeper with some picks for your next three-day weekend. Maybe after reading a few of these, you'll find the inspiration to finally finish writing that book that's been on hold for the last decade.
You could find a selection of more obscure books, for sure, but I want to tackle some solid widely-available options that don't get the attention today that they actually deserve. With any luck, they'll all see a renaissance of discourse once every Digg reader picks up copies for themselves.
'News From Nowhere' By William Morris
Considering that this utopian novel was written over 130 years ago, it's shocking how modern it seems in some ways. It's speaking to the issues of class and the future of work in a resource-rich world that modern writers are still pondering right now.
If you'd like to think about what the world would look like if everyone got to do fulfilling work instead of soul-crushing grinding for rent and healthcare, you're gonna have a pretty good time.
However, don't be surprised when you hit some Victorian-era thoughts on how gender roles would work in a supposed utopia. We can't have it all in our 1800s fiction, sadly.
'Consider Phlebas' By Iain M. Banks
What will people go to war over when resources are no longer an issue? This entry point to Banks's "Culture" series gives us a glimpse at how war will come and effect us even if we think that the end of history has arrived.
At one point, Amazon was looking to make a streaming series out of these novels, but that ship has sailed. Now it has to slum it on lists on underappreciated sci-fi books.
'The City In The Middle Of The Night' By Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders helped start io9 before going off to write her own sci-fi, and that exposure to a wide swath of existing writing shows in her work. Much of what was built in the best '60s sci-fi is found here, but updated for modern expectations.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the changing environment impacts our lives on the micro and macro scale, so having a book that takes the environment to such extremes put some of those concepts into clearer focus for me.
'The Ministry For The Future' By Kim Stanley Robinson
Another climate-focused book, this novel's basic premise hits on the core issue with much of our large-scale decision making: an inability to think beyond what's happening right this moment. What if, instead, we had to respect the well-being of future humans as much as we respect our own?
Unfortunately, this novel came out during the height of the pandemic and the lead-up to the 2020 election. Many of us were a bit distracted at the time, so it probably passed us by. If that happened to you, consider remedying the situation this summer.
'Star Wars: Legacy Of The Force: Betrayal' By Aaron Allston
Here's the part of the article in which I get to grind out my disagreements with Mickey Mouse about the direction that Star Wars ended up taking under his control. That's right, I'm gonna take that rat down a peg!
What the "Legacy Of The Force" books did with the fall of Jacen Solo in the mid-aughts vastly outshines the half-hearted Xerox they did with Kylo Ren (aka Ben Solo). Hate on the pre-Disney expanded universe all you'd like, but I will defend those books until the day I die. They're so much more interesting than anything J.J. Abrams has done with the license.
